Taking the Fight South

Chronicle of a Jew's Battle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

Howard Ball

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780268109165
• eBook ISBN: 9780268109189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Taking the Fight South provides a timely and telling reminder of the vigilance democracy requires if racial justice is to be fully realized.

Distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball has written dozens of books during his career, including the landmark biography of Thurgood Marshall, A Defiant Life, and the critically acclaimed Murder in Mississippi, chronicling the Mississippi Burning killings. In Taking the Fight South, arguably his most personal book, Ball focuses on six years, from 1976 to 1982, when, against the advice of friends and colleagues in New York, he and his Jewish family moved from the Bronx to Starkville, Mississippi, where he received a tenured position in the political science department at Mississippi State University. For Ball, his wife, Carol, and their three young daughters, the move represented a leap of faith, ultimately illustrating their deep commitment toward racial justice.

Ball, with breathtaking historical authority, narrates the experience of his family as Jewish outsiders in Mississippi, an unfamiliar and dangerous landscape contending with the aftermath of the civil rights struggle. Signs and natives greeted them with a humiliating and frightening message: "No Jews, Negroes, etc., or dogs welcome." From refereeing football games, coaching soccer, and helping young black girls integrate the segregated Girl Scout troops in Starkville, to life-threatening calls from the KKK in the middle of the night, from his work for the ACLU to his arguments in the press and before a congressional committee for the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Ball takes the reader to a precarious time and place in the history of the South. He was briefly an observer but quickly became an activist, confronting white racists stubbornly holding on to a Jim Crow white supremacist past and fighting to create a more diverse, equitable, and just society.

Ball's story is one of an imitable advocate who didn't just observe as a passive spectator but interrupted injustice. Taking the Fight South will join the list of required books to read about the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of racism in the United States. The book will also appeal to readers interested in Judaism because of its depiction of anti-Semitism directed toward Starkville's Jewish community, struggling to survive in the heart of the deep and very fundamentalist Protestant South.

CHAPTER 1

Going Down to Mississippi

After living most of my thirty-nine years in one of the Bronx’s many Jewish ghettos of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and then in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, New York, in the 1960s and ’70s, in 1976 I took a job in Mississippi. I was going to be professor of political science at Mississippi State University (MSU), located adjacent to the city of Starkville, in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. My responsibility at MSU was to teach four courses in constitutional law and civil rights and liberties during the academic year. It was the kind of job description I had wished for over the past decade at Hofstra University. I thought I was ready for this new teaching environment.

I immediately called my mother to tell her the news. Her response was very loud and, for her, terse: “You are meshugenah!”¹ She truly believed that Mississippi was an evil third-world country. It was a place where Jews were eaten after being boiled to death. And if that did not happen fast enough, you were damned because you had to eat trafe² food like fried pickles with pulled pork and—ugh—a chocolate milkshake, before you were boiled! Tearing up, she begged me not to move, asking me again and again, “Why would a nice Jewish professor from the Bronx, with a beautiful wife and three precious daughters, even think much less move to that place.” Why, indeed?

GROWING UP IN THE BRONX

My father, Abe, didn’t offer any opinions about our moving plans, nor did he ask the why question. It didn’t surprise me at all. His life had been a continual struggle, one in which the encounters seemingly never subsided. Abe’s struggles began early in his life. Three years after he was born in Poland in 1911, his mother—physically a very tiny woman but also a brave heart—took Abe and his older brother Al, on foot, across war-torn Europe on a harrowing, years-long journey from Poland to Hamburg, Germany’s largest seaport city. Her husband, the granddad I never knew, had crossed the Atlantic Ocean before the Great War began, and she and the children were joining him in America. Which she did! All by herself!

My father left school after the third grade because the family, which now included a little sister, Rachel, was quite poor and he had to go to work to help out. He worked long and hard hours, eventually mastering the plumbing trade. Because of an injury to his right arm suffered on a job, he could not serve in the army during the Second World War. Instead, he worked at Todd Shipyard’s facility in Hoboken, New Jersey, the largest plant on the East Coast, installing toilets and showers in a variety of naval vessels. It was labor-intensive and dangerous work in an environment laced with asbestos, the then-largely-unknown carcinogen. As with the other shipyard laborers, asbestos was his daily intimate buddy aboard his ships. Every day for four years, at work’s end, he wrapped the pipes and the joints with his silent mate. Abe was sixty-nine years old when he died of cancer in 1980. It was caused by an undiagnosed mesothelioma. My mother, devastated by his death, not yet aware of the underlying cause of death and unwilling to go through the trauma of litigation once we found out why he died, never joined a class action suit against the shipyard.³

After the war ended, he continued to ply his trade; but because he was Jewish, Abe was a hardworking nonunion plumber until a few years before he retired. That discrimination became a financial and a mental albatross around his neck, because he worked—as he always growled it—“for a momzer.”⁴ Every day he would come home, dirt on his clothing and his hands, tired and perpetually angry, cursing that “God-damned bastard Uberstein,” especially his miserliness—and the fact that he was Jewish, to boot.

