Jonathan C. Hamilton, “They Did This to Us: A Sage of Race and Outsiders in the Rural South,” Documentary Film Script (1991)

They Did This to Us is a documentary film focused on race and outsiders in the rural South a quarter of a century after the famous Freedom Summer and most intense phase of the Civil Rights era in the United States. This documentary portrait of an archetypal Southern town’s past, prejudices, and present is an interplay of media exploits, civil rights history, current race relations, and the character of the rural South. It features a combination of interviews with diverse citizens, archival footage, and historical research.

“Tomorrow’s Headlines Today”

Outside of West Point, Mississippi, to the Northeast, an old windmill keeps watch.  It is an adopted symbol of the community; and like the locale it represents, it has weathered much history.  Slightly rusting with age, it still swirls in the sun, as wind eases past, across green fields, South, and into town.

West Point is located fifty miles South of Tupelo in Clay County.  The population of some 8,800 people is roughly half black and half white.  Most everyone lives within earshot of the hourly strikes of the clock at city hall.

Beneath the clock, the Confederate monument, erected in 1907, stands guard over the town park at Main and Commerce Streets.  Until recently, freight trains still interrupted Main Street at midday.  Some of the trains now have been diverted around the city limits, where an eight mile strip of Alternate State Highway 45 will soon become the first four-lane into town, including a new bridge over Tibbee Bottom.

Off the highway, near Stafford’s Big Burger and past Ray’s Rent-A-Movie, is the local Wal-Mart Discount City.  Looming across the parking lot, a building that formerly housed the one-screen cinema has been converted into the “independent, fundamentalist, missionary” Baptist Tabernacle.  Film posters have been replaced by signs proclaiming the gospel.  They offer “Tomorrow’s Headline’s Today:  Men, Women, and Children Vanished by the Thousands in Holy Rapture.”

Most churches in town are more conventional, serving as cornerstones of local tradition.  And during the workweek, a large portion of the town labors at Bryan Foods, a homegrown meat packing company founded in the Thirties.

While Bryan and the Baptist Tabernacle can only be claimed by West Point, they represent the broader culture of the rural South, and West Point is, in many ways, an archetype of the rural Southern town.  But residents claim that one thing distinguishes this town from all others, and it can be found at the local high school on the edge of town in McAllister Field on autumn Friday nights.

“They Literally Live Lyrics”

After winning one state title in the early Eighties, from 1987 to 1989, the West Point High School Green Wave went on to victory in three consecutive 4-A state football championships, leading the local paper to declare the town as “the football capital of Mississippi.” West Point High graduate Spanky Bruce is now the editor of the Daily Times Leader, where he got his start in journalism covering football.

SPANKY BRUCE:  I compare our football program here now to at least a fairly large college program in number of participants and size of boys and all.  I doubt there’s any program in the country that could claim that kind of a record.

In 1990, the spirit of football excellence in West Point attracted the attention of ESPN, the cable television sports channel.  At the start of the season, West Point awaited its team’s appearance in the national limelight.  Bubba Davis is the head coach behind the Green Wave’s success.

BUBBA DAVIS:  I thought [the ESPN coverage] would be a good chance to give some publicity to the boys who had worked so hard to attain those championships, and I thought it would be good for the community.

Three crew members from ESPN’s Scholastic Sports America program came to film the feature.  Wayne King is Sports Editor of the Daily Times Leader.

WAYNE KING:  From the impression the ESPN crew gave them when they were here, they thought the story was going to be completely positive.  The story should have been, ‘Here’s this little town that’s produced teams that played in state championships.’ But then, some patron at the private school, Oak Hill, had called up there and said, ‘You know we’ve got two teams in this town.’

In addition to West Point public schools there is a private school, Oak Hill Academy, whose football team had also achieved recent success.  David Glasgow is Headmaster of Oak Hill.

DAVID GLASGOW:  Oak Hill had been in the playoffs the last year, and they thought that was great that we have two teams in one town, and they wanted to know if they could come out and cover us, too.  And we told them sure, we’d be glad.

