The Latest Print Edition of Southern Changes is Now Available!

Fall 2015

In This Issue:

• Andrew Marannis' Profile of SEC Basketball Pioneer
• Lee Formwalt's History of the Southwest Georgia Freedom Struggle
• Julian Bond on the Masters of Augusta
• Andrew McDowd "Mac" Secrest, Heroic Southern Journalist
• The Battle over America's History Textbooks

 

To obtain your copy, contact the Southern Regional Council at charles.johnson@hklaw.com or click here. 

A University of Texas Faculty Member Reflects on the Recent Remarks of Justices Roberts & Scalia

Last week I traveled to Washington, D.C. with President Fenves, student leaders, and other supporters to hear oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the case of Fisher v. The University of Texas. It was a momentous day as we defended the educational benefits of diversity and our holistic admissions policy at our nation’s highest court.

Unfortunately, much of the great discourse was overshadowed by a set of remarks made by Justice Antonin Scalia. “There are those that contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.” Continuing, he would later assert that based upon a brief filed in the case, Black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas and that they come from lesser schools where they aren’t in classes that are “too fast for them.”

As you can imagine, and have likely read, his comments have drawn national attention. Although he makes no direct mention to it, his queries appear to allude to a concept known as the mismatch theory. The mismatch theory argues that non-academic preferences, such as extracurricular activity, socio-economic status, and race, harms the beneficiaries, as they would be better served to attend a less selective college on par with their academic performance. 

Although this theory on its face seems plausible, the research used to make the assertion has been invalidated by dozens of social scientists. And not only that, research has proven that in reality, the exact opposite is true – that minority students who attend more selective universities earn higher grades and leave school at lower rates than others.

On the UT campus, our Gateway Scholars Program is a perfect example of this achievement. The program, which is made up of approximately 600 students mostly from low-income and first generation college backgrounds, have an average first-year GPA of 3.24 with a first-year retention rate of 96.4%, higher than the university overall.

Furthermore our Intellectual Entrepreneurship pre-graduate internship program, which pairs undergraduates with a graduate student and faculty mentor, illustrates that succeeding at research and gaining admittance to highly selective graduate schools is also attainable for students from all backgrounds. In recent years, more than 75 African-American IE program alumni have enrolled and graduated from the likes of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford, schools no one would deem “less advanced.”

The brief Justice Scalia cites also makes mention that historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) produce a high percentage of African-Americans graduating with natural science and engineering degrees, theorizing the reason being that students are not grouped at the bottom of their classes, as they would be at more selective universities. This ignores the history of HBCUs, which have been graduating Black scientists and engineers since the late 1880s. Many students that are accepted into our nation’s most selective universities choose to attend Howard, Spelman, Prairie View A&M and others because they understand they’re entering into a legacy that no other research institute in the nation could match.

It also ignores the fact that the nation’s top 50 universities producing African-American science and engineering doctorates is comprised of either top research institutes or HBCUs – there is no “lesser school” in the list. And if you dig deeper, when examined proportionately, some of our nation’s top research institutes including Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, as well as UT Austin – which falls in the top 50 and has its own proud legacy of producing some of the nation’s prominent African-American scientists including Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephanie Wilson, the second African-American woman to go into space – lead the nation in producing African-American scientists, further debunking Justice Scalia’s statement.

Earlier in the hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts questioned the benefit of having a minority perspective in a physics class. Like the remarks made by Justice Scalia, not only are they incorrect, but I believe they can be chilling. If we begin asking our students to justify their presence, be they admitted due to academic performance, athletic or musical talent, or even superior civic leadership, we are failing them. As educators we cannot adhere to theories that conclude that our students would rather drop out or prefer less-advanced schools, rather than persevere, just as we cannot favor one student over another due to institutional bias. No matter how slow we roll forward, we must never roll back.

Dr. Gregory J. Vincent
Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement
Professor of Law
W. K. Kellogg Professor of Community College Leadership

Dr. Vincent is preparing a longer scholarly article to more fully address this issue.

The Last Innocents: The Civil Rights Movement and the Teaching of High School History

By James W. Loewen

From Southern Changes, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1995)

In 1974 Pantheon published the first revisionist textbook of state history in the United States, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, edited by Charles Sallis and myself. The Southern Regional Council awarded the book the 1976 Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction, but the State of Mississippi rejected it for use as a public school text. This led to the lawsuit Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed, et al., which we finally won in 1980. As a result, Mississippi was ordered to adopt our textbook for six years beginning in 1980.

