The changes has been so great … The job market has increased. Blacks are in management on jobs. We don’t have to go to the windows anymore. We can walk through the front door to be served. We can sit in a restaurant wherever we feel we want to sit.… We’re moving into the neighborhoods wherever we want to live. And I can go to the bank, and there’s a black girl and a white one, and there’s one sitting over here as vice president of the bank.
—Daisy Harris Wade, 2000
Between 1962 and 1968, the Hattiesburg civil rights movement revolutionized race in the Hub City. Through dozens of public demonstrations and countless acts of individual resistance, local African Americans excised Jim Crow from their society. By the end of the decade, the most visible signs of Jim Crow had been vanquished. Formal racial segregation in public spaces ended. Schools and hospitals desegregated. Black people gained the ability to register to vote, serve on juries, obtain jobs in previously segregated companies, and purchase homes outside traditionally black neighborhoods. The police force hired black men. In 1965, a white man was convicted of raping a black woman for the first time in Hattiesburg history. “Five years ago nothing would have been done about that case,” noted a bailiff who served at the trial. “The civil rights movement had something to do with it all right.” That same autumn, the University of Southern Mississippi admitted its first black students. These changes by no means completely erased racial problems or reconciled historical racial advantages, but they did indeed signify the end of Jim Crow.1
None of this was easy. Despite new federal legislation, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which barred racial discrimination in public places and empowered the Department of Justice to oversee local voter registration practices, the onus of extricating Southern society from the grip of Jim Crow fell upon the shoulders of everyday local black citizens. Many white segregationists refused to follow federal law unless compelled by overwhelming demonstrations or legal action. Black citizens, now armed with new legislative tools, committed themselves to the painstaking processes of eliminating Jim Crow from every corner of the South. These black citizens worked outside the purview of reporters and news cameras to demand equal opportunities.
There was never a time in Southern history when black people were not active. From organizing through churches and pouring resources into black schools, African Americans had always gotten together within their communities to help improve the lives and prospects of their fellow black citizens. But in Hattiesburg and elsewhere, the nature of black activism in the 1960s was inherently different from the activism of previous eras: the civil rights movement of the 1960s directly targeted and successfully overthrew Jim Crow. In this regard, although historians have argued for broader conceptualizations of the civil rights movement beyond the 1960s, local black activists engaged in 1960s-era protests typically consider the activism of that era distinct.
Consider the view of local people. Virtually all black Hattiesburgers who participated in the movement of the 1960s conceptualized precise points of origin. In later describing the movement, local activists such as Victoria Gray and Daisy Harris Wade used language such as “by the time the movement came” and “when this movement started in 1964,” respectively, definitively positioning the beginning of their movement in the 1960s. To Daisy Harris Wade, the movement began on a specific day—Hattiesburg Freedom Day on January 22, 1964. For Victoria Gray, the movement began when she started working with SNCC activists in the spring of 1962. To local participants, the wave of extraordinary activism of the 1960s constituted a distinct civil rights movement.2
This does not mean that they did not recognize the movement of the 1960s within the broader context of local black community organizing traditions. Virtually all leaders in Hattiesburg’s civil rights movement cited the importance of earlier institutions and communal values that predated the 1960s. Some cited Eureka High School; others pointed to the black business community. All noted the churches. When Victoria Gray was a high schooler in 1945, she wrote an essay about the influence of the local black business community in shaping, as she wrote, “My decision of what I wanted to do in life.” In a 2002 interview, Gray continued to credit lessons passed down by her grandfather and neighbors that helped shape her worldview. In interviews conducted as late as 2011, Daisy Harris Wade, a graduate of the Eureka High School class of 1949, similarly cited her experiences as a student at Eureka in the 1940s and the importance of the old black churches in shaping her life before the movement. But those experiences were part of another era. The civil rights movement, however similar or deeply entwined it was with the efforts of the past, represented something entirely different: the rapid expulsion of Jim Crow from their society.3