BUBBA DAVIS:  They said that they had never been treated so nice.  They said they felt like the Southern hospitality they had heard about all these years, that they had finally found it in West Point.  The people that treated them real well felt good about it, until what we saw, what we all saw.

SPANKY BRUCE:  Banjo music playing like something out of the turn of the century playing in the background and you expect to see a rebel charge of some kind.  They had “Dixie” going, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, here we go again.”

ESPN NARRATOR:  In West Point, Mississippi, they don’t just sing the old song of the South, they literally live the lyrics.

Visions of a feature on football successes turned sour as the specter of school segregation reared its ugly head in front of a national audience.

ESPN:  If you’re a young man in West Point, Mississippi, you come to a crossroads.  Now, you can either hang a left and go to the public high school, or you can take a right and end up at Oak Hill Academy.  When you size up the two schools, their success is the only similarity.  Over half of the 9000 people who live in West Point, Mississippi are black, and all their children attend public school.  Not one has ever attended Oak Hill Academy.

A sense of betrayal turned the town’s excitement turned to anger.

DAVIS:  15, 16, 17 year old kids:  they were thrilled to death to think that they were going to be featured on national TV.  It didn’t take them long to realize what was going on either, that this wasn’t going to honor them, or the three teams before them.  This was going to be a black-white issue, a public- private school issue.

Chris Jefferson is quarterback at West Point High School.

CHRIS JEFFERSON:  We didn’t know how to answer them.  I thought they’d be coming in to ask about how we prepared for season, not all that about combining schools and how I feel about two teams in West Point.

ESPN:  The advantages of combining two talented teams is obvious, so why are there two teams in such a small town?

KING:  Nobody was expecting that question.  I had done my homework on what West Point had accomplished in the playoffs, and Oak Hill.  Then, they asked me should the two schools be combined.  I just didn’t expect it out of this type of crew that goes around publicizing the positive aspects of high schools and student athletes all over the country.  Television impact is just so strong that it aroused the emotions more than a print story that used exactly the same words all the way through would have done.

Oak Hill Academy Head Coach Tommy Nester and Quarterback Cody Maharrey were similarly surprised.  Their complaints were directed beyond the athletic arena to the media itself.

TOMMY NESTER:  A lot of what they asked, most of it doesn’t get on TV.  They go through and pick out what they want to put on TV.

CODY MAHARRAY:  I really didn’t expect what they came down here and did to us.  I was kind of disappointed in them doing that to us, and to West Point.  We were all sitting there watching it when it came on, and it was about us playing them and all the racial differences.

Later an All-American center for the university of Mississippi, eighteen year West Point Mayor Kenny Dill started his football career at the public high school.

KENNY DILL:  Certainly the sensationalism of centering in on one circumstance here in Mississippi that’s not favorable for anybody, I think it’s sort of put out of context.

DAVID GLASGOW:  They can force a lot of persuasion on the general public by the way they report the news.  We had no idea ESPN would go back and report what they saw down here.  I don’t really think the people saw a true picture of West Point, Mississippi.

People from all perspectives in town complained about the exploitative media, but it became more than just that.  West Point native Robert Smith has taught history in the public school system for 21 years.  As he explains, the Connecticut-based ESPN crew did not just represent the media.  Some townspeople ultimately identified the crew as another wave of Northern outsiders plowing its way into the heart of the South.  Robert Smith was active in the civil rights movement and now teaches history at West Point High.

ROBERT SMITH:  What concerned me most about the media, was from the standpoint of saying, this is a better view, something that will keep Northerners thinking that people in Mississippi are at each other’s throats, and that nothing has changed.  Mississippi has become the whipping boy for the world, it seems, as though nobody else has made any mistakes, or just the South, and it’s all right to beat up on them because they’re Southerners.  Like the Civil War still going on, and the North is still not satisfied, it says, “I must defeat you again.”

