Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It was a different time, the late 1950s, in Mississippi, in the South, and in America. In a series of multiple births, a new mass movement for civil rights emerged, in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Emmett Till case and the Montgomery bus boycott. At last, the accumulated weight of decades of de jure segregation and its rituals of discrimination – black men and women humiliated, cheated out of the fruits of their labor, and even killed – became visible to people outside the region. In the carrying out of court victories and in non-violent mass protest, African Americans exposed the violence of segregation. The visual mass media, the slick photo magazines like Life, Look, and even Time but also the new medium of television, circulated these images in a political context shaped by the Cold War and the growing importance of black voters in the North. At last, the Southern culture of segregation became a critical political issue, for whites as well as blacks.Sometimes William Faulkner knew these changes were coming. “We speak now against the day,” Faulkner told the 1955 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in a speech reprinted in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have ... log in or subscribe to read full text