Local movements were also largely shaped by black people’s changing view of the potential of federal action. In the 1960s, African Americans more than ever came to believe in the possibility of circumnavigating oppressive local and state governments to gain access to federal protections, both old and new, that they had never enjoyed. As Hattiesburg reverend John M. Barnes stressed to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in 1959, “We need the Federal Government on this matter. The officials of Forrest County will continue to deny colored people the right to register and vote unless they are required to do so.” With the Department of Justice pursuing its case against Theron Lynd and the explosion of civil rights activism across the American South, black Hattiesburgers became increasingly active in their fight against Jim Crow. Reporters, cameras, and dozens of outside volunteers undergirded the potential effectiveness of local activism. As local African Americans gained increasing confidence in federal authority, the Hattiesburg movement flourished.4
It is also important to understand that black people were essential in pushing the federal government toward a greater commitment to protecting black civil rights. This increasing commitment was not only the result of growing black political constituencies and their allies in the North, but also from black Southern activists. The events in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, often receive credit for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But that legislation was, in reality, a consequence of over a decade of black Southern political activism that documented blatant violations of the Fifteenth Amendment. When United States Attorney General Herbert Brownell testified in 1956 to the Senate Judiciary Committee considering civil rights legislation, he read a 1952 affidavit completed by a black Hattiesburg voter registration applicant and cited the case of Peay et al. v. Cox as “one illustration” of black Southerners being denied the right to vote. In Hattiesburg and elsewhere, thousands of black activists spent years laying the groundwork to prove the necessity of additional enforcement mechanisms to help guarantee basic constitutional rights. After more than seventy years of racially based voter discrimination, the federal government finally provided these mechanisms with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.5
In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, everyday African Americans shouldered the burden of desegregating Southern society. When racially segregated public schools were formally outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it was black children and their parents who weathered the difficult processes of desegregating previously all-white schools. During that fall, Mississippi enacted a plan known as “freedom-of-choice” desegregation that for the first time in Hattiesburg history allowed students of any color to attend any public school in the municipal school district.6
In Hattiesburg, only black students crossed the old racial boundaries by desegregating previously all-white schools. This was a risky and challenging maneuver for black families, who faced job loss, social ostracism, violence, and any number of informal economic sanctions. For the students themselves, this was at times “a harrowing experience,” noted Daisy Harris Wade’s son Anthony, who desegregated one of Hattiesburg’s public schools as an eighth-grader in 1966. Black youths experienced daily harassment from both peers and teachers.7
Glenda Funchess, a former Hattiesburg Freedom School student who entered a previously all-white school in 1967 at the age of thirteen, remembered regular chants of “nigger, nigger, nigger” and white children who refused to sit at lunch tables with black students. There were countless acts of racially based harassment and humiliation. Funchess recalled one such incident in which her white peers destroyed an essay she wrote for class because the paper focused on Martin Luther King Jr. In another episode, a white girl who sang in the school choir one day broke into tears because, as she explained to the choir director, “My parents are coming, and they’re gonna see me standing next to Glenda.” Tormented, attacked, and isolated, young black children endured the difficult process of pioneering school desegregation. Because of these challenges, at the beginning of the 1966–67 academic year, fewer than 3 percent of black Mississippi public school students were attending previously segregated white schools.8
Freedom-of-choice remained until 1969, when the United States Supreme Court decided in Alexander v. Holmes County to order Mississippi to develop alternative plans for desegregation. Many white families responded to school desegregation by moving to suburbs or enrolling their children in predominantly white private academies or parochial schools that were supported by state-funded tuition grants. In Hattiesburg, the Citizens’ Council first announced its plan to form an all-white private school in the summer of 1965.9
Although formal public school segregation ended in 1964, Mississippi’s schools as a whole have never truly integrated. As late as 2015, Mississippi had forty-four active school desegregation cases pending with the Department of Justice. In the thirty years after the Alexander v. Holmes County decision, white enrollment in Hattiesburg public schools declined from 55 percent to 11 percent. White families either relocated to the outskirts or sent their kids to more racially homogenous private schools. As of the 2017–18 school year, African Americans comprised approximately 91 percent of students enrolled in the public schools of Hattiesburg, a metropolitan area that is roughly 68 percent white. There is no reason to expect that Hattiesburg-area public schools will ever represent the racial demographics of the local population, but they are at least desegregated and provide black students with an opportunity to finish high school. Despite the lingering problems of educational inequality that affect thousands of public school districts across the nation, African American political participation helps give black residents a voice in electing representatives to the school board. The biggest difference between Jim Crow and now is that so many more black students have a chance to learn and succeed before their society systematically crushes their dreams.10
