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JACKSON,
Miss. — The last time I visited this Southern city was in June 1964,
Mississippi Freedom summer, when Northern college kids were traveling
south to register voters, though that wasn’t why I was here. A high
school sophomore, AWOL from home, I was on a cross-country bus trip from
Boston, and Jackson was one of the stops. I wanted to meet Eudora
Welty, who I knew lived there and whose early, playful stories I loved.
My plan was to call from a pay phone, then drop by her house to say hi.
Welty’s
writing, wry and linguistically zany, was the only version of “South” I
knew, and it made me eager to go there. But by the time I reached
Jackson, I was feeling uneasy. I’d seen “colored entrance” signs on
public buildings and falling-down sharecropper shacks along the road.
I’d also heard rumors that three civil rights workers had mysteriously
disappeared. I hoped a meeting with Welty might be reassuring. But when I
couldn’t find her in the phone book, and no one I asked knew her name, I
caught another bus and moved on.
Politically, at this stage in my life, I was out of touch, insulated by
privilege, aware only in a muffled way — through reading, mostly — of
the racism that saturated American life. The trip started to change
that. It triggered alarms that have never shut off. And I heard them
loud and clear when I returned to Jackson to see the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum that recently opened here.
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Source: The New York Times
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