As best I can estimate, I was about 10 years old when the biggest thing ever to come to East Tupelo arrived — a public swimming pool.
East Tupelo in the 1960s was populated mainly by poor and lower-middle class whites. The government housing project, located just to the west of the elementary school, was almost exclusively white, too. Our side of town didn’t have much political clout.
The affluent citizens, the doctors and bankers and business owners, lived on the west side. That was where the country club was located, along with a nice park and swimming pool at Rockwell Park.
The black population was stuck in the middle of the two, in places called “Shake Rag” and “The Hill.” They had their own schools in those waning days of segregated education, but when blacks residents ventured out of their neighborhoods to shop or play, they migrated to the west side, which was where most of the shopping and recreational facilities were located.
It might have stayed that way indefinitely were it not for one poor white kid from East Tupelo, Elvis Presley.
By the time I was 10, Elvis had become an international star — and a park was built in East Tupelo to honor its most famous native son. The little shotgun house he had lived in was moved a few blocks to the land set aside from the park and became a tourist attraction. The admission was 25 cents, which seems like a bargain until you realized you could look at everything in the house — none of which ever belong to Elvis, whose family had long since moved to Memphis — in less that two minutes
There was a Youth Center (pool tables, ping-pong tables and a juke box were the main features), a little pond for fishing, a baseball field and what quickly became its most important feature, a public swimming pool.
I started thinking about that swimming pool at Elvis Presley Park after my first trip to the Neshoba County Fair last weekend.
A long-time fair-goer told me that the expected crowd at the Fair that Saturday was 60,000. And if the attendance was 60,000, a conservative estimate would be that 59,900 of those fair-goers were white.
I had seen this before, back at that the swimming pool back in my hometown all those years ago.
I was a newcomer to the fair, of course, and I suspect by now long-time attendees never give the matter much of a thought. The Neshoba County Fair is billed as “Mississippi’s House Party,” but it’s pretty clear that an awful lot of Mississippians either aren’t invited or won’t come to the Party. Neither explanation is very satisfying. There is no overt hostility or even an “understanding” that the Fair is a “white” event. It is a genial, non-threatening atmosphere.
So this is not an indictment of the Fair, but rather as an observation. It’s reasonable to say that there are any number of events where white people are equally absent.
But I do believe, in either case, these events are indisputable snap-shots of where our state is now of the subject of race relations. In many ways, our state remains a segregated society and we can only assume that’s because both blacks and whites prefer it that way.
I wonder when, or if, we will understand what this means, how it holds us all back, how it robs our state of its true potential, how it keeps us strangers and makes us suspicious and distrustful, how it plays into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who use those divisions to exploit us all.
Recent events in our country have led many to call for a new dialogue about race in America. We need to talk to each other and, more importantly, listen to each other, they say.
But it’s pretty hard to talk to somebody who isn’t there.
When the swimming pool in East Tupelo opened that long-ago summer, the poor kids swarmed to it. That group included a few black kids, too.
I remember well that when a black kid jumped into that pool, a lot of white kids got out or moved to the opposite end of the pool. The lessons reinforced by our state’s history were taught at an early age in those days.
I don’t know what happened to those particular white kids, but I suspect they are the aging adults of today who “want their country back.”
Of course, we tell ourselves that those people are in the minority and that things have changed. It’s different now.
For those who believe that, go to the Neshoba County Fair or Juneteenth celebration and confront the truth.
We are still on opposite ends of the pool.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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