During the same autumn of 1964 that Hattiesburg schools desegregated, local civil rights activist Victoria Gray became the first black woman in Mississippi history to run for the United States Senate. Backed by an integrated independent political party known as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), Gray ran against incumbent John Stennis in the 1964 Democratic Primary and lost by a large margin of 153,572 to 4,249.11
The year 1964 marked the beginning of immense changes in black political participation in Mississippi. Gray was one of an unprecedented number of African American candidates who ran for state or local office in that year. As nationally syndicated columnist Robert G. Spivack observed, the 1964 Mississippi Democratic primaries featured “the largest number of Negro candidates for major office in Mississippi since Reconstruction.” Black voters have played a major role in the state Democratic Party ever since, especially because so many white segregationist Democrats left the party after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During that autumn’s presidential election, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, an Arizona senator whose vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act earned him the endorsement of the Mississippi Citizens’ Council, became the first Republican to win the state of Mississippi since Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 during Reconstruction.12
Over the ensuing years, black Hattiesburgers continued to expand local black political participation. Daisy Harris Wade remembered “stages” of growth, estimating 10 percent involvement of the black community “when the ministers were here” in January of 1964. By Freedom Summer, Wade estimated “about fifty percent.” And then “about seventy-five or eighty percent of the people were involved one way or the other” by the early spring of 1966. These rough estimates provided by an activist reflect the growing numbers of registered black voters in Hattiesburg during the mid-1960s.13
On June 16, 1965, the United States Court of Appeals finally ruled in the Theron Lynd case. The federal court enacted specific limitations on Lynd’s ability to deny voter applications and required an immediate review of 350 “application forms of those rejected Negro applicants who applied during his tenure in office and who are not now registered.” Less than two months later, on August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided the federal government with unprecedented authority to oversee voter registration in places like Forrest County, where African Americans had for decades been systematically disfranchised. Nearly a century after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, black people in Forrest County could finally register to vote. In March of 1964, there were 196 black residents of Forrest County registered to vote. Roughly three years later, that figure soared to 5,467.14
Local movement activists led a charge to inform the newly enfranchised black electorate. Through community newspapers such The Voice of the Movement and the Forrest County NAACP’s Freedom Flashes—both of which were produced in black-owned businesses in the Mobile Street District—black political leaders encouraged their neighbors to register to vote and provided updates on local political activities. In 1966, movement leaders compiled a “political handbook for the black people of Forrest County,” a sixteen-page pamphlet explaining the duties of various city and state elected officials and encouraging local black voters to consider whether the current elected officials truly represented their best interests.15
Ever since African Americans regained the right to vote, white conservative Mississippi politicians have taken steps to limit their political power. In 1966—the year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act—white Mississippi legislators redrew the state’s five congressional districts to split potential black voting blocs. In addition to recurrent gerrymandering, white Mississippi legislators since 1966 have employed a range of tactics to curtail the influence of the black vote. They have diluted black political power by expanding at-large voting across districts, changed the process of electing supervisors in countywide elections, altered nominating procedures for school district trustees, reformed primary elections, and switched some positions from elected to appointed. As former Mississippi civil rights attorney Frank Parker observed in 1990, “Outright denial to black Mississippians of the right to vote, now prohibited by federal law, was replaced with these more subtle strategies to dilute and cancel out the black vote.” Conservative white Mississippians, who have now fully switched to the Republican Party, continue to work to weaken the power of black votes. Jim Crow ended, but black people have had to fight relentlessly to maintain access to the ballot box. Most recently, white conservatives have used new voter identification laws to target black voters. Even in post–Jim Crow Mississippi, there is no indication that they will ever cease their continual assaults on black voting rights.16