Rewriting Mississippi history helped me see the problems in American history, for I came to realize, especially after moving to Vermont, that in history teaching as well as other areas, Mississippi in the 1960s merely exaggerated tendencies that unfortunately permeated the United States. Gradually I became aware that American history textbooks simply do not tell high school students what historians tell each other in their professional monographs and articles. For my most recent book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, I selected twelve commonly used high school history textbooks and spent much of ten years surveying what they tell students about our past.1

The distortions begin with what textbooks say about the Indians, continue as authors retell the familiar (though largely false) legends about Columbus and the Pilgrims, carry on through astonishing omissions about historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, and Woodrow Wilson, and even affect what history books predict for the future. Let me illustrate, however, with a topic which most readers of Southern Changes know intimately: the story of the Southern civil rights movement and its complex relationship with the federal government.

Between 1960 and 1968, the civil rights movement repeatedly appealed to the federal government for protection and enforcement of federal law, but governmental response was woefully inadequate, especially during the Kennedy administration. In Mississippi, movement offices displayed this bitter rejoinder:

There's a street in Itta Bena called Freedom. There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty. There's a department in Washington called Justice.

From their start investigating alleged Communists during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a long history of antagonism toward African Americans. Although the last four years of that administration saw more anti-black race riots than any other time in our history, agents focused on gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating blacks' civil rights. Hoover explained the Washington, D.C., anti-black race riot of 1919 as due to "the numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women."

In the beginning the FBI had a few black agents, but by the early 1960s the Bureau had none, although Hoover tried to claim it did by counting his chauffeurs.2 Many FBI agents in the South were white Southerners who cared what their white Southern neighbors thought of them and were themselves white supremacists.

Even in the 1960s, Hoover still thought the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a terrible error. Beginning in 1963, Hoover decided to try to destroy Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. With the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King's associates, bugged King's hotel rooms, and made tape recordings of his conversations with and about women. The FBI then passed on the lurid details, including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to Senator Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters, foundation administrators, and of course the president. In 1964, a high FBI administrator sent a tape recording of King having sex, along with an anonymous note suggesting that King kill himself, to the office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). When King went to Europe to claim the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI tried to sabotage receptions in his honor. Hoover called the civil rights leader "the most notorious liar in the country" and tried to prove that SCLC was infested with Communists. Hoover also passed along disinformation about the Mississippi Summer Project, organizations such as CORE and SNCC, and other civil rights leaders including Jesse Jackson. At the same time, the FBI refused to pass on to King information about death threats made against him and repeatedly claimed that protecting civil rights workers from violence was not its job.

In 1962, SNCC sued Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to force them to protect civil rights demonstrations. Desperate for ways to force the United States to care about enforcing the law in the Deep South, Mississippi civil rights workers Amzie Moore and Robert Moses then hit upon the 1964 "Freedom Summer" idea. The FBI finally opened an office in Jackson after the national outcry prompted by the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi. But later that summer, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City, agents tapped the phones of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther King, at the request of President Johnson.

After Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, students from a nearby black college demonstrated against an Orangeburg, South Carolina, bowling alley which refused to obey the law. State troopers fired on the demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight--many in the soles of their feet as they threw themselves on the ground to avoid the gunfire. The FBI responded not by helping to identify which officers fired in what became known as "the Orangeburg Massacre," but by falsifying information about the students to help the troopers with their defense.

Federal harassment of black organizations was not limited to Dixie. In California, Chicago, and elsewhere, the Bureau tried to eliminate the breakfast programs of the Black Panther organization, spread false rumors about venereal disease to break up Panther marriages, helped escalate conflict between other black groups and the Panthers, and helped Chicago police raid the apartment of Panther leader Fred Hampton and kill him in bed in 1969. The FBI warned black leader Stokely Carmichael's mother of a fictitious plot to murder him, prompting Carmichael to flee the United States.

The FBI also investigated pro-black faculty members at colleges across America. The institution at which I taught, Tougaloo College in Mississippi, was a special target: at one point agents in Jackson even proposed to "neutralize" the entire college, because among other things its students had sponsored "out-of-state militant Negro speakers, voter-registration drives, and African cultural seminars and lectures... [and] condemned various publicized injustices to the civil rights of Negroes in Mississippi." Obviously high crimes and misdemeanors!

