NONFICTION
“Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America”
by Calvin Trillin
Random House, 304 pages, $27
“History is just people,” Edna Ferber once wrote, and it “isn’t only yesterday. It’s today. There is no history without people, any more than there is sound without hearing.”
“Jackson, 1964,” a collection of essays from the prolific Calvin Trillin, echoes both observations. Featuring 17 New Yorker columns from the past 50 years, the book doubles as a time capsule of sorts, recording the voices and peculiar personalities of the civil rights era.
In the introduction, he calls these dispatches “conflicting evidence” that the “dream Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of has not arrived.” His insightful, if sometimes uneven, essays suggest that today’s noisy outbursts against intolerance are just the latest tremors in an ongoing earthquake.
Trillin, who was born in Kansas City, Mo., in 1935 and attended Yale, landed a job at the Atlanta bureau of Time in 1960. The revered journalist, critic and satirical poet has been a fixture of the New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine hired him to cover the first black students enrolled at the University of Georgia.
While the Athens saga is mentioned only briefly here (for a full account, see 1992’s “An Education in Georgia”), Trillin does recall how working the “seg beat” gave him a front-line view of boycotts, sit-ins and widespread resistance to desegregation.
“I knew all of the verses to ‘We Shall Overcome,’” he writes. “I could calibrate a white Southerner’s racial views by the way he pronounced the word ‘Negro.’” He admits to ambivalence regarding the ethical gray zone between covering the news and participating in it.
On assignment in Alabama, he and a fellow journalist hesitated before climbing aboard a bus full of Freedom Riders. Fifty years and nearly 30 books later, he describes attending a commemoration in Chicago and greeting Rep. John Lewis “like an old comrade-in-arms. We had both been at the bus station in Montgomery when men with clubs attacked first the press and then the Freedom Riders.”
The book abounds with stirring moments that emphasize the dangers of bucking the status quo. Some of its most evocative passages, however, unfold in quieter circumstances. Trillin may be known for his cutting wit and meticulous prose, but he also has the good sense to know when to disappear.
The title essay from 1964 recounts a gripping episode that heats up on a flight from Atlanta to Jackson, Miss. The writer observes as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. flips through news magazines and talks about safety concerns with Andrew Young and other aides. Across the aisle, a “nice-looking young white man” strikes up a conversation, beginning with polite questions about Christian values before revealing his opinion that King’s crusade is doing more damage than good.
Maintaining a friendly tone, the reverend schools his seatmate on hypocrisy, eventually declaring, “‘I’d like to be loved by everyone, but we can’t always wait for love.’”
Trillin does a similar disappearing act in “Victoria Delee — in Her Own Words.” The 1971 column gives voice to a working-class South Carolina mother struggling to send her six kids to integrated schools. Delee describes the “living hell” of beatings and harassment her family endured: “My house, before they burned it down, looked like a polka-dotted dress. Every kind of bullet hole was in that house. Even with all that, I never hate.”
Exasperation over busing, defiant school boards and ludicrous arguments about “state sovereignty” run throughout the collection. Trillin demonstrates that the tensions triggered by Brown v. Board of Education weren’t a solely Southern phenomenon. He mounts a careful, if rambling, investigation into Denver’s integration problems in “Doing the Right Thing Isn’t Always Easy,” written in 1969 (20 years before a similarly titled film made Spike Lee a household name).
Elsewhere, he tackles discrimination in Boston discos in the mid-1970s, Kafkaesque legal scuffles in Louisiana and disturbing incidents of entrenched prejudice across the country. A 1975 report from Seattle makes the case that police brutality against minorities is anything but a recent phenomenon.
“The naked statement — a black man has been killed by a white policeman — is such a fearsome divider of the races that the people who preside over a city immediately try to cover it with details,” Trillin writes.
The familiarity of these incidents from 30 or 40 years ago is jarring, but other essays hinge on more obscure matters, such as the way advocates in the North once classified white Southern powerbrokers as “‘smart segs’ and ‘dumb segs.’” Such hair-splitting sounds like minor footnotes from a distant era. To be fair, some entries guaranteed to captivate scholars might send casual readers skipping ahead.
This is not the case with “Remembrance of Moderates Past” from 1977, which delivers an interesting glimpse into Atlanta’s anxieties in the early 1960’s, including juicy asides about discrimination at the Piedmont Driving Club and other local institutions.
“When it seemed that the first desegregation would come in the Atlanta public schools, businessmen feared that the state legislature, then controlled by rural types who could campaign almost as well on hating Atlanta as on loving segregation, would find great entertainment in the closing of the schools and the filling of the streets with troops.”
The term “moderate,” Trillin explains, became synonymous with “someone who had something to lose” — in other words, individuals in charge of corporate giants like Coca-Cola. (It’s interesting to note how The Atlanta Journal-Constitution comes into play, briefly, in the city’s kerfuffle over social justice.)
The essay brings to mind Georgia’s recent backlash over the so-called “religious liberty” bill, as well as countless other headlines, which seems to prove Ferber’s point that yesterday is never over. Extending the metaphor about humanity’s role in history, she wrote, “If a great tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, it falls without sound.” Luckily, “Jackson, 1964” is a welcome reminder that critical thinkers like Trillin have spent years of their lives listening.
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