“Bear by the Tail”

For white Southerners, resentment of Northern outsiders is rooted in the perception of a lost cause waged by their forbears.  Long-time West Point resident Red Harpole explains in his book of Civil War tales gathered from past generations of white Southerners.

B. C. “RED” HARPOLE:  Contrary to what is usually thought, slavery was not popular with most Southerners.  Everyone knew they had a “bear by the tail.” They couldn’t hold on indefinitely, nor could they let go.  Yet, almost every Southerner resented ‘outsiders’ who knew nothing about the South telling him how to handle his problem.

HARPOLE:  They wanted to make everything good for the Negroes in the South to keep them out of their part of the country in the North and the East, and that was the general thought.  That part of it was the sore part of it, that they were going a round-about way to accomplish what they wanted.

Red Harpole’s book is about the Civil War, but his comments are about outsiders participating in a battle that emerged in the South one hundred years later:  the Civil Rights Movement.  After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education declaration that “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” white leaders conjured ways to avoid the Supreme Court mandate.

In the early Sixties, as integration continued to evade Southern blacks, the state erupted in conflict.  At the University of Mississippi at Oxford, two lay dead when a riot pitting locals against federal troops accompanied the enrollment of Ole Miss’ first black student, James Meredith.  Less than a year later, Meredith’s legal counsel, state NAACP leader Medgar Evers, was shot and killed in Jackson.

With Meredith and Evers, Mississippi earned the reputation as the most defiant of the Southern states.  Movement organizers responded with a plan to open the closed society of Mississippi.  In June 1964, whites leaders warned of the state’s impending “invasion.” West Point native James Hull grew up in the midst of the movement.

JAMES HULL:  The invasion came to West Point, and it was received here the same way it was received everywhere else, with acrimony and rejection.  Nobody wanted anybody coming to their hometowns and telling them how to do things.

Most volunteers were white college students from the Northeast who were under the auspices of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

STUDENT VOLUNTEER:  I believe my freedom is wrapped up with the freedom of every other American.

JAMES HULL:  People saw those students as rabble-rousing, knee-jerk hippie communists who were trying to come in and raise hell, and why don’t they go back home.  So they weren’t welcome at all.

John Jackson was the first president of the West Point NAACP chapter.

JOHN JACKSON:  I remember from Williamstown, Massachusetts, Williams College.  We had students from that school.  And of course, at that time I lived in this little house with a breezeway, and after I got back from the service we made that breezeway into a little room, and so they slept on the floor in the back of that little house.  They came in, and most people in the city were afraid to let them come into their homes.

“There’s Going to Be Bloodshed”

Fear was not unwarranted.  Just as Freedom Summer began, three volunteers disappeared south of West Point in between Philadelphia and Meridian.  Weeks later, the dead bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were dug from the red clay earth.

JAMES HULL:  When we found out that those three guys were actually killed, there was a wave of emotions, and the first emotion that I remember hit me was shame, because I didn’t believe it at first, then there was sadness, because they were dead, and then there was fear.

JOHN JACKSON:  None of us felt safe.  But we knew that if something happened, the media would pick it up.  We wouldn’t get attention on our own, but these students brought a lot of attention with them.

JACKSON:  Otherwise, they would have blown us apart without any hesitation.

Because of the high risk of deadly violence towards blacks, the FBI placed informers in the local Ku Klux Klan and segregationist White Citizens Council, but area native Charlotte Valentine was not afraid.

