Letter fron Joseph and Nancy Ellin to Mom and Dad; July 9, 1964

              July 9 [1964], [Hattiesburg, Mississippi] [typescript page 1]


 

Dear Mom and Dad,


            I hope the letter business is straightened out; I just spoke to Alan and Mrs. Shavzin and they both said you were worried.  We’ve written I think two letters that you should have gotten since you wrote Sunday.  (Behind me two Justice Dept. lawyers are busy talking to our staff leader.)  We had some trouble yesterday:  the head of the ministers’ project got arrested for passing a bad check.  In Miss. intent to defraud is assumed, and you have to prove that you hadn’t merely added your account up wrong; the lawyer says he’s in trouble.  The check that bounced was in payment for a tape recorder that he bought from someone who is not very sympathetic and will press the case; and Bob made a bad mistake.  When the teller called to tell him that the check had bounced (this is a local bank you understand) Bob told him to try again to cash it; he should have offered on the spot to come down and give him cash.  This ought to be a lesson to all of us that you can’t operate here as if we were in the north, every slip can count against you. I found myself speeding today (by 5 mph); very careless.  But we are all getting careless, I think, because this seems like such a loose town.  Negroes have spontaneously integrated Kresses, Woolworth’s, and a number of other places without trouble; Miss. in general seems willing to comply with the civil rights bill.  The Citizens Council has loosed a terrific denunciation of businessmen who comply, and I think they have made a mistake.  The Jackson paper, which is fantastically white supremacist, published a front page letter from a lawyer tearing into the CC for their stand.  (Of course he said he was a segregationist and hated the law, but argued that we must obey.)  Criticism of the CC is not something that one does lightly in this state, and if the Clarion-Ledger put it on the front page it means that there must be many people who are rather fed up, even relieved, I bet, that they have a way out of CC domination.  I have never seen a bill that means as much to anyone as the civil rights bill does to Negroes here.  There is also a great deal of Kennedy love:  almost everyone will tell you that Pres. Kennedy tried to help the Negro.  And Goldwater is hated; I really doubt that he would get a single Negro vote (not that there are any Negro votes here).  Our landlady has a picture of JFK on the wall.


            Both of us have been busier than Cain.  Nancy finds teaching, under far from good conditions, very difficult.  She has too many kids in a tiny attic room over the church and is very nervous over what she considers her total ignorance of both methods and subject matter (especially Negro history, which is a big thing here).  The people, especially the adults, are very eager to learn; they are dying to discuss government and the movement, and dying to hear about Negroes who have accomplished things.  They are pathetically ignorant about the background of their people; I asked a group of three or four older people to name famous Negroes and all they could think of were Carver and Booker Washington.  The kids all know jazz musicians and sports figures but not too much else.


            I have high school and jr high school kids, ten of them:  I’ve got about the best teaching position in town.  The schools suffer from too many little kids and not enough teen-agers; the thing was billed as, or anyway became, a mass movement, and we attracted parents who can send their kids, but not too many of the older kids we wanted; I suspect they think school is too tame for civil rights militants. There are a few real bright kids, but most of them even the bright ones, don’t know much in an academic sense; we discussed the US gvt yesterday and they didn’t know anything really, had never heard of the committee system in Congress.  We staged a committee hearing in the classroom; someone made a bill she wanted Congress to pass and the rest were congressmen on the committee.  The bill was to give money to Negroes in Miss; we had a