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Taking the Fight South

Taking the Fight South

Chronicle of a Jew's Battle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

by Howard Ball

280 pages, 6.25 x 9.38 in, 35 b&w illustrations

Hardcover

Published: February 2021

ISBN 9780268109165

$32.00

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Published: February 2021

ISBN 9780268109189

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Taking the Fight South provides a timely and telling reminder of the vigilance democracy requires if racial justice is to be fully realized.

Distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball has written dozens of books during his career, including the landmark biography of Thurgood Marshall, A Defiant Life, and the critically acclaimed Murder in Mississippi, chronicling the Mississippi Burning killings. In Taking the Fight South, arguably his most personal book, Ball focuses on six years, from 1976 to 1982, when, against the advice of friends and colleagues in New York, he and his Jewish family moved from the Bronx to Starkville, Mississippi, where he received a tenured position in the political science department at Mississippi State University. For Ball, his wife, Carol, and their three young daughters, the move represented a leap of faith, ultimately illustrating their deep commitment toward racial justice.

Ball, with breathtaking historical authority, narrates the experience of his family as Jewish outsiders in Mississippi, an unfamiliar and dangerous landscape contending with the aftermath of the civil rights struggle. Signs and natives greeted them with a humiliating and frightening message: “No Jews, Negroes, etc., or dogs welcome.” From refereeing football games, coaching soccer, and helping young black girls integrate the segregated Girl Scout troops in Starkville, to life-threatening calls from the KKK in the middle of the night, from his work for the ACLU to his arguments in the press and before a congressional committee for the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Ball takes the reader to a precarious time and place in the history of the South. He was briefly an observer but quickly became an activist, confronting white racists stubbornly holding on to a Jim Crow white supremacist past and fighting to create a more diverse, equitable, and just society.

Ball’s story is one of an imitable advocate who didn’t just observe as a passive spectator but interrupted injustice. Taking the Fight South will join the list of required books to read about the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of racism in the United States. The book will also appeal to readers interested in Judaism because of its depiction of anti-Semitism directed toward Starkville’s Jewish community, struggling to survive in the heart of the deep and very fundamentalist Protestant South.

“As we examine the horrific examples of public racism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant policy and behavior in contemporary society, I read this book personally, internalizing it deeply to ask if I would have had similar courage.” —Mark Curnutte, author of Across the Color Line

“Howard Ball is a tenacious legal activist and teacher of civil rights. His involvement with the cause has been lifelong. More than anything else, his work in the Mississippi ACLU grounds this entertaining and informative book.” —Howard Winant, co-author of Racial Formation in the United States

"Howard Ball has written extensively about civil rights and civil liberties. Taking the Fight South offers readers a candid and emotional view of the six years he spent living in Starkville and teaching political science at Mississippi State University. In the process, Ball reinforces his Jewish identity as well as his determination to fight racism, finding out firsthand what it takes to be a 'mensch.'" —Steven F. Lawson, co-author of Exploring American Histories

"Howard Ball's memoir connects the dots between his teaching and scholarship on constitutional law and civil rights, his life and career as an advocate for racial equality, and his Jewish identity. It offers a first-hand narrative of southern Jewish community from the perspective of a never-fully-welcomed New Yorker. Recounting his research on the failure of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to guarantee compliance, the memoir sheds depressing light on voter discrimination today. It reminds us of the fragility of democracy and of the urgency of resisting ongoing efforts to subvert it." —Cheryl Lester, co-author of Social Work Practice With a Difference

"Ball’s third book as an interloper in the Deep South is poignant, enlightening, and serves as a reminder of how far Mississippi has come and yet how far we still have to go." —The Daily Leader

"In 1976, historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball moved his family from the Bronx to Starkville, Mississippi, where they’d stay until 1982. Ball describes the experience of his Jewish New York brood as they fend off KKK phone calls and fight for a more just future." —Jewish Exponent