The FBI's conduct and the federal leadership that tolerated and sometimes requested it are part of the legacy of the 1960s, alongside such positive achievements as the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. As historian Kenneth O'Reilly put it, "when the FBI stood against black people, so did the government."

How do American high school history textbooks treat this legacy?

First, they leave out everything bad the government ever did, as if it never happened. Textbooks do not even want to say anything bad about state governments: ten textbooks include part of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but nine of them censor his negative comments about the governments of Alabama and Mississippi.

Not only do high school text books fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during the period. In so doing, textbooks follow what we might call the Hollywood approach to civil rights. Hollywood's main feature film on the movement, you may remember, was Alan Parker's notorious Mississippi Burning. In that movie, the three civil rights workers get killed in the first five minutes; for the rest of its two hours the movie portrays not a single civil rights worker or black Mississippian over the age of twelve with whom the viewer could possibly identify. Instead, Parker concocts two fictional white FBI agents who play out the hoary "good cop/bad cop" formula and in the process, double-handedly solve the murders. In reality, everyone in east Mississippi knew for weeks who did it. Supporters of the civil rights movement, including Michael Schwerner's widow, Rita, and every white northern friend the movement could muster pressured Congress and the federal executive to force the FBI to open a Mississippi office and make bringing the murderers to justice a priority.3 No innovative police work was involved; the FBI finally apprehended the conspirators after giving one of them $30,000 to testify against the others.

American high school history textbooks offer a Parker-like analysis of the entire civil rights movement. Like the arrests of the Klansmen in Mississippi Burning, advances in civil rights simply result from good government. Federal initiative in itself "explains" milestones like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John F. Kennedy proposed them, Lyndon Baines Johnson passed them through Congress, and thus we have them today. Or, in the immortal passive voice of one textbook,American History, "Another civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act, was passed." Several textbooks even reverse the time order, putting the bills first, the civil rights movement later.4

Much of the civil rights movement consisted of various tactics to force the federal government to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments and other civil rights laws. Omitting this dynamic not only makes it impossible for students to see how citizens can get the government to act, but also makes for inaccurate history. Instead, textbooks tell us about the "outstanding leadership" of John F. Kennedy on civil rights. Challenge of Freedom provides a typical treatment:

President Kennedy and his administration responded to the call for racial equality. In June1963 the President asked for congressional action on far-reaching equal rights laws. Following the President's example, thousands of Americans became involved in the equal rights movement as well. In August 1963 more than 200,000 people took part in a march in Washington, D. C. (611-13)

This account reverses leader and led. In reality, JFK first tried to stop the march, then sent his vice-president to Norway to keep him away from it, because Kennedy felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro-civil rights. Even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a Kennedy partisan, notes dryly in his assessment of the administration that "the best spirit of Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency."

Similarly, when describing the attack on segregation that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Triumph of the American Nation makes no mention that African Americans were the plaintiffs and attorneys in Brown v. Board of Education or that prior cases also brought by the NAACP prepared the way. Today many black students think desegregation was something the federal government forced on the black community. They have no idea it was something the black community forced on the federal government.5 No wonder some young African Americans now view Brown as part of a government conspiracy to destroy black institutions! Meanwhile, young white Americans can reasonably infer that the federal government has been nice enough to blacks, so why does it need to do more?

However, it is boring to read about all the good things the government did on its own. Moreover, revelation after revelation of misconduct and deceit in the federal executive branch have shattered the trust of the American people, including high school students. Since they are unwilling to say bad things about the government, high school textbook authors come across as the last innocents left in America. When students encounter so little material in school about the bad things the government has done, especially when parents and the daily newspaper tell a different story, this "makes all education suspect," according to education researcher Donald Barr.

Nor can the servile approach of textbook authors to the government teach students to be effective citizens. Not one of the history books I surveyed educates students about the dynamics that should characterize the interrelationship between the people and their government in a democracy.6 Consequently none of the books tells how citizens can, and in fact have, forced the government to respond to them. According to Patrick Ferguson, many teachers only reinforce this passive image: his study of twelve randomly selected teachers of twelfth-grade American government courses found that about the only way they suggested that individuals could influence local or national governments was through voting.

