Hugh Sidey's America: Sad Song Of the Delta

Aaron Henry recalls the days when Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were on the line, calling from Washington to his tiny Fourth Street Drugstore in Clarksdale to give heart to the movement. Foot soldiers in the bloody civil rights wars crowded the store's narrow aisles in those days, desperation and what sometimes seemed like misplaced hope overcoming their justified fears. Now, in the soft afternoon shadow, the phone is silent, and there is only one visitor, come to ask how things have changed.

Henry, a thickset man of 68, has been head of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since the civil rights movement was at its peak. Mississippi's Delta was one of its deadliest battlegrounds, a crescent of tormented land between Memphis and Vicksburg, hemmed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the poorest and blackest part of this country. A generation ago, some of the most oppressed blacks in the most harshly segregated state in the U.S. rose to claim their share of America's dream, and some whites did their violent worst to stop them. Television beamed the story to the world, and the nation's shame and anger forced the politicians in Washington to act. The result was new laws guaranteeing the civil rights of all citizens, regardless of their color.

Henry's eyes blaze with the memories of the human cost of that victory. Because 14-year-old Emmett Till, down from Chicago to visit relatives, allegedly whistled at a white woman, he was beaten, shot and then thrown into the Tallahatchie River in 1955. An all-white jury acquitted two white men of the killing. In 1963 Henry's N.A.A.C.P. associate, Medgar Evers, was gunned down in the driveway of his home in Jackson. His accused murderer, Byron de la Beckwith, was freed when all-white juries failed to reach a verdict. Now the state, seeking to atone for old wrongs, is trying to extradite him from Tennessee to try him again for the killing. Henry himself was arrested several times for his civil rights activities, and was once chained and shackled to a garbage truck to keep him from escaping. He glances up at the piece of tin that covers the hole in the ceiling where a bomb was thrown in 1964. All that is dim history now to most of the world.

But not to Henry.

He picks up the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, which used to trumpet the segregationist line but today champions racial harmony, and reads slowly out loud about George Bush's threatened veto of the new civil rights bill and about a school-board vote in Jackson along racial lines. "The battle of human rights and race relations is over," he says, "but while most people don't express overt racism, their actions manifest a prejudice. We've got to persevere."