Growing up and living in New York City and Long Island for four decades, I lived in Jewish ghettos in the Bronx and on Long Island. I was shielded from the hate, prejudice, and discrimination my father and my relatives, whether in sales, or plumbing or sheet metal trades, or in all the military services, experienced.

Until I went to graduate school in New Jersey, I lived in the second-floor three-room apartment (2D) in an old, small tenement building, 322 East 173rd Street, just east of the Grand Concourse. Inside there were six other members of my family: my three sisters, Carol, Sarah, and Brenda; my mother, Fay; my father, Abe; and my grandfather, my mother’s father, Max Kintish. I was the oldest and the only boy in the apartment. Until I was a Bar Mitzvah, I shared a small two-bunk bedroom with all my sisters. When I was thirteen, I was moved into a tinier room inhabited by my granddad, who was beginning his final sad journey accompanied by a common traveler, dementia. It became a somewhat difficult time when, at night, Max would get up, grab a slipper, and, very weakly, start hitting me with it, yelling at me in Yiddish. Until he passed, when I was a first-year student at Hunter College, it was just a heart-wrenching experience for me and for my mother.

Most of my parents’ siblings (my aunts and uncles) and their children (my cousins) lived in the Bronx and Brooklyn. I was surrounded by familial love, cheerfulness, alongside the occasional petty, but very long-lasting, quarrels engaged in by one of the mishpucha⁵ toward another. All of us were poor growing up, and there were times when job loss was a dismal reality. But we were part of a very large family, and these dilemmas were shouldered by our own little kolkhoz.⁶

When I began college work, I had to find a place in the apartment to do my schoolwork. There was only one spot: at a pulldown worktable that extended from a secretary standing in the family room. Occasionally I was working at the desk when my father came home, exhausted and angry. Most of the time, he’d yell at me, telling me “to get a job and make some money to help us out!”

Very infrequently, because I knew what happened next, I would exclaim, “Please just let me finish my . . .” Before my plea ended, he pulled off his belt and quickly cornered me by the dumbwaiter next to the apartment door and gave me a couple of whacks. They stung, but he calmed down afterward and got ready for dinner. He never apologized, but I never expected it from him. He did not attend my high school, college, or graduate school commencements, nor did he come to any of my Taft High School football games.

Abe bitterly disliked the schvartzes⁷ “invading” the Bronx from, he swore, Puerto Rico. His prejudice extended to my Black friends on the football team with me at Taft. He was furious when he found out that one of my good friends and a study hall partner, Olive Bowles, who was the head Taft cheerleader, was a schvartze!

This dread my dad felt toward another discriminated-against minority group never abated. He was infuriated when he found out, from a photo of us in the New York Daily News, that I was one of the Hunter College students who participated in a protest march on Fordham Road, across from Alexander’s department store, in support of the Black college students protesting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in North Carolina.

Although my mom’s fears and concerns about my family’s moving to Mississippi were profound, they never came close to my father’s anger, chagrin, and embarrassment that his only son was moving to the South.

My father claimed that his anger emerged after he was robbed and assaulted twice by Blacks, two who had worked for him. However, his antipathy toward persons of color was a hallmark of his life before these muggings and robberies. The second attack occurred when he was in his sixties. It led to his retirement. He was brutally beaten up by two Black men when he interrupted them burglarizing his small plumbing store. He wound up in Bronx Hospital. He never pressed charges against the two men. He knew who they were, but he feared what might happen to him and mom.

After he was discharged, he quickly—at a financial loss—sold the hole-in-the-wall business and, with my mother, moved into their first, and their only, “house.” It was a no-frills mobile home in Monticello, New York. (He did visit us in Starkville, just months before his asbestos-induced death, on the occasion of my oldest daughter Sue’s Bat Mitzvah in 1980.)

I was working in Mississippi when my father died. Before then, I had been teaching at Hofstra University, in New York’s Nassau County. It was my first job after receiving my PhD from Rutgers University. Our next move was to Mississippi State University, Starkville, Oktibbeha County, Mississippi.

TEACHING AT HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY

When we moved to Mississippi, I was a tenured associate professor of political science at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Nassau County, Long Island. It was my first teaching job after graduate work at Rutgers University. I had been married thirteen years to Carol May Neidell, a Jewess of Carle Place and Westbury, Long Island (although she lived her first six years in Brooklyn). I was the father of three young daughters, Sue, Sheryl, and, the youngest, Melissa. We had lived in Stony Brook since 1968, and I commuted sixty-six miles daily (round trip) to teach my political theory, civil liberties, and constitutional law classes at Hofstra.

I had begun to seriously think about relocating around the time I received tenure at Hofstra in 1972. I enjoyed researching and writing and having my work on the US Supreme Court and constitutional issues published. While at Hofstra, annually I would take my Supreme Court class to visit the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. It was a three-day event: day one, attending oral arguments; day two, meeting a sitting justice of the court (over the eleven years, these meetings included Earl Warren, Hugo Black, Tom Clark, Potter Stewart, and William O. Douglas); and day three, meeting with law clerks, staff from the solicitor general’s office, and the marshall of the court. (My students loved these trips, and I continued them when I moved to Vermont three decades later.)