Nonetheless, black people embraced and defended new political activities. They fought virtually every plan designed to limit their political power, a battle that included two victorious cases involving Hattiesburg civil rights leaders—Connor v. Johnson and Fairley v. Patterson—that reached the United States Supreme Court. As early as 1967, black Mississippians elected twenty-two African Americans to local offices. By the late 1980s, Mississippi led the United States of America in the number of elected black officials with 646.17
Hattiesburg activists attacked all components of Jim Crow. Soon after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, local activists launched a series of demonstrations to desegregate public facilities. When thirty-five-year-old Dorothea Jackson was removed from a bus that August for refusing to give up her seat, the remaining twenty black passengers stood up and walked off the bus, spurring a boycott that ended segregated seating on city busses. Two days later, a half dozen Freedom School students and their teacher strolled through town during an impromptu desegregation tour. In a single afternoon, the group targeted the local public library and the local Kress Stores. The library closed to avoid having to allow black kids to borrow books, and a waitress at the Kress Store refused to serve the interracial group. Shortly thereafter, a police officer arrested the Freedom School teacher. But the library demonstration helped spur a larger response that later desegregated the library. The arrested teacher later won a lawsuit against the Kress Corporation.18
Most places, especially national chain stores, desegregated relatively peacefully as white onlookers silently watched racial segregation crumble. Other venues desegregated only after the threat of a lawsuit based on the new Civil Rights Act of 1964. Protestors were regularly beaten and arrested, but they nonetheless continued to mount desegregation campaigns throughout the duration of the local movement. Through the persistence of local activists and the support of new laws, Hattiesburg institutions desegregated.19
Hattiesburg’s white leaders, deeply concerned about the optics of violent resistance, objected to the protests but advocated peace. Most local white citizens heeded the Hattiesburg American’s warning that “violence would only play into the hands of the leaders of these extremist groups,” but some white citizens just could not bring themselves to operate peacefully. When a group of thirty-five local African Americans and four Northern civil rights activists launched a sit-in at Lea’s Restaurant in January of 1965, a group of unidentified local white terrorists burned a cross in front of a school in one of the black neighborhoods. When protests continued over the ensuing days, several local white men attacked the demonstrators. All told, local movement leaders reported twelve beatings during the last two weeks of January in 1965.20
But the freedom fighters persevered. Backed by the support of a branch of the Delta Ministry, which operated an office out of Lenon Woods’s guesthouse on Mobile Street, civil rights workers who had been attacked pressed charges, completed affidavits, and publicized the violence to hundreds of supporters across the country. Ultimately, these reports helped lead to the arrest of several perpetrators.21
The aid of outside activists was crucial to carrying this fight forward, but it was primarily local African Americans who led efforts to expel Jim Crow. By August of 1965, a visiting white Presbyterian minister from Minnesota reported, “We feel so good about the progress here that we are beginning to look toward the time when our presence in Hattiesburg will no longer be needed.”22
At about 2:30 in the morning on January 10, 1966, Klansmen laid siege to the home of voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer and his family. Two of the attackers ran toward the house under the cover of gunfire and tossed gasoline-filled containers through the windows followed by a flaming cloth that ignited the containers. As the fire spread, the Klansmen fired a continuous stream of bullets into the home. Vernon Dahmer leaned against his front door, returning fire as he could while his wife Ellie, ten-year-old daughter, and two sons, aged twelve and twenty, scrambled to escape the burning house. After Ellie managed to pop out a back window, the family fled into a barn located behind the house. Vernon Dahmer saved his family that night, but later succumbed to severe burns to his head, upper body, and arms. He was fifty-seven years old when he died on the afternoon of January 10, 1966.23
Local white leaders condemned the crime. The Chamber of Commerce issued a statement “condemning the tragic acts of violence against the Vernon Dahmer family” and urging “all of the law enforcement agencies to pursue with diligence their efforts to bring all of the perpetrators of this unconscionable crime to their justice.” The Forrest County Board of Supervisors and Hattiesburg City Council issued a similar statement, calling for the “prosecution of the person or persons guilty of this tragic and deplorable crime” and creating a Dahmer Family Fund of Forrest County to help the family rebuild their home and pay for additional expenses. The Hattiesburg American rebuked the “revolting, cowardly crime” committed by “terrorists,” editorializing that “the crime against them must be punished.”24
