REMEMBRANCE OF MODERATES PAST 1977
“I keep hearing about white people who say they’ve been working behind the scenes,” a black lawyer in New Orleans told me during the desegregation of the public schools there, in 1960—a time when the business and professional leadership of New Orleans stood silent while the city seemed to be taken over by a bunch of women in hair curlers screaming obscenities at six-year-olds. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It must be getting mighty crowded back there, behind the scenes.” From then on, and whenever somebody mentioned working behind the scenes during a time of racial turmoil in the South, a picture planted by that black lawyer came into my mind: Onstage, little of interest is going on—just the usual succession of Southern pols, often in chorus, doing their “never-never” number and dancing off into the wings to great applause from the cheap seats. Every so often, that routine is broken by the appearance onstage of a solitary figure who presents a declamation about obeying the law of the land and is, predictably, pelted with rotten tomatoes or worse. Behind the scenes, hordes of community leaders—prominent businessmen and pillars of the local bar and charity-drive chairmen and country-club presidents—are silently moving scenery around and around and around.
Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America
Calvin Trillin