Br'er Fox

Save for the road signs and the scrawny pine trees lining the road, the men who took up lames Meredith's protest march (TIME, June 17) could have been anywhere but in Mississippi. State highway patrolmen -- from the same force that had walked off the job as mobs howled their hatred for Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962 -- hovered around like mother hens; highway crews even mowed the high grass on the road shoulders to smooth the marchers' path. For veteran civil rights demonstrators, the atmosphere could hardly have seemed more unreal if the Ku Klux Klan had plied them with doughnuts and coffee.

The change was partly smart tactics, partly a result of the fresher racial climate that Governor Paul Johnson has managed to create in Mississippi. Though no more of an integrationist than his predecessor, demagogic Ross Barnett, Johnson knows well that racial savagery can only scare off badly needed Northern industries. Moreover, unlike most segregationists he realizes that bla tant oppression merely helps the civil rights cause. As the march entered its second week, Johnson passed the word: keep cool.

Brother Jeff. Cool it was. In Grenada (pop. 7,914), a white supremacist stronghold that hitherto had been thought to be too tough for civil rights workers to crack, the Governor's dic tum received its clearest vindication. "We want Brother Jefferson Davis to know that the South he represented will never rise again," proclaimed Robert Green, 32, a march leader, as he stood astride the Davis memorial in the town square. "We want Mississippi to know that it is a part of the Union. We want white folks to know we have died for the flag too." With that, he lodged the Stars and Stripes in place above Jeff Davis' head. As the 600 Negroes in the square roared their glee, Grenada's whites glowered their hatred--"I saw two of my niggers in there," snarled one. "They won't have no jobs tomorrow"--yet did nothing. Town officials met the marchers' every major demand. They desegregated toilets in the courthouse, allowed four Negroes to help enroll voters, promised to enable Negroes to register near their homes without coming into town. Negro registration doubled almost overnight.

Sudden Passivity. The red carpet soon ran out when the march switched off Highway 51 into the Delta, where Negroes often outnumber white residents. Governor Johnson lost some of his own cool and decided to withdraw more than half of the protecting state convoy. In Greenwood police at first refused to let the marchers pitch their tents on school property, arresting three, including S.N.C.C. Leader Stokely Carmichael, when they tried. Most militant of all civil rights leaders, Carmichael, free on bond, shouted his anger: "We want black power! Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down to get rid of the dirt." Marchers and local Negroes picked up the chant: "Black power! Black power!" Even then, officials of Greenwood remained silent, and eventually relented on most of the marchers' demands.

By their sudden show of Southern passivity--sullen as it was--white Mississippians managed to play Br'er Fox to the marchers, who did not quite attract all of the headlines they sought in the hope of galvanizing Congress into quick passage of President Johnson's new civil rights bill. They were succeeding in James Meredith's original task of showing Negroes that they could walk through Mississippi with dignity. More important yet, their registration forays added 2,250 Negroes to Mississippi's voting lists.

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