By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance of the executive branch or the growth of the CIA, National Security Council, and other covert agencies into what some analysts call a fourth branch of government. By taking the government's side, they encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship. And by presenting government actions in a vacuum, textbooks mystify the complex interrelationship between the people and their leaders. All of this encourages students to throw up their hands in the belief that the government determines everything anyway, so why bother, especially if its actions are usually so benign. In this way, our American history textbooks minimize the potential power of the people and, despite their best patriotic efforts, take a stance that is overtly anti-democratic.

I hope to have persuaded you that the way history textbooks present the relationship between the civil rights movement and the government is incredibly incomplete and inaccurate, and that these errors have consequences for our society today. The same holds for how history textbooks treat Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus, the War of 1812, the My Lai massacre, and even the Gettysburg Address, as other chapters of Lies My Teacher Told Me demonstrate. Hopefully I have also persuaded you to put Lies My teacher Told Me in the hands of every teacher of American history in the South, so that knowledge of our past can become a tool for self-understanding and social change, rather than another source of the social problems facing our country.

Portions of this essay appear in slightly different form inLies My Teacher Told Me, and are reprinted here by permission of the author.

The twelve American history textbooks surveyed in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen:

Social Science Staff of the Educational Research Council of America, The American Adventure (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1975).

Ira Peck, Steven Jantzen, and Daniel Rosen, American Adventures (Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1987)

John A. Garraty with Aaron signer and Michael Gallagher, American History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

Thomas A Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1991)

Robert Green, Laura L. Becker, and Robert E. Coviello, The American Tradition (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1984).

Nancy Bauer, The American Way (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979).

Robert Sobel, Roger LaRaus, Linda Ann De Leon, and Harry P. Morris, The Challenge of Freedom (Mission Hills, Calif.: Glencoe, 1990).

Allen Kownslar and Donald B. Frizzle, Discovering American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974).

Carol Berkin and Leonard Wood, Land of Promise (Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman, 1983)

 Philip Roden, Robynn Greer, Bruce Kraig, and Betty Bivins, Life and Liberty (Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman, 1984).

Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti, Triumph of the American Nation (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).

James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, The United States--A History of the Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981).

James W. Loewen is a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont and an expert in voting rights issues. His previous books include the Smith Award-winning Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with co-author Charles Sallis) and The Truth About Columbus, a "subversively true" poster book which also resulted from his research on American history textbooks.

Notes

1. Lies My Teacher Told Me (The New Press, 1995, 384 pages)lists and describes these textbooks.

2. Statements of fact are footnoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me. This paragraph, for example, relies on Kenneth O'Reilly, "Racial Matters" and Charles Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence.

3. Meanwhile, Hoover tapped Schwerner's father's telephone to see if he might be a communist!

4. One textbook, The United States--A History of the Republic, does draw a connection between the Selma march and the Voting Rights Act: "President Johnson pressed for further civil rights legislation after the Reverend James J. Reeb, a black civil rights worker, was shot during a voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama." Reeb was a white Unitarian minister who had come to Selma to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march. Later A History of the Republic offers one of the fuller accounts of the civil rights movement, but other that this half sentence about Reeb, places it afterthe legislation it influenced.

5. Jury selection in the 1994 retrial of Byron de la Beckwith for his 1963 murder of Medgar Evers revealed that young black Mississippians "Know little of Evers' struggle for racial equality".

6. In two vignette-chapters on the Montgomery movement and Martin Luther King, American Adventurestell how the civil rights movement pressured Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but in its vignette-chapter on Lyndon Johnson,Adventures gives the credit to LBJ and Robert Kennedy.

A Journalist of Heart, Mind and Courage

Andrew McDowd "Mac" Secrest
September 15, 1923 - April 27, 2010
An Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

By Tom Scheft

As the “voice” of his newspaper, as the conscience of his community, his state, his country, and even the world, as a federal mediator for civil rights, Mac Secrest chose roles that—literally and figuratively—set him apart. 

Part I

When you meet someone initially and know little about him or her, you can’t possibly speculate on how important this person may be to you, how much of an influence he or she may have on you. So it was with Mac Secrest for me. It was 1977. All I knew was that he had joined the English faculty at North Carolina Central University. He had been the editor and owner of a small weekly newspaper in South Carolina, and he was heading up the new Media-Journalism Program. He was going to train volunteer faculty to be journalism teachers, whether they had any newspaper experience or not. I was one of the volunteers.

