New York in the '50s by Dan Wakefield Page B

you a young lawyer?”
    â€œNo, ma’am,” I said. “I’m a reporter, from New York.”
    It was on that trip that I first felt justified in identifying New York as my home. I went around the racially tense town in the Delta—even knocking on people’s doors to interview them about the controversial case that was making headlines—proudly identifying myself as a reporter for The Nation , “in New York.” It was hardly a way to win favor. Just being a reporter from up north was enough to get me taken for a ride by two sheriff’s deputies, who dropped me in the middle of nowhere so I had to walk back to town in the gathering dark. I was lucky a ride was all they gave me.
    I felt no fear because I was young and naïve, and also because Murray Kempton was there, to introduce me to the other reporters and make sure I knew what was going on. He saw to it that I had a room in town, and that I got out of there when the other reporters left for a motel in the bigger, less tense city of Greenville to write their stories, so I wouldn’t be the lone Yankee in Sumner after the trial.
    The trial in the small, sweltering, segregated courtroom was indeed classic, with the murdered boy’s uncle, an aged Negro field hand named Moses Wright, testifying against Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the two white men accused of the brutal murder. Their acquittal was a foregone conclusion of white supremacy ruling over law. The drama set the stage for the conflict to come, the struggle for civil rights in the South, in which Mose Wright was only the first of the long-oppressed people of his race to stand up, in the face of threats and against the whole weight of tradition and power in the region, and proclaim the right to the freedom they were supposed to have received the century before.
    I sat up all night writing so that I could file my report at Western Union the next morning, to make the deadline. I finished at dawn. The lead of my piece summed up my perception of the trial and the situation we were now to observe as it went through its struggleto change in the decade to come: “The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it.”
    The Nation ran the story, “Justice in Sumner,” with my byline, and suddenly I was a published writer in a national magazine. I bought up all the copies at the local newsstand and passed them out like cigars—this, in fact, was a birth. The editors and, more important, the publisher of The Nation liked the piece and wanted me to come in and meet them and talk about doing more work.
    The offices of The Nation were at 333 Sixth Avenue, at the corner of West 4th Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. There was nothing colorful, however, about the dreary old building that housed the magazine. You took a rickety freight elevator to the fourth floor and saw an elderly telephone operator at one of those old-fashioned switchboards with wires that plugged into little sockets to connect calls, the kind you see in black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties. The operator also acted as receptionist, and you waited until she finished answering and connecting calls to say who it was you wanted to see.
    The editor in chief was Carey McWilliams, a liberal journalist who had written a well-respected book called Factories in the Field , an account of migrant workers in California. Carey’s working-editor garb was a gray cardigan sweater he buttoned halfway up his white shirt with tie; his jacket hung on a coatrack by his desk. He always had on those shoes specially formed for the feet, which reminded me of the kind Frankenstein wore—one Nation contributor, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, called them space shoes. Norman, in fact, called Carey “Space Shoes” or “Space” or “Old Space,” a nickname that made me