So the Heffners Left McComb

INTRODUCTION

Trent Brown, 2016

It is clearly not easy for man to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

FREUD—Civilization and Its Discontents

On Saturday, September 5, 1964, the Labor Day weekend, the family of Albert W. Red Heffner Jr. left their house at 202 Shannon Drive in McComb, Mississippi, where they had lived for ten years. They never returned to the town. On July 17 of that summer, they made a decision that would within a few weeks cost them their home, Red’s job, the friends they thought they had made in the small southwest Mississippi city, and their peace of mind. We’ve had it, Red’s wife Mary Alva (Malva) told a reporter after they left. You’ll never know the hell that was in our hearts.¹ In the eyes of their neighbors, their unforgivable sin was to have spoken on several occasions with civil rights workers in town and finally to have invited two of them to their house for conversation. Both of the civil rights workers, Rev. Don McCord and Dennis Sweeney, were white, although that did not seem to lessen the shock of the Heffners’ action to the town. The evening of Friday, July 17, as the Heffners, McCord, and Sweeney discussed the summer’s voter registration project in McComb, the Heffners became suddenly aware that their neighbors and others were and had been observing them. The telephone at their house rang, and an unidentified caller asked for Dennis Sweeney.² How is the civil rights work going? a woman’s voice asked. After realizing the potentially dangerous nature of the call, Sweeney hung up the telephone. Later that evening, cars began circling the Heffners’ block.

Over the next weeks, the anonymous phone calls continued, becoming increasingly vulgar and threatening. Malva recalled that they eventually received more than three hundred harassing calls. People in the neighborhood, if not active participants in the intimidation campaign against them, were certainly aware of the dangers the Heffners faced. One afternoon a four-year-old boy asked Mrs. Heffner, When is your house going to be bombed? a reasonable question considering the level of violence in the town that summer. Red Heffner had seen his role only as a possible line of communication between respectable white McComb and the civil rights workers. Even though he informed police chief George Guy, a man he considered to be his friend, of his actions and attempted to explain his reasoning to people in town he thought would surely understand his desire to help keep matters calm that summer, the community turned with viciousness on the family, who were despised, suspected, ostracized, and economically crippled.³

The fall of the Heffners from the community’s grace was swift and complete. Their story demonstrates the power of fear, conformity, community pressure, and threats of retaliation of many sorts that silenced so many white Mississippians against the violence of the summer of 1964 as well as during the longer period of the civil rights movement in the state during the 1950s and 1960s. So the Heffners Left McComb is journalist Hodding Carter II’s succinct account of the events that led to the Heffners’ downfall and flight from their home.⁴ It is not a history of the broader civil rights movement in the city or of the voter registration campaign that triggered a wave of violence in McComb that summer. It concentrates instead on the background of the Heffners, their immediate actions in the early summer of 1964, and the campaign of intimidation that drove them from their hometown. Even on those terms, it is not an account of the full community’s thoughts and actions. Black McComb figures very little in Carter’s account, as he admits. The best role he could imagine for them in a telling of the community’s story is as a shadowy, contrapuntal chorus (10), a metaphor that says much about the limits in those days even of a sympathetic white Mississippian such as Carter. The students and other volunteers who came for the Mississippi Freedom Summer, Carter sets down as engaged in an idealist if foolhardy project (10). Their plans, voices, and fates receive little attention here. No, the book is by design an account of white McComb and its rejection of the Heffners. It is easy to see what Carter omitted, some things by design and others because he wrote the account immediately after the events he recounts. But by showing how acutely community pressure could turn on and drive away one previously respected white family during the most intense period of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, Carter’s book stands as an important but largely neglected document.

Early histories of the civil rights movement, as well as many popular accounts, focus on leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., opponents such as George Wallace, or action or inaction at the national level by Congress or Presidents Kennedy or Johnson. More recent scholarly work generally concentrates on local people, either activists or opponents of reform.⁵ Carter’s book, on the other hand, features a family that never chose to make a stand on the principles of the struggle in that time and place, yet were deliberately and systematically punished and driven into exile for what white McComb perceived as a most serious breach of the racial solidarity upon which the community rested and depended. Like most of their white middle-class peers in McComb, the Heffners felt invested in their community, church, and other local institutions. That investment led them to seek a way of understanding what was happening locally as national attention and grassroots pressure intensified on what most whites called without sarcasm the Mississippi Way of Life. The Heffners felt that the voter registration campaign in the state that summer and the violent white response to it represented something new and potentially disruptive to their community, and hoped through mediation or at least communication to end the violence that had begun in McComb as soon as the first outsiders had come to town. The longer tradition of violence against local blacks, on the other hand, seemed never to have excited much attention from Red Heffner. That violence was certainly less visible or somehow simply less troubling even to moderate white McComb, if only because it did not figure so prominently in the local or national press or in conversations with other community leaders and respectable people. Nor, it should be noted, did that longer pattern of violence against black McComb feature a summer dynamiting terrorist campaign, as happened in 1964.

