WON OVER: Reflections of a Federal Judge from Jim Crow Mississippi

By William Alsup

Foreword by Judge Thelton Henderson

Published by NewSouth Books, Montgomery AL,  2019

African-American patron going in colored entrance of the Crescent Theatre in Belzoni, Mississippi, ca 1939;  photographer Marion Post Wolcott. Wikipedia 

by Jo Freeman

When I was working in Mississippi for SCLC in 1966, I would not have believed that any of the young white men I saw on the streets (mostly harassing us) would ever reject white supremacy. They appeared as dedicated to its domination as sports fans are to their clubs.

William Alsup writes that I was wrong; that there were some young white men who heard the civil rights movement’s message that white supremacy and segregation were wrong. They may not have bought into all of its messages — at least not then — but they heard enough of it to knock cracks in the closed society of Mississippi.

The author's memoir is not just about himself, but the small group of young white men who were his pals in his hometown of Jackson and on the campus of Mississippi State University (MSU). It’s about coming of age in the middle of a revolution and being "won over" to the other side.  

They started with a teenage act of rebellion (so what else is new?) — when he and a buddy decided to paint over a billboard that said IMPEACH EARL WARREN. They got away with it; it made the local papers; his mother didn’t chastise him but only said "be careful."

Born in 1945, Alsup absorbed the big events of the 1950s when the issue of race went national. But it was the court-ordered admission of the first black student to the University of Mississippi in September of 1962 that made him and his friends think seriously about segregation. The Governor and the state newspapers called for active resistance as federal marshals escorted Air Force veteran James Meredith on the campus of the flagship university during three days of riots and two deaths. At this point, Alsup still believed in the Mississippi Way of Life, but one of his friends was beginning to question it.  

Alsup later observed that only a small sliver of the Mississippi population supported civil rights, even modestly. He and his friends made a small step in that direction the following May when the Birmingham demonstrations were making national news and the NAACP was boycotting and picketing stores in Jackson. They wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Jackson newspapers supporting voting rights and equal education for Negroes – but nothing else. Nonetheless, it was a "call in the wilderness."

Right, An "Impeach Earl Warren sign", posted in San Francisco in October 1958

They were also affected by the contrast between white violence and the peaceful March on Washington on August 28, 1963. The comparison enhanced the moral authority of the civil rights movement.

Most of his group went on to college, many to Mississippi State University — a land grant university. Of course blacks were not admitted, and very few women. At MSU Alsup joined the debate team, which took him all over the country for tournaments and expanded his friendship network. He also became active in the YMCA and the Young Democrats.

Alsup doesn’t say so, but the Y was on the cutting edge of racial change throughout the South. The YW was ahead of the YM, but both used Christianity to talk about racial justice. 

At this point I began to make comparisons between his experiences at MSU and mine at Berkeley. Cal was often called Red Square West, but the fact that MSU was making similar waves only a few years later tells us that there was something of a Zeitgeist running through higher education.

Both schools had a speaker ban. Berkeley’s began in the 1930s as a Communist Speaker Ban and enlarged over time to be a controversial speaker ban. Alsup doesn’t recount the equivalent MSU history, but by his freshman year in 1963 controversial speakers were forbidden. In both institutions the University President opposed the ban but the governing board insisted on it.

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