“Yet, elsewhere, all over town, there were suggestions that something new was coming to the surface here, something never quite articulated with any degree of force or with the courage of numbers in many Deep-Southern towns, some painful summoning with deepest wellsprings. There were whites in town who fully intended to keep their children in the public schools, and who not only would say so openly, but who after a time would even go further and defend the very notion itself of integrated education as a positive encouragement to their children’s learning. At first this spirit was imperceptible, but gradually, under the influence of some of Yazoo’s white leaders and with the emergence of others of like mind, it became a movement with noticeable strength behind it.”

– from “Holding Our Breath: October 1969 – January 1970” in Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town by Willie Morris, published in Reporting Civil Rights, Volume Two