For starters, let me just say, read this book.
Hattiesburg’s historic Eureka School, on East Sixth Street, is mentioned frequently in William Sturkey’s book “Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.”
So it was fitting that when Sturkey came back to town to talk about his book, his address would be given in the upstairs auditorium of that school.
The book, generally speaking, is “a biracial history of the city,” Sturkey said. Its 12 chapters alternate between two very different ways of looking at the American South, in a quite Hattiesburg-centered fashion, during the Reconstruction era, on through the fight for civil rights for black Americans.
Why Hattiesburg?
“Hattiesburg was a beautiful lens, or a character, in the understanding of the Jim Crow era,” Sturkey said during his talk at the historic school on Oct. 16.
“You can’t understand the full picture without looking at both parts,” both the black and the white aspects of the story, and Hattiesburg specifically lent a “living, breathing, tragic” picture of that portion of American history, he said.
The Eureka School was the first public school built specifically for African-Americans in Hattiesburg, and it was the only public school for those students from 1921 to 1949. After a new high school for African-Americans was built in 1947, the building continued as an elementary school until 1987.
Much of the two-story structure will eventually become a museum, for the civil rights struggle in general, but for the Mobile Street area of Hattiesburg, more specifically.
“There hasn’t been a chance to make it a museum,” said Rick Taylor, while introducing Sturkey. Taylor is executive director of the Hattiesburg Convention Commission, which supervises use of the space.
The building, especially the roof, was damaged in the 2013 tornado that ripped through Hattiesburg, mandating extensive renovations. Once the school had been renovated, it began being used as an event space – like the event surrounding Sturkey’s speech – and ever since, “it’s been too busy to do anything else,” like open a museum, Taylor said.
Sturkey began working on the book when he was a grad student at the University of Southern Mississippi. It’s an extraordinarily well-researched book (It was published by the Harvard University Press, which isn’t known for producing pablum. More than a quarter of the book is bibliography, glossary, and notes.).
Currently, Sturkey is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches courses on the history of the American South, especially the history of African-Americans in it.
Before publishing his book, Sturkey said, he “never actually spent much time inside Eureka High School.”
Much of Hattiesburg’s struggle against the Jim Crow laws occurred before the 1960s, when the battle for equal civil rights for African-Americans is generally thought to have happened.
“Everything won in the Civil Rights movement had already been guaranteed” by the laws passed during the Reconstruction Era, Sturkey said in his address to the capacity crowd. The issue was that it was extraordinarily difficult for black people to proceed with claiming the rights they already (in theory) had.
“First, African-Americans had to prove that they were, in fact, being discriminated against,” he said, noting that a great number of state and federal cases involving civil rights did, in fact, come from Hattiesburg. “Hattiesburg had an amazing role in that process.”
In response to a question from the crowd, Sturkey said he doesn’t “think of the Jim Crow laws as being the same thing as racial segregation.”
Segregation was different because it kept the races separate, while the Jim Crow laws intentionally prevented black people from exercising rights they already had, he said.
The book focuses on the importance of churches in the Mobile Street area of what is now known as East Hattiesburg. That’s how much of Sturkey’s research was accomplished, he acknowledged.
There was no local newspaper outlet for that kind of news, so local black women sent stories about their daily lives in Hattiesburg to newspapers in larger, mostly northern, cities – such as Chicago’s Defender – almost daily, but at least weekly, Sturkey said.
Because of that, there is a better record of life during that era from southern Mississippi than from most other parts of the country.
Another of Sturkey’s primary sources was Mississippi’s oral history project, he said, noting that listening to the recorded interviews provided “leads” that helped him on the project.
The principal black family profiled in the book, the Smiths, produced four doctors in the 1940s, as well as running several businesses in downtown Hattiesburg.
“Because of their extraordinary lives, it made the Smith family history easier to follow” than most other families in this area, at that time, Sturkey said, whether those families were white or black.
One more thing that was interesting to him, and then we’ll stop: “Even the archives were segregated.”
