In the summer of 1969, Taylor Branch took a job registering rural black voters in his home state of Georgia. He kept a diary of his experiences, which he later turned into a Washington Monthly article detailing how the gains of the civil rights era were being systematically undermined by corrupt police in the rural South. The experience also sparked the idea for Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 195463, Branchs Pulitzer Prizewinning narrative history of the civil rights movement.
ll right, get the money off the table, said Bubba-doo Wiggins, the proprietor of the Big Apple in Cuthbert, Georgia, as he jumped from his perch with a can of Colt 45 and a fistful of house-cut dollars. In what resembled the routine panic of a grammar school fire drill, he herded all the card players across the hall into a small closet on the mysterious side of the shack. The younger people scattered. The white man, a graduate student visiting the town, followed the pack, disoriented, and was the last to squeeze into the tiny room.
What the hell is going on? he whispered to his fellow loser.
Beer truck, he replied, obviously amused at the others perplexity.
Through a crack in the door, the stranger could see Bubba-doo behind the bar. He saw the proprietor put down his Colt 45 to greet two uniformed white men who ambled up and began some small talk.
Whos that, the sheriff? whispered the white man to the loser.
No, the police, he said. They go around with the beer truck every Friday.
The screen door closed again, and a rotund white man soon came into view, wheeling a half-dozen cases of beer up to the bar. He was wearing a Schlitz uniform and smoking a cigar. He left for another load.
Bubba-doo soon rapped on the door with the all-clear sign, and the poker players tumbled out into the hallway. The white man ran to a window in time to watch the beer truck stir up the red dust, with the police car right behind.
Unfortunately, the poker game had evaporated. As the others filed past on their way home for supper,the stranger decided that their interest in him wasdirectly related to whether or not his pockets werefull.
No more game here, man, observed his fellow loser.
The two losers walked across the room, past the jukebox, and out onto the Big Apples front porch, where the strains of a twilight hymn from the revival floated on the summer air.
Whatchew doing down here in niggertown? came a voice from the police car, which had drifted back down the road, evidently having finished its beer run.
Sir?
I said whatchew doing down here in niggertown?
Im, you know, Im doing a manpower survey for the university. Uh, Im seeing about the kind of jobs these people have around here.
You what? The stranger walked down the steps and over to the passenger side of the police car, experiencing all the physical symptoms of acute fearshaking, sweating, burning skin, gulping, pounding heart, dry mouth, cold hands, wobbling knees, cloudy, swirling brain.
You aint down here trying to stir up our niggers, are you?
No, sir.
We treat our niggers real good around here, so we aint had no riots or anything, and we aim to keep it that way. Do you know you could get knifed down here easy as that?
No, sir, said the accused, looking surprised and hoping that the policeman would take him for a bumbling student, which seemed accurate enough.
rom the white peoples point of view, the operation of the law is a distinctly informal business in southwest Georgia. Few local whites are ever arrested, other than a drunk or two, and the main concerns of the law are traffic tickets and the maintenance of calm among the black people. Neither task draws much attention from most white people, and keeping the lid on the black parts of town seems so easy that it produces boredom.
If policemen seem rather overlooked by the white people, the Negroes act in compensation, for black people see them as the symbol of white power. The policeman represents more than violence or the fact that whites inevitably win any interracial legal battle. The man who rose from the pool room to the police car symbolizes the unpredictability of law enforcement for blacks. Lacking the restraint and formality of schoolbook law, he uses his badge as he sees fit and is often governed by an ornery mood.
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