And I loved interacting with my students in the many courses I taught at Hofstra. It was a “teaching” university, and I did a great deal of teaching, five different courses each semester, in two very broad subsets of political science—constitutional law and political theory.

This teaching load meant that, regularly, I taught ten different courses a year. It made research, writing, and scholarly publication very, very difficult. If I wanted to research and write, I had to spend evenings and weekends away from my growing family. (By the time I left New York, however, I had two books published and a third, No Pledge of Privacy, on the 1974 Watergate tapes litigation in the federal courts, in press.)

I longed to teach at a university that provided me with a different kind of scholarly environment: fewer courses to teach, colleagues who enjoyed doing research and publishing their findings, research support, and a genuinely supportive climate for social science research and publication.

The Hofstra milieu reminded me of Eugene O’Neill’s powerful play The Iceman Cometh. There was the always-busy faculty lounge, where, day after day, for the eleven years I was at Hofstra, small groups of faculty, each clique never more than six to eight persons, would sit at round tables. They would generally be hunched over their tea and coffee in the morning, and over lunch later on in the day, always talking and shouting about the same issues and personalities. Always talking about what they would do if the school had another president, if their department had a different chairperson, and so on.

If one visited the group in the lunchroom only once a year, the overheard conversation would be fully understood. It was as if the onlooker had been sitting at the table the day before. Eerie, yes; frustrating, yes; encouraging, never. (When one of the regulars, a somewhat effete historian who smoked cigarettes inserted into an ivory cigarette holder, heard that my first book had been published, he remarked, “I didn’t know you could write!”)

AN INVITATION TO VISIT MISSISSIPPI

For three years, 1972–75, my job search did not go well at all. Frankly, nothing happened. However, in late 1975, I received a positive letter and a number of telephone calls from Barbara Teters, the head of the Political Science Department at Mississippi State University, inviting me down to campus for an interview. Hoping that Harvard would give me a call, I delayed responding to the Mississippi invitation.

When Harvard’s Department of Government didn’t make me an offer I couldn’t refuse, I returned the Mississippi calls and somewhat reluctantly visited the campus. The flight down was an experience I’ll never forget. I really was not eager to visit the Magnolia State, but my curiosity got the better of me. On the flight down, I was surrounded by all the horrible visions I ever imagined about Mississippi.

And they were pretty horrid specters, involving violence and death, all taking place in dark, moss-shrouded forests and swamps. And the villain was Count Dracula in the guise of a burly redneck wearing a filthy, green John Deere baseball cap, holding a shotgun ominously in both massive hands, and with a noose slung over his shoulder. By the time my plane landed at the Golden Triangle Regional Airport, servicing Starkville, West Point, and Columbus, Mississippi, my mind had done its job on me and I was very eager to return as quickly as possible to New York’s comfortable bosom and continue my job search.

However, I quickly found out that there were no dark swampy forests in Oktibbeha County (only cool piney woods). Also, I did not see one single John Deere type during my two-day visit. (This was a good omen at the time, although once we moved, I found other, darker realities in Mississippi, including plenty of John Deere talking—and spitting—heads.)

The MSU campus was very big and quite pretty, and the people I met seemed very decent and quite gracious. And there were a greater percentage of Black students on this predominantly white Southern campus than there were on Hofstra’s campus in New York.

The department needed a person to teach in only one area of political science, constitutional law/civil liberties. The teaching load was less than half the number of courses I taught annually at Hofstra, and the courses were all in my favorite subject area. And I would get a promotion and a higher salary if I took the job. Most of all, I would have the free time to do some serious research into the status of civil rights in the South. For me, I thought, Mississippi would be my laboratory!

I was invited to visit the campus to interview for the position. It was a brief visit, one full day of interviews, sandwiched between two nights in the Ramada Inn.

The university was one of three predominantly white major institutions of higher learning in the state, and scholarly research was encouraged and supported in a number of ways. (The other two institutions were the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi.)

There were and still are eight institutions of higher learning in Mississippi. Three of them are still predominantly Black (Jackson State, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley State Universities). The only predominantly white colleges, Mississippi University for Women and Delta State College, were smaller liberal arts campuses.

Litigation introduced by Black plaintiffs in the 1960s challenging the segregated system of higher education in the state had still not been concluded when we arrived in July 1976. The legal controversy finally ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Jennifer A. Stollman
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Going Down to Mississippi
• Chapter 2 The Jewish Community in Starkville, Mississippi, and We “Fast-Talkin’ New York Jews”
• Chapter 3 “Hey, Rabbi”: Refereeing Football Games in the Magnolia State
• Chapter 4 Confronting Racism While Serving the ACLU in Mississippi
• Chapter 5 Defending the 1965 Voting Rights Act
• Chapter 6 A Solitary Jew on Campus and in the Field
• Chapter 7 Leaving the Magnolia State
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: The Yin/Yang of Life in Mississippi, and Two Men from Union Collide
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index