Black mayor brings redemption to town burdened

by racist past
Tim Reid
The day the Ku Klux Klan paid a visit to this cauldron of racial
hatred in Mississippi is deeply etched on James Young’s memory.
He remembers his father standing in the front room of the family
home with a shotgun in his hand as Klansmen rampaged through
the town, lynching blacks and firebombing their churches.
That was 1964, when whites held every elected office in the town
down to the local tax assessor and one of the Deep South’s most
infamous atrocities had just unfolded — the murder of three civil
rights workers depicted a generation later in the film Mississippi
Burning.
It is no surprise then that Mr Young, 53, still struggles to describe
how he feels about becoming the first black mayor of Philadelphia,
Mississippi. Many contend that his election was even more
remarkable and unforeseen than Barack Obama’s ascent to the
White House.
“I recently met a black lady, she was about 100 years old,” Mr
Young says as he sits in the tiny mayor’s office, two blocks from the
courthouse where five years ago the Klan leader who
masterminded the 1964 murders finally met justice and was convicted of manslaughter.
“She said, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever live to see a black president.’ Her next statement was: ‘And I
sure did not ever believe a black man would be mayor of Philadelphia’ .”
Mr Young is about to end his first year as mayor. To reach office he had to defeat the white
incumbent, Rayburn Waddell, in a town with a 55 per cent white majority. He won by just 46
votes.

It was, without a doubt, one of the most astonishing election results in US history. After the 1964
murders, which prompted President Johnson to send in the FBI and built momentum for the
seminal Voting Rights Act the following year, Philadelphia, Mississippi became a byword for
violent bigotry.

When Mr Young was a seven-year-old boy watching his father’s nightly armed vigil, the Klan
ruled the town with impunity. Many members of the local police force were Klansmen. Blacks
brave enough to try to register to vote were met with qualifying questions by white officials: how
many bubbles in a bar of soap? How many feathers on a chicken?
“I never could have envisaged then becoming mayor. Never. It was just not on our radar. If
someone had told me there would be black mayor here and a black President I would have
called them crazy..
“I was overwhelmed by the after-effect, and how it impacted so many people who lived here
before.
“I had to get somebody to answer my phone at home. I got calls from all over the world and
from all 50 states, people just ringing to congratulate me, people crying on the phone, telling me
they couldn’t believe it had happened in Philadelphia. I just didn’t think Philadelphia had
garnered that much attention.
“Older black men and women kept coming to the office, they started talking, they would start
crying, the tears rolling down their cheeks, not believing that they had lived long enough to see
this, knowing the struggles that took place in the 50s and 60s in this area and in the South.
They would start talking about events in their life, the mistreatment, not being able to vote, being
excluded from the political scene — for me to be elected mayor of Philadelphia was to them a
dream come true.”
Mr Young, a Pentecostal minister who was elected to the job of county supervisor in 1991, grew
up in Philadelphia and says the change in attitude about race has been extraordinary, especially
in recent years.
He says there are still racists in the town who would never vote for a black man, but his victory
symbolises remarkable progress in the South in the past generation.
A new generation of white and black district attorneys has aggressively pursued a belated
reckoning for the Klansmen who were often acquitted of murder by all-white juries in the 1960s.
A string of elderly men have been sent to prison, including Edgar Ray Killen, the former leader
of Philadelphia’s Ku Klux Klan, jailed in 2005 for overseeing the Mississippi Burning murders on
June 21, 1964, when James Chaney, a black man, and Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner, both white, were beaten, shot and buried in a dam.
In that year, there was not a single elected black official in Mississippi. Now it has more African
American elected officials than any other state. In 1970, there were 86. Today there are more
than 800.
For years numerous white residents have said how desperate they were to escape from the
stench of Philadelphia’s past. Many of those must have voted for Mr Young, who knocked on
every door during his campaign, and his victory has given the town a kind of redemption. Mr
Young says he was never once insulted or had a door slammed in his face.
Residents say the town’s first black mayor has been a success so far. “He’s doing great. He
mingles with the people. He’s got some jobs coming in, he’s got us a new plant coming our way,
he’s trying to get more small businesses in town. Everybody I talk to likes him,” says Wilson
Hobson, the owner of Hobson Barber Shop on Philadelphia’s Main Street>.
Mr Young attributes his popularity to a desire to turn over a new leaf. “Many whites have
mentioned the town’s history,” he said.
“A white college student called me and said that for years he was embarrassed to tell people
that he was from Philadelphia. He said that after I won the mayor’s race, it changed how people
looked at him or received him when he told them where he was from.”
Mr Young also credits Mr Obama’s election victory, six months before his, for helping him win.
“It changed the landscape, it changed the attitude.” Since then, Mr Young and his wife have
visited the White House and met Mr Obama and his wife Michelle.
“Who woulda thought that?” Mr Young says, a smile on his face. “A little black country boy
playing in the woods, one day shaking hands with a black president.”
Written for The Times newspaper, by Tim
Reid
Accessed on line 30-4-2010