How could the Heffners become outcasts so quickly in the eyes of a community that had previously welcomed them? The Heffners, practically anyone in McComb would have said, were respectable people; indeed, they were respected rather than simply respectable. Malva Heffner’s first husband, Bob Nave, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. Jan Nave, twenty-one, her daughter and his, was a student at the Mississippi State College for Women and was completing her year as Miss Mississippi, in an era when the South followed such pageants with a vengeance. Their daughter Carla, seventeen, was perhaps less conventionally studious than her sister, but was a serious reader and enjoyed writing. Hodding Carter notes that even before the summer, she had a preoccupation with civil rights (16). Given to outspokenness, as was her father, Carla was generally popular at McComb High School, where she was a member of the Class of 1965. Both Malva and Red had attended Ole Miss. Red had been honored by the Lincoln National Life insurance company for which he worked, and McComb civic organizations recognized him as an outstanding young man. They were active in their local Episcopal congregation, the Church of the Redeemer, one of the few affiliations that did differentiate them from their peers in the overwhelmingly Baptist and Methodist city. In short, though, they were strivers—community-oriented people who fit in. They were the sort who provided leadership in business, town government, and churches throughout the region. In writing the story of their exile, Hodding Carter told of a family with whom he certainly identified—moderate, thoughtful, and interested in their community, but at the same time accepting of segregation and other realities of the southern situation, while deploring vulgar or violent behavior in its defense. The Heffners were not, in other words, outsiders (until they seemed to become so that summer) or troublemakers who found the trouble for which they came looking, as many white southerners said of that summer’s civil rights workers. Shortly after they left McComb, Malva Heffner told a reporter, If it could happen to us, it could happen to anyone. Carter’s book is usefully viewed as a detailed, convincing exposition of that hypothesis.

One of the safest generalizations to make about McComb, Mississippi, is that few cities in the state experienced such a sustained, intense period of violence during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and that few places of comparable violent resistance in the entire South have until very recently made less of an effort to understand, reflect upon, or come to terms with that fact. As is true throughout most of the state, there are no statues in McComb to commemorate the struggles of the 1960s, but during the Heffners’ years in town, there were no statues to earlier wars, either. McComb was a railroad town, founded after the Civil War. There were no Faulknerian memories, in marble or otherwise, that might serve as markers of a Confederate past, white Redemption, or anything else that might indicate a reserve of civil memory upon which a scene like the 1960s might have played out as one of those periodic challenges that rises, is dealt with, and then joins in the larger remembered history of order triumphing over chaos.

The lack of official public commemoration and discussion of the civil rights movement is not because, as in nearby Brookhaven, for instance, nothing of great value from the pre-1970 period seems to have been lost by local whites. That is to say, the lack of statues and other memorials is not because the years marked no significant events or changes. Indeed, elective politics, the schools, and other similar areas of contestation have certainly accommodated black power—and that is a term that needs careful qualification in this context—in ways that other communities in the state simply have not done as thoroughly or without a white retreat from the public schools or from the geographical boundaries of the community itself, as in Jackson, the state capital. Put simply, the McComb schools and McComb politics became areas of active black participation and authority in the 1980s and 1990s without generating the kind of white retreat that marks the dreadfully depressed communities of the Delta or the financially strapped capital city of Jackson. But this is not to say that McComb is a model for reconciliation or accommodation or a useful working arrangement between whites and blacks, for the circumstances that have caused the disappearance of the memory of the Heffners as well as a general amnesia (in the white public, at least) of those years, is contingent and specific, just as were the circumstances that led white McComb to drive away the Heffners in 1964.

McComb’s Carroll Oaks subdivision, where the Heffners bought a new house in 1954, was initially indistinguishable from many thousands of other collections of moderately prosperous ranch-style houses built in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Such houses were the ones in which World War II–era veterans raised their families and worked at white-collar or professional jobs like the one that Red Heffner had selling insurance policies in those long-ago days of middle-class prosperity and one-income families. In the mid-1960s, Carroll Oaks seemed new and fashionable and in mid-century style, and bore little resemblance to the solid Victorians, occasional Spanish Colonial, tidy bungalows, and other interesting architectural styles to be found in the old neighborhoods of west and central McComb, especially those around and off of centrally located Delaware Avenue. But while the subdivision was nouveau, it was not riche, at least not in any way that spoke meaningfully of white social class tensions. White McComb’s modest homes were not conspicuously divided from those of the more prosperous white professionals and older families by any striking or well-known boundaries. Such proximity, which meant that white children of the town spent their school years together, almost certainly led to a sense of community and pride in the neat little town that went beyond the usual rhetoric of civic boosterism. The closest thing to a white social divide in the town was East McComb, where modest houses and warehouses and small business and light industry existed side-by-side with railroad workers and their families.

For McComb was a railroad town, in ways that were remembered and not remembered in the 1960s. But that origin and economic definition meant a great deal to the town’s history. McComb lies just to the west