           

When he entered the room to address his faculty recruits, he sported an engaging smile. He was tall and trim, was dressed in blazer and tie, and sported a well-groomed head of sandy-colored, gracefully graying hair. I said, “Hi, Dr. Secrest,” and he immediately replied, “It’s Mac. Call me Mac.” Clearly, in those brief seconds I experienced a positive feeling about the man—a genuineness that would be confirmed again and again and again throughout our years of work and friendship.

           

As he talked to us about his plans for the program, I felt at ease. I am, at heart, what I call a “healthy skeptic,” but in a matter of minutes I watched him begin to win the trust of his colleagues. He was, first and foremost, an astonishing conversationalist—juxtaposing seriousness and insightful examples with witticisms, erudite quotations (sometimes rendered in French), and even contemporary slang. His conversational panache was impressive.     

           

I remained amazed by—but cautious of—his cheerful openness and intellect. I was guarded, because here was my new “boss.” Like many people, I had learned that no matter how nice bosses may be in the beginning, eventually many feel the need to “show you who’s boss.” Inevitably, underlings need to be put in their place. With Mac, that day never came.

           

While he was the director of the program, Mac made it clear that we were colleagues, and he valued our expertise. He explained he had sold his newspaper because he wanted no part in journalism’s move to computerization, and he promptly put Tom Evans and me in charge of developing the new electronic newsroom that was to be the hands-on, production part of the program. Evans and I relished that immediate trust and responsibility.

           

Evans was certainly deserving of trust. He was a seasoned English teacher equipped with full professorial beard and a quick, bright mind. But me? I cast a different impression—a short, stocky sort with wild, longish hair. I looked like a product of the ’60s, which I was. This “look” was (and continues to be) off-putting for many folks. However, Mac gave off no initial sense of reservation. Nor did he ever.

           

This acceptance was no accident. I would come to learn that he was—indeed—a man who gave everyone the benefit of the doubt, preferring to judge people, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. advised, based on the content of their character. Years later in 2004, when reading Mac’s autobiography, I would be reminded—again and again—that Mac was someone who believed in people and did not impulsively judge books by their covers.

           

One example of this is Jim Crawford, who worked for Mac at his newspaper, The Cheraw Chronicle. In the 1950s, Crawford, a Black man and a linotype operator, had come down with tuberculosis and undergone medical treatment before moving to Cheraw and attempting to find a job. In his book Mac says matter-of-factly that he was “in great need” of a linotype operator, but that simple statement is followed by a quote from one of Crawford’s friends:

Crawford had to face a double stigma in the workplace. He ease a recovered tubercular patient, which scared a lot of people, and he was a black man. In the 1950s newspapers publishers in South Carolina didn’t hire black linotype operators. But Secrest didn’t pay any attention to stigmas. Jim had a health certificate. He was proficient in his trade. Race didn’t matter. He hired Jim, paid him the prevailing wage, and just saved his life.

I don’t remember when I first learned that Mac had been a significant person in the America’s battle for civil rights. I had no idea he had been a crusading journalist—a successful one, whose editorials were reprinted in newspapers across the nation, including The Washington Post and The New York Times; no idea he’d taken on the Ku Klux Klan; no idea he had written award-winning editorials—such as the 1958 Sidney Hillman Award for best editorial on civil rights and racial issues and his 1967 denouncing of Sen. Strom Thurmond, “A Profile in Extremism”; no idea he had strategized with Andrew Young and Dr. King; and no idea he’d been a racial mediator for the government’s Community Relations Service, which included his being stationed in Selma, Alabama in 1965 in the midst of its historic turmoil, and also serving from 1964-1966 in Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

           

Mac never initiated talk about his work with the Civil Rights Movement, but things would pop up. The first time I remember that occurring was when a group of faculty was sitting around and someone mentioned comedian/activist Dick Gregory. I noted that his autobiography had a huge impact on me when I was 13 years old. Mac followed with: “I helped integrate a Holiday Inn with him one night during the ’60s.” He said it as though he were announcing the time of day.

           

I sat up straight and exclaimed: “You know Dick Gregory? You did what with him?”

           

Mac nodded. “We helped integrate the first Holiday Inn in Alabama. Interesting man. That was quite a while ago.”