Despite such sentiments, it is worth remembering that Vernon Dahmer had long been fighting these very same institutions—local white government officials, business leaders, and the press—for basic voting rights for African Americans. Although these groups expressed remorse for his death in 1966, white businessmen and city leaders had for years played key roles in fighting against black civil rights. The Hattiesburg Citizens’ Council had helped publicize the names of local civil rights activists and closely monitored their behavior. Led by the city’s elite white citizens, the local Citizens’ Council had been responsible for framing Dahmer’s friend and ally Clyde Kennard six years earlier and had for years been working to suppress black activism to protect white supremacy. The longtime enemies of civil rights activists shared a level of complicity in all attacks against activists. It certainly did not help that the Hattiesburg American published Dahmer’s home address in the newspaper after his son applied to register to vote. Local white leaders had not operated on the side of Vernon Dahmer and his allies; only after his death did they publicly demonstrate sympathy toward him and his causes. Black people always bore the burden of the sins of their oppressors.25
Nonetheless, Vernon Dahmer’s death signaled a sea change in the local movement. Just two days after Dahmer’s murder, the Hattiesburg American published a fifteen-point list of requests submitted by local African American civil rights leaders. These included hiring more black police officers and firefighters, appointing African Americans to the school board, immediately desegregating all public facilities, fully complying with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, providing equal access to health services, adding paved curbs and new street signs to black neighborhoods, and using courtesy titles toward African Americans in the local press. There were no definitive deadlines for meeting these “requests,” but the goals of black activists received unprecedented attention in the local media and from city officials. The Chamber of Commerce called a special meeting on January 12 to discuss the requests and formulate a plan to raise money for a reward leading to the apprehension of Dahmer’s killers. Seventeen days after the Dahmer murder, the Chamber of Commerce actually held a meeting with local black leaders—including two of the original plaintiffs in Peay et al. v. Cox—to talk about grievances. Not all issues were resolved, but each attendee signed a statement declaring that the gathering was held in “an atmosphere of friendly mutual respect and understanding.”26
When white Hattiesburg leaders wavered on responding to these requests, African Americans mobilized to aggressively pursue their goals. Beginning with a march on the morning of Dahmer’s funeral, more black people joined the movement than ever before. “At the death of Mr. Dahmer in ’66, the numbers grew,” remembered Daisy Harris Wade. “I would say about seventy-five or eighty percent of the people were involved one way or the other.” As one of the last few remaining clergy from the Delta Ministry reported in March of 1966, “The work here in Hattiesburg has fallen mostly into the hands of the local people now.”27
In the months and years to follow, local African Americans expanded their voter registration campaigns and sit-ins to include protests designed to completely expel racial segregation from their society. In 1967, they executed a widespread boycott that successfully pressured downtown stores to hire more African Americans. They also secured federal funding from the national Office of Economic Opportunity to run eight Head Start centers that provided local black women with good jobs teaching young African American students.28
Black community activism did not operate entirely without conflict. In fact, the boycott of 1967 was supported by a militant group known as “The Spirit” that formed in the wake of Vernon Dahmer’s murder. The members protected local black churches and NAACP officials, but also helped enforce the boycott by issuing warnings to any black person who shopped in a white store. Additionally, the local NAACP experienced regular infighting that led to the expulsion of several of its leaders. Some local NAACP members believed that working-class activists had been excluded from the process of formulating the “requests” sent to white city officials. Even in their differences, however, black people overthrew Jim Crow, ending the systematic racial segregation and disfranchisement that had for so long limited black life in Hattiesburg.29
In 1968, the state of Mississippi charged eleven Klansmen with murder and / or arson for their involvement in the death of Vernon Dahmer. The terrorists who murdered Dahmer belonged to sect of nearby Klansmen led by a violent and deranged white supremacist named Samuel Holloway Bowers. Prior to the 1964 Freedom Summer, Bowers warned his followers, “The events which will occur in Mississippi this summer may well determine the fate of Christian civilization for centuries to come.” Members of this group were also involved in the famous Freedom Summer murder of civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in nearby Neshoba County. It was later discovered that Bowers ordered the murders of both Michael Schwerner and Vernon Dahmer as part of a campaign of guerrilla terror designed to stymie civil rights activism in Mississippi.30