CHARLOTTE VALENTINE:  I got involved when a lot of students came down from New York.  And they wanted to launch a registration drive, you might say.  And they wanted to rent a little house we had right out between here and the church to do their work, and so we did it.  And we really weren’t thinking it was going to cause so much trouble when they came, but we knew all along that it wasn’t so favorable to the whites.  And of course, that’s when we got a lot of problems, and we got a lot of threats, you know, and riding up and down the road at night.  They burned a cross up by the church.  We had this house shot in one Saturday night, about two o’clock I’d say it was.  And they had the accommodation of the sheriff, because he was in that car, too.  And the next morning I was getting my breakfast ready, and my daughter said, “Mother, the sheriff’s here.” He was at the door and told us what was going to happen if we didn’t get these people out of the county.  And I told him that was his job, to get them out himself.  “Well, you’re going to get killed, you’re going to get killed.” Well, I didn’t think too much about that, “there’s going to be bloodshed, if y’all don’t get them out.” And I said, “It’s going to be some of yours, too.  It’s going to be some of yours, too.” And then they started letting the stocks out all the time.  My son would come and say, “Momma, they done cut the fence in three different places and the cows is all over the road.” He would tell it every morning.  And the next two weeks they came through again, shooting, but they shot up at the house that those Freedom Riders were working in.  And after that they burnt that house down.  And after our house got shot into we put our mattress up against the wall to protect us, and we slept on the floor, and kept on doing what we were doing.  We were determined to let them stay there until they did some of what they came here to do.

JAMES HULL:  Voter registration, boycotts, and all is one thing.  There were other very specific things that needed to be done that they did.  For instance, here in West Point, half the town was unpaved, and everything was paved up to the old Fifth Street high school, then the half that was unpaved was in the black community.  So these students counted street lights and unpaved streets and showed what needed to be done.  These were specific things that needed to be done.

Student volunteers were back in 1965, organizing freedom schools to supplement the education of young blacks, whose schools were funded at a small fraction of that designated for their white counterparts.  In late July, the Freedom Schools spurred a pivotal event of the movement in West Point.

JAMES HULL:  Beasley High School was a predominately black school at the time.  There was a high level of militancy at the school, simply because the principal and teachers believed in and understood self-sufficiency and collective organization; that’s where Ms. Charlotte Valentine is from.

CHARLOTTE VALENTINE:  My children was there.  They were boycotting the school.  They was having what you call a freedom school down at the church.  They were boycotting for a lot of reasons, they wanted a science lab, and a gym, and I don’t know what all.  We needed books, because when it came time for new books, the white school would get new books and then pass theirs on along to Beasley.  And so we decided that we would boycott it.  And every morning they would go, but they would go to the school, they would stop there at the church.  And they would do freedom songs, and draw, and they would not go to school like normally but would go to the church.  And so the sheriff finally came down and too a busload of them off to town, locked them up.  And my husband and I were the ones to go with them to initiate things, and then we were the ones to go and get them out.

The arrest of 44 Beasley students spawned a public protest and the subsequent arrest of 45 student volunteers and local blacks.

JAMES HULL:  I was one of them who was thrown in the jail that next day.  This was one of the times that we were collected up and thrown in the West Point jail and had mace thrown on us.

JOHN JACKSON:  I was the one that, whenever they got into jail, I was the one that would come down and bail them out.

As area officers searched the students at the local jail, one patrolman fell dead of a heart attack.

JOHN JACKSON:  I remember the guy, and he was kind of fat and he had a heart attack and died.  And they had arrested some students, and one of them happened to be the son of a senator or congressman from Wisconsin.

Michael Reuss was arrested for manslaughter after the patrolman fell dead.  When news surfaced that Reuss was the son of a member of Congress, the charges were dropped.  The Beasley incident was indicative of the Freedom Summers, garnering national media coverage.

Only 45 blacks in the area were registered to vote prior to that summer, and those registrations had often taken eight or more attempts.  After the Civil Rights Voting Act passed, 700 black voters were soon registered in Clay County.  But the progress fueled by the Freedom Summers was disrupted by complications within the movement.

Students were frayed by their treatment in West Point.  They complained about being regularly run off of the road.  At the now vacant Ritz Theater downtown, the white Northern students were harassed, and could not sit in the same rows as other whites.  The students were also frustrated with local blacks.

