In the Weekly Standard profile, [Haley] Barbour marvelled at the fact that Yazoo City's schools were desegregated without violence, unlike in many other towns in Mississippi. But for Mangold, whose parents were both physicians in Yazoo City, another local institution is in the forefront of his memory of that era: the hospital.
Built in the mid 1950s with federal assistance, the Yazoo City hospital was, at the insistence of the local White Citizens Council, a whites-only facility, Mangold says. As a child, he had the nighttime assignment of answering the back door at his parents' home, where they had their medical practice (whites came to the front door, blacks to the back). He would often see black residents with grievous injuries requiring emergency care -- but they had nowhere to go.
"There was no hospital in town where blacks could go. They would have to go to Jackson 40 or 50 miles away and many died on the way," he says, adding that this state of affairs lasted for years.
Further, his parents became pariahs in town and their business was damaged because they had resisted the White Citizens Council petition that the hospital be whites-only.
"Threatening phone calls, dead cats on the lawn and other acts of intimidation combined to run my father out of town for two years," Mangold wrote in his letter to the Clarion-Ledger.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's (R) does not recall the 1950s, opining "I just don't remember it as being that bad."
I guess it's easy when you are not looking or caring for or paying attention to the real world around you, only the all-white bubble of your ignorance.
No comments:
Post a Comment