Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America
Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2016)
Calvin Trillin spent his late twenties on the ‘seg beat’; first for Time’s Atlanta Bureau in 1960-61, then for the New Yorker, “in the days when race and the South were thought of as basically the same story by national magazines.” He covered sit-in movements, school desegregation in all sorts of places, voting drives and Freedom Rides. This collection of his New Yorker pieces brings them back as he originally wrote them, give or take a few redundancies.
The South, of course, is not the only place with racial tensions: he also reports from Seattle, Newark, and Oshkosh. In New Orleans, there’s the black Mardi Gras parade, featuring King Zulu in a grass skirt, black-and-white face, and coconuts, though perhaps fewer stops at taverns than had one been the norm. Whether this is tradition, parody, good clean fun, or heinous racism, seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
New Orleans is of particular interest because it has so many gradations of race. A piece from 1986 goes into the story of a woman who discovered that her birth certificate listed both of her parents as ‘colored.’ It’s not the sort of error, if such it was, that the responsible bureaucrat was willing to remedy with the stroke of a pen. Jack Westholz represented the vital records office, where “it was taken for granted that certain families had a traceable amount of black blood, and that it was up to the vital-records office to tell them apart. When it came to tracing traceable amounts, nobody ever accused the vital-records office of bureaucratic lethargy.” This is characteristically dry Trillin prose: the strain of the ridiculous is allowed to speak for itself. The matter didn’t make it to the United States Supreme Court, but not for lack of trying.
When it comes to weird racial math, Boston holds up its end. The parking garage for the John Hancock tower had an awkwardly large restaurant space on its ground floor, which in 1976 was a discotheque known as Whimsey’s. Black people were not exactly barred from going to Whimsey’s, but they sometimes had trouble getting in – does anyone actually have three photo IDs? (When someone actually showed up with three, the bemused doorman let her in.) The Boston Licensing Board heard from enough unrelated complainants to suspend Whimsey’s license for a few days, which surely made absolutely no difference in the grand scheme of Boston’s racial troubles in the nineteen seventies.
The title essay goes deep into the Mississippi Summer Project, as it’s coordinated by the Council of Federated Organizations. “As it happens, COFO is, for all practical purposes, a project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ...so the style-setters are the staff members of SNCC, which may once have been a coat-and-tie organization but is no longer.” By 1964, it’s an overalls-and-blue-workshirts organization, befitting its efforts in the poorest, most rural parts of the state; this also reflects the fact that coats and ties are not good for sleeping on the floor, when needs must. Trillin is following James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, and Robert Moses, who directs the Summer Project; they’re working on literacy education and voter registration, but somehow, much more than that. Moses says, “People say, ‘Why are you doing this? or ‘Why are you starting with this aspect? or ‘Where can this approach ever get you?’And we say, ‘What else would you have us do?’”
From the state side, public school desegregation is seen as inevitable, “and about all that the last session of the legislature could think of to do about it was to provide tuition grants for those who wanted to attend private segregated schools.” How’s that! for an offhand remark with a very long tail. In 1995, he wrote about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission’s trove of records, and the lawsuits trying to open them up. The lawsuits themselves pried loose some colorful secrets: “It is now known, for instance, that an early black applicant to the University of Southern Mississippi who was convicted of several crimes and thrown into prison was framed; an alternative plan was to murder him.”
Calvin Trillin has produced many light-hearted books on eating, presidential foibles, and his late beloved wife, Alice. I would happily read him writing the phone book, so to speak; but on a subject so subtle and so complex, so tragic and so nonsensical, as race in America, his powers are at their best.
Any Good Books, March 2025 by email
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