JAMES HULL:  A white kid probably came here looking for immediate change, wanting to see voting, and business, and integration, and he probably after a few months got frustrated and said I want to see some change not all of this slow change.  “Whoa, man, I came down here from Wisconsin and Maine and Massachusetts to be a part of this just to see you guys lowball it.  I came down here thinking we were going to see some action and ready to lay my life on the line and you’re not doing anything.”

The black community concurrently questioned the role of the outside volunteers.  Most student volunteers stayed only a few months, and most blacks never adjusted to the student presence.

JOHN JACKSON:  People had a tendency to be afraid of whites that came to the area, since they identified them with other whites.

JAMES HULL:  We’re talking about at first dislike because of fear.  That was mainly middle aged blacks who weren’t comfortable with the particular brand of radicalism these students were bringing in.  And the second reason was resentment because of usurpation.  Young blacks said if something was going to be done and they were going to do it, not some white boy from Wisconsin, And this was at the time not just of the start of black militancy, but also black nationalism.

In 1967, Mary Holmes College, a historically black college in West Point, attracted Stokely Carmichael of SNCC.  Carmichael had coined the concept of “black power,” shifting the SNCC agenda away from reliance on white students.

HULL:  With Stokely coming in, that was the thing to say, don’t try to come into my house and clean it up; go into your own house and try to clean it up as to its own racist attitudes.

Some student volunteers were still in West Point in 1967, and they continued to spur controversy.  They were often aided by local black teenagers like Bo McFarland.

HULL:  An excellent basketball player, one of the first six feet five inch guys I ever knew, but the movement was his thing, and he was missing for two or three days, and we eventually found him with his car collapsed in a creek, and there was no doubt of what had happened.  He had been caught, and he had been killed, and there was no doubt in our minds.

George Bess, a black SNCC volunteer, died alongside McFarland.  Local whites doubted the tales of martyrdom, and some blacks conceded that the deaths may have been purely accidental.  The controversy reflected the confusion which had always surrounded the movement’s dependence on outsiders.  The intruders whites had always hated were left behind by the black self-reliance which had always marked the movement in West Point.

HULL:  Everybody that really assisted in the mood of change and the action of change in Clay County was from Clay County.  That was very fortunate.  CCCDP was an umbrella organization which had on its board of directors members of every segment of the community.  There were people who would have been considered at the time very conservative.  They were moderate in their thinking, and there were people who were very radical in their thought.  Those people were basically represented on the CCCDP Board of Directors, and Mr. John Jackson was a member of the Clay County Development Program board.

JACKSON:  My daughters were among the first to go to the interracial schools, and that’s when I began to get these calls.  Somebody called and told me they were going to blow my brains out.  So I went to the local hardware, Kellogg’s, to get a shotgun, and the man said, “You going hunting?” And I said no, I ain’t got time to hunt.  “Well, you getting it for your son?” No, he’s not old enough.  “Well, you, what...” I said, “I’m getting me a shotgun.”

“We Have Reached the Millennium”

Over a decade after the Brown decision, as the role of student volunteers faded from the scene, West Point’s schools had grudgingly begun the trying process of integration.  Under a plan called “freedom of choice,” blacks were allowed to enter white schools, but few felt comfortable doing so, and no real sense of equality emerged.  Sylvester Harris was one of the first blacks to attend and graduate from West Point High School.

SYLVESTER HARRIS:  Integration started here in 1966, and they started out with freedom of choice.  That’s when we went out to the high school, in ‘66.  I was just trying to make it, not worried about being black or not or being discriminated against, but trying to make it.  So, even me changing to West Point High School wasn’t seen as a racial issue, but as a way to get a better education.

To a bloc of resistant whites, though, the enrollment of a few black students - like Harris - in the white public schools meant the unthinkable:  The daily mixing of their white children with blacks.  Mississippi author Melany Neilson describes in her book about growing up as a white child in Mississippi during the integration era.

