on that May 17, the Supreme Court of the United States released its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas,
outlawing racial segregation in public schools. Over the next several
months, as East absorbed what the ruling would mean for Mississippi, he
found himself agreeing with the court’s reasoning and its 9-0 opinion.
The vast majority of his advertisers did not, so he kept his thoughts to
himself. “I didn’t entertain any thought of coming out against the
mores of the society in which I had been born and reared,” he recalled.
Then Mississippi, like most Southern states, began taking steps to
preserve its segregated society. The legislature passed a law requiring
citizens to interpret, in writing, parts of the state constitution in
order to register to vote. Lawmakers established the Mississippi State
Sovereignty Commission, which doubled as a tourism-promotion board and
an intrastate spy agency. In communities around the state, townspeople
organized White Citizens’ Councils to counter advocacy for civil rights.
“I closed my eyes and ears tighter,” East remembered later. “But
inside my heart and mind something was wrong. My moods of depression
were frequent; my outbursts of temper were frequent. I knew neither why
nor what. One thing I did know: I had to get it out, whatever it was.”
So he sat in his office one day in the spring of 1955 and wrote that
it was time for a new symbol for the Magnolia State. After all, “once
you have seen a magnolia, you have seen all magnolias.” Therefore, “as a
100 percent red-blooded Mississippian, we feel the magnolia should give
way to the crawfish—and soon, too.” The crawfish was fitting, he wrote,
because it moves only “backward, toward the mud from which he came,”
and “progress in our state is made that way.”
When the Petal Paper came out several days later, the
response was muted: East received two phone calls, both from men who
seemed to mistake his sarcasm as ridiculing Mississippi’s black
population. They bought subscriptions. “Unfortunately,” the newspaperman
recalled, “the lack of reaction gave me a false sense of security; it
let me go blindly into a fool’s paradise.”
**********
Thus the tiny Petal Paper, circulation 2,300 at its peak,
launched one of the most relentless and single-minded crusades in the
history of the Southern press, during which East went from being an
eager-to-please businessman to what he called an “ulcerated,
pistol-packing editor” who took on the biggest issue of his day with
unforgiving satire. His unique stand for racial equality put him in
touch with Eleanor Roosevelt, William Faulkner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
Upton Sinclair, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and the TV entertainer Steve
Allen and his actress wife, Jayne Meadows. It also got East spied on,
spat upon and threatened with violence and worse.
In the following months, East unleashed a barrage of screwball
satire to ridicule segregation, white supremacy, and massive resistance
to integration. He advocated replacing the magnolia as the state
symbol with the crawfish because the crawfish’s idea of progress
was to move “backward toward the mud from which he came.” East
lampooned Mississippi’s US senator James O. Eastland as “Our Jungle
Gem.” One satirical editorial described St. Peter interrogating blacks
at the entrance to heaven. Another editorial addressed to Bible Belt
Brethren translated the King James Version of the Bible into the
Dixiecrat tongue: “‘And he took the DIXIE CUPS, and gave thanks that
they were SEPARATE BUT EQUAL, and said, Take this MINT JULEP and divide
it among yourselves.’ Dixiecrat Luke 22:17.” East castigated the
Citizens’ Councils and Ku Klux Klan as the “Bigger and Better Bigots
Bureau.” A “news story” reprinted the text of a speech by the
Honorable Jefferson D. Dixiecrat to the Mississippi Chapter of the
Professional Southerners Club, extolling its progress in keeping blacks
from voting.
The Petal Paper’s most legendary broadside took the
form of a March 1956 full-page advertisement with a caricature of
a mule proclaiming, “Yes, You too, can be SUPERIOR, Join the
Glorious Citizens Clan Next Thursday Night!” For only five
dollars, “Citizens Clan” members received ten freedoms, including
“Freedom to yell ‘N——-’ as much as you please without your conscience
bothering you!” and “Freedom to be superior without brain, character,
or principle!” A note at the bottom of the page declared, “This
Page in Behalf of Liberalism, Fairness and Progress Donated by The
Petal Paper.” Known as the “jackass” advertisement, it was
reprinted in the Reporter (March 1957) and Harper’s
(January 1959)
and by East’s account had appeared in all fifty states, Canada, Japan,
Ireland, Australia, France, Italy, and Germany.
By November 1956 wholesale cancellations of local
advertising and subscriptions left the Petal Paper struggling
along on out-of-state
subscriptions and donations. “Friends of P. D. East” mustered financial
and moral support from Steve Allen, Harry Belafonte, Harry Golden, John
Howard Griffin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, generating five thousand dollars
in 1959. A year later, Louisville Courier-Journal editor Mark
Ethridge, a native Mississippian who had encouraged East to write about
race, remarked that “his paper is a hobby now rather than a business.”
Royalties from East’s memoir provided a brief financial respite,
but the Petal Paper, already appearing
irregularly, continued only sporadically after East relocated to
Fairhope, Alabama, in 1963 to escape threats and harassment. By
1968, he had accrued debts totaling twenty-five thousand dollars.
“The loner of the civil rights movement,” East died of liver
failure in Fairhope on 31 December 1971. His memoir, The
Magnolia Jungle: The Life, Times, and Education of a Southern
Editor (1960), ended with a fitting epitaph: “His beloved
Magnolia Jungle needed a path. It needed clearing. Let it be said of P.
D. East: With his heart and his hatchet he hacked like hell!”
