The Black Belt runs across the middle of Alabama and Mississippi, and although it is hallowed ground in the Civil Rights Movement, today, economically, it looks more like ground zero. I saw more, large burned out building in Selma last week than I’ve seen anywhere in 49 states and six continents. Black owned businesses like the BBQ shack above on the site of Bloody Sunday, in Selma, Dallas County, Alabama, are suffering. If white people patronized such black-owned businesses, they’d find that for $8 they could get a Boston Butts sandwich with the most tender slices of perfectly barbecued slow-smoked pork in the state. If white people patronized black-owned businesses, there would be an economic boom in the Black Belt. But Alabama is still economically segregated.
There are two types of people in the world: those who tolerate cruelty and those who do not. The political spectrum is defined by the left, which understands and opposes cruelty, and the right, which accepts and enjoys cruelty. The foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement knew cruelty first hand, and their allies marched with them to end it, from Selma to BLM. The racists on the right, from Wallace to Abbott, revel in the blood of those they hate or laugh about the cruelty. In the middle are the majority, divided between those who don’t care and those who don’t want to think about it because it’s sad.
Driving around the Delta, is like cruising through cruelty: slaves once worked the land stolen from natives, whites guarded concentration camps filled with American families who were ethnically Japanese, and the Klan reigned with terror. And yet most people don’t see it.
”I was the first person to play the Blues on Main Street in my home town. My grandfather couldn’t, and my father couldn’t.”
— Terry “Harmonica” Bean in Clarksdale, MS, 1/26/24.
Many might wonder if the great bluesman Harmonica Bean means that his father didn’t know how to play the Blues. The majority of us are unconscious to the cruelty that would have killed his grandfather or father for daring to play music while being black. The first truly American music, the Delta Blues, which gave birth to Jazz, was oppressed by race hate, and now is still disrespected or ignored by unconscious bias. If more white people patronized black-owned businesses, there would be a boom in decaying Clarksdale Mississippi, and the music would be awesome.
Funnily enough, the song that haunted me most while exploring places I’d first heard about through music was Blue-eyed Soul.
Bobby Gentry said the song was about ‘unconscious cruelty’ and despite being asked many times, she refused to say what was the somethin’ that they were throwin’ off the bridge, except to say that it was ‘a symbol’. She retired and still lives in the area, but she’s long maintained a Greta “leave me alone” Garbo silence about her most famous song.
When Gentry was 13, the body of a young boy was pulled out of the Tallahatchie River only a few miles from where Bobbie grew up. The boy’s mother, outraged at her son’s murder, arranged for an open casket at his funeral near Chicago in 1955. Photos were published and the story became international news.
The case and trial must have been a topic around Bobbie Gentry’s kitchen table throughout her teen years. Local whites responded to the case with casual cruelty, saying that the boy deserved it for whistling at a white woman. Since the victim was paraded around town for hours screaming all night, many people knew what had actually happened, but they refused to speak publicly out of fear of the Klan. After being acquitted, the murderers—protected by double jeopardy—confessed in an article. Even many decades later, witnesses living out of state under false names received death threats demanding silence. Still, many saw the whistle as the point of the case, not the torture nor the killing nor the injustice.
Emmett Till’s 14 year old black body, tortured and beaten for hours, hung screaming in the night from the highest point on the levee, and ultimately shot in a barn, was dropped, most now believe, from a bridge where it drifted into the Tallahatchie River.
I have zero doubt that Bobbie Gentry was profoundly influenced by the casual cruelty she witnessed at age 13 in response to the brutal killing of a cute, well-liked boy only one year older than she was. Growing up in Choctaw and Chickasaw counties, she certainly knew that many of the flowers on the ridges there were planted by Native Americans, before they were forced on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. As an adult in 1967, Gentry certainly knew Till was the ‘symbol’ that sparked the Civil Rights movement, but she also knew that calling public attention to Till’s murder could result in her own death.
What haunts me about the chorus is the cruel history of the place names evoked by “Choctaw Ridge” and the “Tallahatchie Bridge”, contrasted with banal comments of unconsciously cruel family. I believe Gentry echoed the cruel history consciously, but I don’t know. I don’t know her politics or views on race—but I know where she came from—, and in either case, the song is still about unconscious cruelty.
Tomorrow Black History Month begins, and I plan to write about the Civil War, Abolitionism, and my ZCT visits to the Till Monument and about the Selma to Montgomery Trail. But there’s a lesson here about the unconscious views of the middle in America.
Those who were beaten bloody on Sunday 7 March 1965 near the spot pictured knew the cruelty first hand. The horse riding, billy club swinging cops knew the cruelty first hand. But when Americans turned on the TV, opened their newspapers or looked at the photos in Life magazine, the cruelty could no longer be ignored. On the left, many awoke and heeded the call to march. On the right, ridiculous lies were spread by the FBI about Communist agitators with deviant sexual behaviors, in order to confuse people about real injustice.
No longer could the middle stay unconscious about the systemic racism on dramatic display. Many saw the news and woke from a general feeling that something was wrong to a clear view that the injustice was unacceptable. The common black residents of Dallas county, long denied their right to vote, were peacefully assembling to petition our government for a redress of grievances. And the elected officials, from Governor Wallace down to Sheriff Clark, were unjustly using violence to deny them our constitutional rights. Even those who had professed not to care about discrimination against blacks found that a line had been crossed. How could it be right that students, teachers, old folks and ministers, black and white, girls and boys, could be beaten, bloody and unconscious, in their church clothes on Main Street, by the people paid to protect them?
And the middle woke. Just as Dr King promised. And LBJ began writing the speech that would become the Voting Rights Act.
Joe Biden said after Charlottesville that this was a battle for the soul of the nation, and it still is. And victory will be won by highlighting the cruelty of Trumpism versus the kindness of Biden, from kids in cages, to violent insurrectionists, to mass shootings, to young bodies cut by razor wire found drowned in the Rio Grande. The middle must be awakened from not caring or just feeling sad, to doing something to stop the cruelty. Wake, organize, speak out, and vote.