MELANY NEILSON:  It happened to fall on the last day of school when I was in the third grade, in May 1967.  The entire afternoon I watched the clock, perched directly over the head of my teacher.  “Children,” she said, “I have some news for you.” She paused, watching us in our desks, silently waiting.  “Next year colored children are going to go to school with you.  We expect only one or two will be in each class. . . . But that doesn’t mean anything’s going to change.” One afternoon in July 1967, Daddy carried me past Schoolhouse Bottom.  There in a clearing were two bulldozers, a large pile of dirt, and a naked concrete slab.  “That’s where you’re going to school,” Daddy said.  Everything had changed.

The White Citizens’ Councils published a booklet called, “How to Start a Private School,” and in 1966, a group of white West Point residents organized to do just that.  By 1967, Oak Hill Academy was in session for grades one through eight.

DAVID GLASGOW:  The reasons for their starting, I’ve always been told and I’ve told this one, too, that it was to maintain a good academic school, to where you could have a good academic school.  And, maybe moreso where the parents and the local people could have more say-so in their school system than maybe you could have in some other school settings.

KENNY DILL:  A number of them did come about around the state that were out of fear.  A lot of this was federally mandated, and they didn’t feel like they were going to have a lot of choice, and that it was really going to destroy something that was important to them and so a lot of them formed.

JAMES HULL:  Well, as life would have it, the public school system did deteriorate.  The quality of education did go down, and it wasn’t because of the presence of the black students.  And so more people started sending their kids to the academy.

SPANKY BRUCE:  In our case, Stacy was starting to school at the time of desegregation orders, and she was starting to school at the time of what was called the split shifts, and there wasn’t room for all the black and white students, which the courts are concerned with that type of thing, and so we sent Stacy to Oak Hill.  All three of my children went to Oak Hill.  We have never looked upon ourselves as opponents of the public schools.  We were pleased with the education they were getting out there, and it was never a conscious decision to avoid blacks, and you can draw whatever conclusions from that you want to.

As the Sixties came to a close, Oak Hill expanded through the twelfth grade when federal courts forced local schools to surpass “freedom of choice” in favor of wholesale integration.  That lack of “choice” was the breaking point for some residents.

NEWS ARCHIVES:  WALTER CRONKITE:  The new, fully integrated school court mandates in Mississippi occurred in 20 of 30 ordered districts, and officially compliance had been complete, but many whites have fled the public schools for newly created private schools.

NEWS:  GOVERNOR JOHN BELL WILLIAMS:  The moment we have resisted for fifteen years, seeking to avoid, at least to delay, is at hand.  We have reached the millennium.  Mississippi’s children, black and white, have been denied the freedom to choose their schools by an arbitrary edict of the United States supreme Court.

NEWS:  ANCHORMAN:  Despite all the recent turmoil, integration in the South has occurred with very little of the expected violence.  The only real violence had been in West Point, Mississippi.

On the eve of full-scale integration, in January 1970, a small bomb blew out the windows at the local courthouse, and the Clay County Community Development Center, the heart of civil rights activity, was burned.

NEWS:  JOHN BUFFINGTON:  I absolutely do believe it is the fault of the white racist community which has so often ignored the needs and demands of the black community that affect the lives of local blacks.

John Buffington, a longtime leader of the area movement, went on to run for mayor later that year.  Despite the initial violence, West Point’s integration process had gone more smoothly than expected.  The loss of hundreds of white students to the academy was overshadowed by mass white defections in other parts of Mississippi.  The New York Times even ran an article in August proclaiming:  “Mississippi town has changed and a black runs for mayor.”

“The Smiling-ist Man”

The supposedly changed atmosphere was shattered days before John Buffington’s runoff election for mayor.  Johnny Thomas was a Buffington campaign worker.

JAMES HULL:  Mr. Thomas was actually transportation driver.  I was telling you, CCCDP had a van with which they took elderly people to the doctor and the store.  And he was going home one evening, filling his car up with gas.  There is a corner out here called four corners as you go out of time, the last intersection in town.  Main Street and Eshman.  On the Southwest corner there is a car lot.  Well, the incident happened on the store at the southeast corner.