           

On another occasion a group of faculty and students had informally gathered in the English Department newsroom. The conversation turned to the Ku Klux Klan, since we were preparing to bring the director of Klanwatch, a program sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to speak at NCCU. The discussion focused on the ruthlessness and intimidating practices of the Klan. One of my students, an older woman, had lived in a town with a significant Klan presence, and she talked about her childhood and having to routinely hide under her bed on the weekends when drunken Klansmen would ride into the Black section of town and fire bullets into homes.

           

Mac spoke up: “As an editor, I had to deal with the Klan a number of times.”

           

The room got very quiet.

           

I remember stammering, “You took on the Klan?”

           

“Yes. Quite a bit.”

           

“What did you do?” I asked.

           

“Well, I wrote editorials against their ideas and the things they did.” He paused briefly. “One time I actually covered one of their meetings.” He explained that he had “self-invited” himself to cover a Klan function—just walked up on the platform “in a barren, wind-swept cotton field one winter night two miles across the Pee Dee River into Marlboro County.” He “recorded the proceedings,” which included a “harangue of me, The Chronicle, and ‘wishy-washy’ local civic leaders.”

           

We sat there spellbound. Then he smiled. “One time … I stacked wood for a bonfire in front of my house. I stood beside it holding an unlit match. We took a picture and ran it on the front page of The Chronicle. Underneath the picture I ran a caption that told the Klan I’d already assembled the bonfire. I’d already done their work for them. I even had a match for them. I offered them an open invitation. All they needed to do was light the bonfire during the day in their robes but without their hoods on.”

           

He paused and I stammered again, “What happened?”

           

“Nothing … I knew they wouldn’t do it. I was just calling their bluff.”

           

“Weren’t you scared?” I was frightened just thinking about it.

           

Mac thought for a moment. “No,” he said, slowly shaking his head. Then he grinned. “I guess I was just young enough and dumb enough not to be scared.”

           

Many years later I would ask Mac’s wife, Ann, about the bonfire story. “Weren’t you scared?” I said. Ann stood there, her mouth in Mona-Lisa-mode. She shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t respond.

           

Little by little I would pull out bits and pieces from Mac’s history as an activist. He would render things calmly without much elaboration, and I would relentlessly prod him: “Then what happened?” … “How did you feel?” … “Were you scared?”

           

Here’s my point: It’s one thing to “do the right thing” in a difficult situation. It’s quite another to do it when your life may be at stake.

Mac Secrest could have easily made his contribution safely. Born into a life of privilege, Mac could have restricted his focus to that of his family and friends. Why risk one’s life? And yet, he chose a community and took on a role at a time and place in which many of his “critics” had no reservation in taking the law into their own hands:

As the crisis deepened through the years 1956-1964, I occasionally received unsigned hate mail and anonymous telephone calls. Signs reading “For Sale” and “Moving Out” appeared in the front yard. Occasionally pellets peppered our living room picture window. The threats, plus ample evidence of violence against people and property elsewhere, prompted me to take certain precautions. I’d place a penny on the window of my car or tie a thread from hood to bumper. If the penny had dropped or the thread was broken, I’d check to make sure I hadn’t been booby-trapped.

            

For those unaware of the tumultuous zeitgeist of Southern racial politics during that period, Mac notes that many of his enemies had very different methods of redress for people, like him, who used the pen rather than the sword. In 1957, he was one of the writers who contributed to a book of essays, South Carolinians Speak: A Moderate Approach to Race Relations. In discussing that book in his memoir, Mac’s tone appears sobering and haunting:

Public reaction [to the book] was mixed. One contributor’s house was fire-bombed. Another was intimidated into recantation. Some withdrew into silence. Others, including me, just hung in there. So my concern about car bombs and booby traps was not entirely misplaced.

           

           

Imagine what it must be like to live with the daily possibility that you or your family could face death. Why not simply avoid that by moving … anywhere out of the line of fire, away from the threat? How do you not do that?

Next Issue: In Part Two, Mac’s children, David and Molly, talk about growing up in Cheraw, S.C., and discuss being members of a family set apart. The character and personality of Mac Secrest is further explored.

Reference

           

Secrest, Andrew McDowd. (2004). Curses and Blessings: Life and Evolution in the 20th Century South. Bloomington, Indiana: Author House.