"Ball taught at Mississippi State University, adjacent to the town of Starkville, from 1976 to 1982, and in this engaging book, he recalls his experiences as a liberal in a staunchly conservative state which had been an integral part of the Confederacy and which fiercely resisted desegregation." —The Times of Israel

"More than his personal experience with religious otherness, the heart of the memoir involves Ball’s reflections upon incidents of racial discrimination and the attempts that he and others made to remedy it." —H-Nationalism

"I read with rapt interest Howard Ball’s memoir about his experiences—both the achievements and the obstacles—of living in Starkville, where he taught political science at Mississippi State University from 1976 to 1982. The clash between a New York Jewish liberal activist and white reactionaries was inevitable." —Southern Jewish History

When Klan leader Edgar “Preacher” Killen was indicted for murder in early January 2005, I begged (successfully) the managing editor of Vermont’s Burlington Free Press to give me the cachet of “Special Correspondent” so I could go down to Mississippi again, this time to cover the trial that most people thought would never happen. I wanted to see and hear about the changes in the state that had finally led to Killen’s indictment. I wanted to see and write about the “Preacher.” (The following account of the trial is based on my contemporaneous notes taken there and published in the Burlington Free Press on June 23, 2005, “When Past Becomes Present,” and on June 24, 2005, “60 Years for Miss. Killings.”)

It turned out to be a very different, and a much more dramatic news assignment I gave myself. The trial became much more than a capital case in a state court. In essence, it was a stark drama about two men from the same small town, Union, Mississippi, who were neighbors and knew each other growing up. Each man, however, emphasized the opposite one of two core ways of thinking all humans display in their lives: goodness and evilness.

Marcus Gordon, Judge Marcus Gordon, was the jurist presiding over the Killen trial. He had been a trial judge for more than twenty-five years when the Killen murder case was assigned to him; it was his ninth capital case. Over the course of his nearly four-decade career, Gordon had “earned a reputation for being a no-nonsense, firm and fair judge with a steady hand of control over the proceedings.” (Kenneth Billings, “A No-Nonsense Judge for Killen Trial,” The Neshoba Democrat, June 1, 2005.)

Like Killen, the judge was a big man, more than six feet tall, broad shouldered, with thick white hair. Like so many Mississippians, he grew up in farm country, loved hunting and fishing, and horse riding. To escape the tensions inherent in a trial court, he often returned to his farm in Union, less than a mile from his birthplace, where he saddled his horse and just rode. (Horse lovers know how much good “just riding” does for lowering the rider’s blood pressure and renewing good thoughts. Just ask my wife Carol, my Jewish horse whisperer.)

The judge, unlike Killen, served six years in the U.S. Air Force, including service in Korea, and then went to Ole Miss as a mature first year undergraduate. After graduating with a degree in business, Gordon then went to Ole Miss’s law school. Most of his legal career was as an elected district attorney and as a county court judge. Gordon was elected District Attorney of the 8th Judicial District in the 1970s (1971-1977), he then ran for the position of Judge, in the same district a few years later. At the time of his retirement, March 2016, Gordon was the longest serving circuit judge (thirty-seven years) in Mississippi’s history. Three months later, the 84-year old Judge died.

For the judge, the Killen trial “hit close to home.” Marcus Gordon and “Preacher” Killen lived next to each other on the same road in Union. Killen ran a sawmill operation in town and was a part-time Baptist minister. (One of my State students, Donna Ladd, grew up in Philadelphia and remembered, when she was a little girl, meeting Killen in town. He was a part-time watch repairman and her watch needed to be fixed.)

Killen was the Baptist minister who “preached at the Church Judge Gordon’s parents attended and presided over their combined funerals [they died within a day of each other] just a year after the [three civil rights workers were] murdered.” Gordon, when he was District Attorney, also knew Killen professionally: “he once prosecuted Mr. Killen for making a threatening phone call.”

Nearly forty years after the 1964 killings, not one of the nineteen Klansmen involved in the murders had faced homicide charges until Killen’s indictment in 2004. The majority were never convicted of the murders in both federal and State trial courts. They all had church services and burial in its cemetery.