SPANKY BRUCE:  A white man named Stanley got in an argument with him and shot him in front of a bunch of black kids, in cold blood.

JAMES HULL:  Man walked right up to him, shot him, said, “You that CCCDP nigger.” And Johnnie was just the smiling-ist man, and he said, “Yeah.” He shot him dead in the face, man.

JOHN JACKSON:  Johnny was just a worker like most of the civil rights workers, and he had a big family.

Daily Times Leader editor Henry Harris complained about the national press attention garnered by the murder, writing that the Northern media had once again fallen back on its racial stereotypes of the South.  Judge Woodrow Brand set a low bail for Seth Stanley after local Dr. T. R. Powell explained that the defendant had “been suffering from emotional and nervous conditions since his childhood when he was kicked in the left temple by a mule.” Stanley was 45 years old at the time.

JOHN JACKSON:  There were blacks that were there when it happened but were afraid to testify.  Like one guy said he saw him after he was shot, but wouldn’t say he saw it happen, and he wouldn’t say it, and of course the Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan were threatening people.

Police claimed that the gun used in the killing was lost evidence.  One year after the murder, Stanley was acquitted by an all-white jury.

“Still Running from Integration”

Two decades after the Sixties, the ESPN sports crew came to West Point and unknowingly ended up at the same crossroads where Johnny Thomas was murdered.  They indirectly posed the same question as the murder itself:  Has anything really changed?

ESPN NARRATOR:  “You come to a crossroads.”

Some residents think that ESPN identified the last major holdout from the changes wrought during the civil rights movement:  Oak Hill Academy.  Green Wave Coach Bubba Davis is an outspoken critic of the private school system.

BUBBA DAVIS:  They’re there for exactly the reason that I think was portrayed in that segment they put on.  They wanted it to look like there’s a rebel flag, and here’s these white folks still fighting the war, to see if we can’t keep these blacks in chains, and there’s nothing else to keep our children away from them.

SPANKY:  We gave them what they wanted, what they were looking for when they came down here, and that’s our fault.

WAYNE KING:  They just stated the obvious facts.

JAMES HULL:  ESPN didn’t show anything it didn’t find.

DAVID GLASGOW:  They did ask me, it was just unbelievable that we would have two schools in such small a town.  And I said, you know, it’s just because there was a desire by a group of people in this community to want to have this school.  And they started with it back in 1966, and it’s just grown to what it is today on its, I hope on its academic standards.

BUBBA DAVIS:  You know, they’ll tell you that they think they’re getting a better education by being in a private school.

Pete O’Shea is serving in his third term as president of the board at the academy.

PETE O’SHEA:  I myself never went to an integrated school, so I can’t say anything for or against that.  But I have the financial capability to send my children to a private school that specializes in college preparation, so I’m doing that.

DAVIS:  It’s changing very slowly.  You know, ten years ago, I said, “Five years from now, there won’t be any private schools,” being what they are.  But, hey, they’re still here.  They’re not as strong as they used to be, and some of them have closed, but some people will still mortgage their homes to send their kid to a private school. 95, 96 percent of them are still running from integration.

O’SHEA:  Some of them do go out there because they don’t want to go to an integrated school, but I believe that now in the 25 years that Oak Hill has been in existence, maybe 20 percent of them are out there because of integration.

HULL:  I would argue that people have some very good reasons for wanting to send their kids to a private school.  But I would also say that, knowing that there are an awful lot of people sending their kids to school there for a different and specific reason, they need to realize that their kids are not going to get a culturally diverse, ethnically diverse education.  And they’re going to go out there in the business world and say “those coloreds,” and even “those niggers.”

GLASGOW:  That’s sort of like the dark ages, now.  We don’t have people coming around saying you can’t go to school here, you can’t go to school there because of who goes to school there.  That’s not out purpose.  Our purpose is education, and if you want that, you’re free to come here, if you pay the tuition.