In 1967, Bowers was one of seven Klansmen convicted of federal charges for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. Several members of the group had also been indicted on federal charges related to the murder of Vernon Dahmer, but these charges were later dismissed. Nonetheless, these federal indictments represented the first time that Mississippi Klansmen had been charged or convicted for anti–civil rights violence. The federal government was finally working to do something to protect black people from racialized violence in Mississippi.31
The local indictments for murder and / or arson represented an unprecedented commitment by the State of Mississippi to prosecute Klansmen who attacked civil rights activists. As a Hattiesburg reporter noted in 1968, “A remarkable facet of the state indictments and subsequent developments is that generally speaking citizens of the area appear to feel that something was needed in the way of action more stringent than the federal conspiracy charges.” “Yet only a few years ago,” the reporter observed, “such a move would have meant political suicide for the prosecutors and public ostracism.”32
Hailing from a longtime Mississippi family, the Klansman Samuel Bowers carried with him a deep sense of family history that informed his violent actions. In interviews conducted in the early 1980s, Bowers sought to contextualize his role in maintaining the tradition of white supremacy in Mississippi. According to Bowers, his great-grandfather had been a Confederate soldier who engaged in “nightriding in order to recover Southern civilization” during Reconstruction. Representing the next generation was Bowers’s grandfather, Eaton J. Bowers, the Gulf Coast lawyer who in the 1890s served as general counsel of the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad for the Pennsylvanian Joseph T. Jones. Labeling his grandfather “outstanding and brilliant,” Bowers cited his role in helping establish the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad as part of “a pattern in American history” between a “responsible carpetbagger movement … which I say was represented by Captain Jones and the G. & S.I. Railroad” that allowed for Northern and federal economic involvement in the South as long as white Southerners were allowed to “hold the black people down.” When Bowers became concerned that Northerners were no longer upholding their end of the bargain, he launched his violent crusade to maintain white supremacy, or, in his words, “to preserve Christian Civilization.”33
With the help of a Klan informant and the FBI, local prosecutors managed to secure the convictions of four men involved in the Dahmer murder. This did not include all the perpetrators. It is unknown exactly how many people were involved, but the original complaint filed by the FBI included fourteen names. Local prosecutors were constantly challenged by racially prejudiced jurors and witness and jury tampering by Klansmen. Moreover, it is fair to question their commitment to justice. None of the convicted men served more than ten years in prison. Each was released early.34
Between 1967 and 1970, Samuel Holloway Bowers was tried four times without being convicted. During the May 1968 trial, a single juror blocked conviction after twenty-two hours of deliberation, resulting in a mistrial. Bowers did serve time in federal prison for violating the civil rights of the other people he helped kill, but he remained free for some thirty-two years after the murder of Vernon Dahmer. After years of various efforts to reopen the Dahmer case, Bowers was finally tried and convicted in 1998 at the age of seventy-four. “It shows that Mississippi has changed,” reflected former Freedom School student Glenda Funchess after the conviction in 1998. Today, Ms. Funchess is a civil rights attorney in downtown Hattiesburg.35
The historic Mobile Street neighborhood still sits in the shadows of downtown Hattiesburg. On most days, the neighborhood is an empty shell of its former self. The ravages of natural disasters and neglect have taken down most of the buildings. The flood of 1974 inundated the entire neighborhood and displaced thousands of people. Subsequent rains, winds, and other adverse weather events have eroded much of the neighborhood. In 2013, a tornado tore through the Mobile Street District, taking down the neighborhood’s tallest structure, a 107-year-old three-story building, and causing major damage to the now-abandoned Eureka High School and the old Sixth Street USO, which is now an African American Military History Museum. The rest of the neighborhood is filled with empty patches of grass where other buildings caught fire, flooded, or collapsed, and were never rebuilt.36
Mt. Carmel Baptist Church still stands proudly on the corner of Seventh and Mobile, right across from where Gaither Hardaway ran his grocery store. Its congregation, however, has since moved. Mt. Carmel now meets in what used to be a white church. True Light Baptist has similarly moved into a former white church that was vacated when its congregation moved into a church farther from downtown. Ironically, the black congregations now meet in buildings left vacant by those who left to get away from them. St. Paul Methodist remains in place to this day, filled with a proud congregation that does much to remember the church’s history. Not everyone knows the significance of the names etched in the church’s stained-glass windows. The writing on one of those windows reads, “In Memory, Turner Roger Smith & Mamie Grove Smith, By Children.”37
