On a morning in 2012, John Doar sat in his Manhattan law office as I recorded our conversation with my Sony camera. The 90-year-old Presidential Medal of Freedom holder posed and answered his own question about Mississippi in the Civil Rights era.
“What happened that caused something that was unsolvable in 1960 to the solution being inevitable in 1966?” Doar said. “It was the … efforts by everybody….”
A U.S. assistant attorney general at the time, Doar repeatedly challenged the white system along the path to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the first-ever convictions of Mississippi white men in killings tied to civil rights.
Mississippi’s history from six decades ago shows that even deep-seated pathologies can be rectified and that change is possible. The movement’s effectiveness hits hard today, and it is essential that neither time nor censored teaching mute its example. When deep ongoing injustice, willing resisters and ripe timing meet, what looked impossible can occur.
I can’t avoid seeing the parallels between then and now after being immersed in the words of movement leaders and of Doar and dogged Jackson journalist Bill Minor while filming, editing and reediting “Eyes on Mississippi.” The project was initially about the experience of Bill, my first boss. Unsurprisingly for a diehard journalist, he centered his interviews on what he’d reported.
“The local people — they were the heroes” was Bill’s last reflection at his final film session.
In 1960s Mississippi, honest national journalism advanced the movement by showing the country the stakes in what was happening along with the depth of southern white intransigency. Most in-state journalism defended the racist status quo. When newspapers printed the names of every plaintiff — and there could be hundreds — in court segregation challenges, it was no testament to comprehensive coverage. The lists were community retaliation data banks making it easy to identify whom to fire or deny credit. Jackson’s two dailies distorted coverage.
There was the infamous Clarion-Ledger headline on the arrest of NAACP leader Medgar Evers’ murderer: “Californian Is Charged With Murder Of Evers.” In fact, the fertilizer salesman had lived in Mississippi since childhood, as part of a family with pre-Civil War roots.
Bill, then the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s Jackson correspondent, frequently reported anonymously for national outlets, typically either The New York Times or Newsweek, and was determined to get the story in front of national readers.
His explanation for his role as a clear-eyed witness came from the bedrock of his faith: “Someone has to get these stories out” in an era before phone cameras and social media citizen photographers.
The Louisiana-born Roman Catholic matter-of-factly saw his work as a vocation. “It makes you feel like you’ve been put here for a reason, and for as long as I can do it, I’m going to keep doing it.”
What he recognized and reported matched his deep bearings. The horror of club-swinging local police attacking hundreds of Jackson young people in the town’s first mass protest in 1963 spurred Bill to stop inside the downtown Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle to meditate for an hour.
Before he could return to his desk to file the story, “I had to do something for my conscience,” he remembered. That day’s clear display of good and evil between fellow Mississippians amounted to “a cathartic experience in my life,” he told me.
Bill died in 2017; Doar, in 2014. Myrlie Evers-Williams, 93, a key film participant, retired from public life in 2018. The film project turned into an eyewitness recounting of the Mississippi Civil Rights timeline.
Movement stalwart Dr. Robert Smith, 88, remains a living link to history. He continues to practice medicine at the Jackson clinic he founded in 1963.
“No question about it,” he said when asked about the parallels between now and then. “Mississippi can be used as an example of what happens when your systems fail. And that’s exactly what happened here; our systems failed.”
This history matters. In 1964, when introducing Mississippi Delta leader Fannie Lou Hamer at a Harlem church, Malcolm X noted, “Some people wonder, well, what has Mississippi got to do with Harlem? It isn’t actually Mississippi; it’s America. America is Mississippi.”
He saw Mississippi as America in microcosm. That tracks now with heightened demonstrations, the two recent killings of Minnesota protesters and the cascade of court challenges. Journalism’s criticality is there always.
Interviewing Bill for the documentary created the right moment for him to say what previously had gone unspoken in terms of the deep why of his viewpoint. Alongside his expected democratic American ideals, his grasp of public life came out of his inner belief in equality and the truth of God’s love for all. The introspection he brought to our film sessions wasn’t just due to my probing. He was in the last decade of his life and comfortable talking about life’s big picture. His spirituality had grown even stronger with age, he said.