O’SHEA:  We are not allowed by law to refuse any student who comes to that school, as long as they pay their tuition.  It would probably be a good thing for us if we had a few black students come out there because right now we’re not tax exempt, and we would like to be tax exempt.  In other states, they mostly are tax exempt, but in Mississippi hardly any are.  That was taken away back around 1968.

NEWS ARCHIVES:  DAVID BRINKLEY:  Governor Williams asked the legislature to grant tax exemptions to the new private schools that have surfaced, but in Washington, the Supreme Court rules that such exemptions were illegal.

Today, Oak Hill Academy is home to 500 of West Point’s white school age children, over thirty percent of the town’s white student population.  The public school system is over seventy percent black.  Sylvester Harris is now the president of the local NAACP.

SYLVESTER HARRIS:  Everything has changed but nothing has changed.  When you say everything has changed you mean the times are different, but on the other hand fifty years ago blacks were at the bottom of the totem pole, a hundred years ago blacks were at the bottom of the totem pole, 1991, blacks are at the bottom of the totem pole.

KENNY DILL:  The South is still economically deprived, sometimes we’re a state that mainly consists of rural areas, and we lack revenue a lot of times to do the sort of things that are badly needed, like a tax base.

SPANKY BRUCE:  The South’s the most integrated part of the United States right now.  We live together and work together, and we still have our problems, but I’ve said in articles and columns before that segregation is brought on now more by economic problems rather than by the color of a man’s skin.

ROBERT SMITH:  There has been change, but not to the degree that I thought it would come.  Someone said, someone made the comment that we’ve integrated, but not desegregated.

HULL:  We have an absence of segregation.  Obviously, we use the same facilities, buy at the same stores, eat at the same restaurants, but their is no permeation of race relations and cultural understanding.

DILL:  We’ve had some successes, and of course some problems.  But I think we’ve had, well, you know, I think the people in the North sometimes misunderstand the South.

When the 1990 ESPN feature began to question local race relations, blacks and whites alike reacted viscerally.  Whites had historically disdained outsiders, and by the end of the civil rights movement, blacks emphasized self-empowered change within the community.

SMITH:  That attitude seems extended from twenty years ago, the outsiders coming in.

BRUCE:  Normally, like in the Civil Rights days, when people come down and do this sort of thing they tend to be resented, but I think now that it’s a valid resentment, because things are not the same today thirty years later.

“In Spite of All the Things That Took Place”

When student volunteers “invaded” town in 1964, Daily Times Leader editor Henry Harris proclaimed that, “History is being made now in Mississippi.” And history is a continuum.  The aversion toward outsiders persists, as does the dilemma of black-white relations.  But change has come, and only the people of West Point, Mississippi can determine the future of their community.

SYLVESTER HARRIS:  West Point is a classic textbook case.

KENNY DILL:  It’s not that confrontation that’s portrayed a lot of times.  And not that there’s not some on both sides, but in between there are a lot of folks that have learned to work together, play sports together, do a lot of things together, and not live in fear of each other.

BUBBA DAVIS:  We need every person in the community coming together for one common cause.  The fact that there are still private schools throughout Mississippi says we haven’t overcome the thing, and it may be with us forever.  But I like to think that maybe one day in communities like West Point we can come together and say, hey, let’s do it together.

JOHN JACKSON:  The only way you can appreciate it is if you can see Mississippi when it was the worst of the worst, and now, in spite of all the things that took place, we have begun to build in Mississippi, I think, a sound footing for race relations.

ROBERT SMITH:  West Point is a quiet community.  Sometimes it needs some shaking up, someone to come in and say, “Wham!” What you want is to build as a community so somebody won’t come in and make a video about some negative aspects within the community.

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“‘There’s going to be bloodshed, if y’all don’t get them out.’ And I said, ‘It’s going to be some of yours, too.’”

Scene from “They Did This to Us,”
a documentary by Jonathan C. Hamilton