Whoever said Mississippi is not a state but a scar, said it.

Mississippi: An American Journey
by Anthony Walton


I don't think it's possible to understand how much hate builds up when a person is enslaved. We see it in movies, read it in books, but how can we understand it? How can we possibly feel it?

It's not something we as white people sit around trying to understand. Slavery is over--at least in America--and it's never coming back. My attitude has always been, it's ancient history--let it go already! But we need to understand that slavery didn't end in 1862--it only went underground. For years to come, for generations of people--people who are still alive today--black people lived knowing they could be fired without cause, killed without retribution, and worked without hope of saving a dime over what they owed at the company store. They had to put up with whatever the white man dished out or risk being jailed. Or killed. And those people really hate white people.

In Mississippi, the only hope was in escape to the big cities in the north. But even when people successfully escaped the Jim Crow south, like Mr. Walton's father, they were still feeling the rage for years to come. Who wouldn't?

"At school we would get our books and in the cover there would be this person's name; our schoolbooks were always used books. I remember this was like the second or third grade. There would be a person's name in there, and grade, and race, and it would always be 'white'.

    [Me: Can you imagine that? Having to write your race in your schoolbooks?]

"We always got the old books, the white kids got 'em first. And there's always be pages missing, where if you read two chapters relative to something, you couldn't finish. if the third chapter completed the subject matter, then that chapter would be deliberately cut out, or the pages torn up, and you'd never know how it finished. I didn't understand it, why it was happening, but I talked to my parents and teachers and they said there was this school superintendent, a white woman, and she did this on purpose. She also never gave us enough books, or all the units on a particular subject. I think it was to keep us from doing enough work to get a high school diploma. She succeeded in my case.

His father spoke of walking to school and having insults yelled from white kids passing in the school bus; of taking verbal abuse and threats from bosses; of digging ditches in hundred degree temperatures for a man who wrote his paycheck, threw it on the ground, and told him he was never coming back.

This book is not just a recitation of wrongs--nothing like it. It's a deep, thoughtful journey of a man trying to understand his history, especially the one big puzzle of why his mother and father worked so hard and denied themselves simple luxuries. Their kids grew up in the north, getting a good education and going on to college--and taking equal opportunity for granted, as children should. But--at some point--children should ask questions. Mr. Walton did.

Good questions. Painful answers.