by Reid Fitzsimons (note this is a very long article of approx 5,300 words, the first 3,500 being mine and the remainder those of a then pro-life Jesse Jackson from 1977)

Around 45 years-ago I was visiting in-laws deep in Mississippi, this being in the waning days of what we call “Jim Crow.” The in-laws were relatively wealthy, as defined by being two million in debt due to ill-conceived business ventures. They had employees, many of them black, and I befriended a young black man about my age. We had been given an excess amount of pecans and I offered him a bag to take back to his family, which he appreciated. As he was walking away, one of the in-laws, a generation older than me, exclaimed “He’s stealing the pecans!” Knowing this could have an unfortunate outcome, I quickly explained I had given him the bag. The response, in a genteel Southern accent (me being a Yankee) was, “We don’t do that kind of thing down here.”

The political structure of Jim Crow was pretty typical of oppressive societies throughout history, meaning the oppressors needed the oppressed to maintain power. In Jim Crow, there was dangled before the white masses the perpetual threat of “nigras not knowing their place and being uppity.” This had broad and powerful appeal to many of the white masses, who from childhood had been taught that blacks were, simply, inferior. They- blacks- could be dutiful and affectionate pets and treated accordingly, but there was always the fear they would turn on their masters, and the whites holding the power knew how to exploit this fear: one can picture the ugly man, George Wallace, with his ugly promise of “...segregation forever!”