Hammond Smith passed away in 1985 at the age of ninety. His brother Charles had passed years earlier, in 1971, at the age of seventy-nine. In today’s South, Hammond and Charles Smith probably would not live in that black community. Nor would they even own their stores. Most likely, they would work at the Hattiesburg Clinic or a local pharmacy and live in one of the town’s more prominent areas. They almost certainly would not live near Mobile Street. In today’s South, Hammond and Charles could live, shop, and eat wherever they wanted. The destruction of everyday Jim Crow is a major victory of the civil rights movement. But that very system of Jim Crow, which limited black opportunities and was so oppressive and so deadly, also gave birth to the very communities that brought into being the movement that eventually killed it.38
Black people still own businesses and work throughout the city. But since the destruction of Jim Crow, the number of homegrown small black businesses has drastically declined. Hammond Smith’s pharmacy probably couldn’t survive today against the CVS stores and the Walgreens that dot the city and accept dollars from all races. Thousands of black Hattiesburgers now work and shop in two large Walmart stores on either end of the city. Black people are now free to spend their time and money as they please. That is no small thing. But decades ago, their time and dollars would have cycled through their own communities rather than into the bank accounts of multimillion-dollar corporations. Those dollars would have gone into the hands of the people who ran the groceries, cafes, and barbershops of that once vibrant community.
Since integration, Hattiesburg itself has sprawled miles away from its historic center. Thousands of residents, both white and black, have packed up their lives and moved away from the core. Commerce followed. Some of America’s largest chain stores now dot Hardy Street for miles beyond the old city core. The migrants left a decaying downtown in their wake; there are still a few places to eat and drink, but downtown Hattiesburg is no longer the center of local commerce. A downtown association draws people back into the city center for concerts, plays, farmer’s markets, and festivals. It is also leading an effort to reverse the outmigration by encouraging people to move downtown. But such efforts are merely the beginning stages of an effort to reverse outmigration processes underway since the end of Jim Crow. In the years after the 1960s, racial progress flipped the city inside out, leaving an old historic core for the black residents who cannot afford or choose not to move and some white residents who populate the older white neighborhoods.39
So much has changed. But the legacy of a racially disputed past hangs above the Hub City. Hattiesburg celebrates its civil rights history and even has plans to refurbish Eureka High School into a local civil rights museum that could be added to the Hattiesburg Freedom Summer Trail. But on most days, and in more subtle ways, the city also honors the white supremacists who worked most devotedly to tear the races apart. The county still bears the name Forrest, after the murderous Civil War general and Ku Klux Klan pioneer. And, of course, its Confederate monument stands tall next to the courthouse; never mind the fact that the city was founded more than ten years after the Civil War ended. The state flag contains the old Confederate battle flag in its upper left-hand corner. When the University of Southern Mississippi removed it from campus following the murder of nine black people in Charleston by a white supremacist in 2015, local white neo-Confederate boosters camped on the edge of campus waving Confederate flags in protest. One of them was a former member of the Citizens’ Council in the 1960s; it is hard to take seriously his cries of “heritage not hate” when you know he belonged to an organization that sponsored racial terrorism. At the very least, Mississippians’ refusal to remove Confederate flags and monuments represents the privileging of one people’s heritage over that of others. It also signals the assurance that this seemingly eternal struggle over race will continue to pollute the lives of millions to come. Despite so much change, many Southerners today insist on passing down the sins of their ancestors to their offspring. But some do share a vision that one day this American cancer of racism might end.40
African Americans in the South have more opportunities now than they ever had. But losses were embedded within those iconic victories. Hollowed-out neighborhoods now sit in the former sites of bustling black downtowns; the entire American South is filled with those once-rich spaces, and some African Americans still occupy them. Most of those residents are poor, and although they can now ride in the front of the bus, one cannot help but wonder how many opportunities are actually theirs. Few black communities are as capable of self-sustenance as they once had been. The decline of Jim Crow was a victory of the movement. But it ultimately led to the fall of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of extraordinarily resilient black communities where a people lived and grew together within the confines of Jim Crow.