The Wages of Virtue

Even when expected, the horrible is shocking; the contents of black plastic bags, now named only X-1, X-2, X-3, bear a mute testimony to the perverse of virtue paid in Mississippi. A land characterized, surely victimized, by its simple almost elemental way of life has replied to change in the most simple and elemental way--murder.

But words of outrage, demands for justice, pleas for moderation, and abhorrence of violence seem terribly hollow and inadequate now. In the North, the bald fact of death for men who might have been friends, or sons, is evocative enough. In the South, the language is not the same; the paradoxical meanings of justice, law, and minority rights make our words impotent.

Only the painful change in Mississippi helps give meaning to the waste of life. It is a change in the language which both Negroes and white speak, a change in power: power in votes, power in education, power in political awareness.

No one has any illusions that the millenium will soon descend on Meridian or Jackson or Batesville. At best, within a reasonable number of years, there will be a stalemate of mutual respect. Only then will the longer process of assimilation and acculturation take place.

But without the pressure of votes and increasing knowledge, there would be no change in the nearly monolithic, completely hierarchical society which is Mississippi. That the state cannot be changed in a day is not an indication of the folly of civil rights workers but a measure of their courage.