Debate highlights Mississippi's racial evolution

The eight black baseball teams formed a new league with the white teams from across town.

"It feels good to be at the table, for your input to matter," Clemons says.

Walking through the community center, which is almost completed, Clemons shows evident pride. "Will there be Internet access in those rooms?" he asks one workman. Renovation of the swimming pool outside comes next.

Four black men sit in the shade outside the center, wondering whether the pool will be completed. "Leroy said it would," says Leon Baxtrum, 75, speaking of Clemons. "Leroy, they listen when he speaks. He has the ability to work within the system."

They all agreed that race relations in Philadelphia, while not perfect, were pretty good.

"There's probably more problems up (north) than down here," said Curlee Connors, 59. "But you got to have a whipping boy, so why not Mississippi."

Fred Evans, 65, left Philadelphia as a young man to work in Flint, Mich., then lived in California, Missouri and Illinois before retiring back home.

"When I left in the '60s, I hated it here," Evans says. "But things changed."

'Old times here are not forgotten'
"I don't want to be Pollyannish here. Like the song 'Dixie' says, old times here are not forgotten," says former secretary of state Dick Molpus, a Philadelphia native who received death threats after apologizing to the three families at a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the killings. "But I really do believe Mississippi can be a beacon for the United States to follow when it comes to race."

A statue of James Meredith now stands on the Ole Miss campus, near an administration building that remains marked by bullets fired in 1962. The university is home to a diverse student body and the Institute of Racial Reconciliation, which worked with Philadelphia on its historic resolution.

Republican Gov. Haley Barbour has signed bills to create a civil rights curriculum for public schools and a civil rights museum in Jackson, the state capital. The airport there already bears the name of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Blacks are part of the power structure now, holding 49 of the state legislature's 174 seats, plus dozens of mayor and county supervisor positions.

Yet there has never been a black statewide official in Mississippi since Reconstruction. There are 26 active white hate groups in the state, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Council of Conservative Citizens, which opposes racial integration and says America should "remain European in character," recently had 34 members in the state House of representatives, according to the SPLC.

Mississippi knows that racism lives on, which is one reason why it offers powerful lessons about how to move on.

In some ways, the rest of the nation has no choice but to follow.

Whites are projected to be a minority in the United States by the year 2042. In the new Mississippi, whites are expected to be a minority by 2015.

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