Yes...I will verify about Yudan's dad....I knew him too as a boy.....and I agree with his sentiments.
On the freedom riders....whew...this is sort of a minefield.
I remember it as a boy. I even did a paper and oral report on it from a Reader's Digest article in 69 and recall getting all emotional giving the report.
But...looking back now. I remember that of course the Klan hated all of them and the Citizen's Council and SSC and even some LEOs were happy enough to let the Klan buffoons do their dirty work. Most citizens even reasonable ones viewed the Freedom Riders are socialists/commies....which many were. Many were also Jewish idealists from Northern campuses and that is where the friction between many Southerners and Jewish Southerners started. The Southern Jews felt compelled to side with their fellow Yankee Jews who were being attacked or murdered down South and then that of course gave the Klan the chance to bomb a few Temples. I believe in Meridian though...the local Sherrif...no fan of freedom riders himself....took a Dem view of buffoons trying to kill Jews and actually went to the trouble to set some Klan boys up trying to bomb a local prominant Jews home and caught them in the act and basically executed the culprits on sight...one might have been a woman even (Ainsworth)...one of my many family names.
What I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is that it was more complex than Mississippi Burning (though Hackman is good as always).
Most Mississippians I knew where ambivalent at worst or even sympathetic to granting blacks constitutional freedoms but they really despised the interlopers.
They had no idea that the noble idea of equal protection under the law would morph into the monster it is today although I remember my grandfather who had been prominant and refused to join the WCC and who had hired blacks into authority positions like my dad as well later....said before he died.
"We have done the right thing, blacks deserve to be treated as equals....but remember that "generosity breeds dependence breeds contempt"....a lesson not lost on the left obviously.
A dangerous era.....more than just 2 sides.
Both my father and grandfather would have been considered pro-civil rights and suffered some threats and insults etc. They owned large contracting companies and promoted blacks to supervisory spots. When my dad did that in Waveland on a job, the locals burned his office trailer and spiked the equipment.
Both of them voiced apprehension as to where all this they had endorsed would lead before they died. My grandpa never saw the bad fruit but he feared it. My dad died pretty dissillusioned by it all in 97. Good Intentions and the Road to Hell and all that. It should have stopped with Equal Constitutional Rights...period...but of course it did not.
What to do about any criminals still out there from the Jim Crow wars is a topic for debate....many are already dead....many have already been questionably acquitted.
I have no answers...only questions....one in particular?
What do we do now to stem the bleeding?
"The Southern Jews felt compelled to side with their fellow Yankee Jews who were being attacked or murdered down South and then that of course gave the Klan the chance to bomb a few Temples. I believe in Meridian though...the local Sherrif...no fan of freedom riders himself....took a Dem view of buffoons trying to kill Jews and actually went to the trouble to set some Klan boys up trying to bomb a local prominant Jews home and caught them in the act and basically executed the culprits on sight...one might have been a woman even (Ainsworth)...one of my many family names."I remember the summer of '68 pretty well. The Klan were fire bombing the black churches and the local synagogue, which was a couple of blocks through the woods behind my house. My family heard the explosion, and went to check it out. Me? I didn't hear a thing...slept right through it. There was, also, a black church right behind my house that my parents watched over. It was a precious little church, with a small congregation, that was in the country before Meridian grew out to it. We really didn't want anything to happen to it.
I really don't remember Jewish sentiment at that time...they weren't very vocal about it that I noticed. Sheriff Birdsong was the sheriff at that time, I think, and, you are right...there was no love lost for the freedom riders, but he didn't like the idea of Jews being targeted for death more. IIRC, they recieved a tip that the Davidsons, whose daughter is a year younger than I am, were targeted. As they were checking out his house, they found enough dynamite to blow up the entire block in the back seat of their daughter's Camaro. Luckily, they were able to take care of it before it exploded. I'm not sure, but I seem to remember that the perps tried to set off the bomb by firing shots through the rear of her car. In any case, they caught up with the perps, who led LEOs on a car chase and a shootout. I can't remember how many people were involved, but I do remember some, and maybe all, of them were killed in that shootout.
That was a memorable summer. I sure was glad when it was over.
