In the room at the Holiday Inn in Tupelo, Miss., there are no towels. But there is a fly swatter with a sign on its handle that reads FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY. A visitor in Tupelo gets told again and again, "This town could be the model for all other Southern towns." On normal Saturday mornings, the main street fills up peaceably with shoppers, black and white, from all over Lee County, plus a sprinkling of reverent tourists looking for Elvis Presley's birthplace.
On this Saturday morning, seven Ku Klux Klansmen are sitting at a table in the Holiday Inn coffeeshop eating grits and scrambled eggs. Wives and children have been put at smaller tables. Out behind the inn, a dozen Mississippi state highway patrolmen are clustered around the trunk of a car, joking and passing out bullets like jelly beans as they draw a day's supply of ammunition. "Did you count 'em? I give you 18, didn't I?" says one. "Now, you know I can't count," comes the reply. One of them tells me they are going to shoot skeet. "Yeah, down at the skeet march," adds another. Every skeet one finds this hilarious.
But the people of Tupelo, torn between sheer incredulity and cold fear, do not find their situation funny. Tupelo (pop. 26,500) managed to tiptoe all the way through the '60s without any civil rights trouble. Ever since spring, though, local blacks have been boycotting stores, first to protest the failure of the city to fire two white policemen accused of beating a black prisoner, then, when the two resigned, to demand more jobs. And here is the Ku Klux Klan threatening a rally and cross-burning outside town on the very day that the United League of North Mississippi, a black civil rights group, has scheduled a protest march. Both groups are headed for the county courthouse. All week little Southern Airway's 18-seat Metros, known locally as "weed eaters," have been pumping in from Memphis and Atlanta, loaded with Klansmen and league supporters from as far away as San Francisco.
In the Waffle House coffeeshop on Gloster Street, Jerry Rice groans, "I think there're a lot of people like me who just can't believe these guys are still running around in sheets. This is 1978." Walter Christian, a local insurance man, grumbles, "Why did they pick Saturday, anyway? Saturday is our busiest shopping day." Most people have a deeper fear. They are pretty sure there will be a shooting. "Life is cheaper down here than in the North," says Mel Blatt, who migrated to Mississippi from New York a few years back. "You don't have to do much to get yourself shot."
Just before noon, 600 blacks step out from the Springhill Missionary Baptist Church on Green Street and head silently for the courthouse, walking three abreast and carrying signs reading SMASH THE KLAN. A police helicopter whirls overhead. The 65-member Tupelo police force is stationed along the route, looking like a seedy version of a TV SWAT team. Most carry 12-gauge pump guns or rifles (some with bayonets), and several big old boys are bulging out of blue bulletproof vests. They look mad. "I walked point for 31 days in a row in Viet Nam," says a young black marcher. "I was tense, but not scared. That's how I feel today."