A couple of weeks ago I finished reading William Sturkey’s Hattiesburg, An American City in Black and White. Dr. Sturkey is a faculty member in the history department at the University of North Carolina, having been previously a visiting professor here at Southern Miss. In other words, he is a well-trained, legitimate historian.
For me this was a page turner. Why? I could drive down many streets in downtown Hattiesburg and east of there toward the Leaf River, and “see” the city developing, from the time Captain William H. Hardy stopped for lunch on the banks of the Leaf in 1882 through the nineteen sixties’ civil rights movement.
In this brief review I’ll mention only three of the many aspects of the book that made it valuable reading for me. First, Sturkey makes extensive use of archival material available locally, especially oral histories, court records and newspaper accounts. And if you have lived here for a while as I have, you will see many familiar names along with their interesting backgrounds, deeds and misdeeds.
Second, Sturkey chronicles the many economic ups and downs of the city. The timber companies began to discover the extensive longleaf pine forests across south Mississippi not long after the city’s founding, and the Hattiesburg area boomed–not just with the likes of Tatum Lumber Company but also with the dozens of small sawmills scattered along the Leaf and Bouie Rivers. Then when the timber ran out in the Twenties (no thought having been given to concepts like sustainability), employment plummeted, the economy hit rock bottom and the Great Depression followed in the 1930’s. Camp Shelby gearing up for WW I helped some, and there was some Federal aid during the Depression. However, the next really big economic boost came with Camp Shelby’s massive build up before and during WW II. After the war of course came another weak economy.
Third, the story of Hattiesburg that Dr. Sturkey tells, untold before, is a fuller picture of the city, one that describes in detail how the self-contained city within a city, the Mobile Street District, sustained an oppressed population that was unable to vote or to participate equally in the otherwise flourishing, white economy that just across the tracks to the west. A clear, yet subtle, technique of Sturkey’s is to add the word “white,” when appropriate, to describe, for example, a new manufacturing concern that located in Hattiesburg after WW II, Reliance Manufacturing. It brought 400 new jobs to the city, but they were white jobs. Indeed African-American citizens were, more often than not, deprived of the benefits that came to Hattiesburg, whether in the form of new businesses or new jobs at Camp Shelby or Federal assistance during the Great Depression. Indeed, much of the Hattiesburg story is about the grit, vision and determination of local black citizens to make their way despite the separate but unequal lives they were forced to live.
Professor Sturkey presents Hattiesburg through a wider and more inclusive lens than most of us have ever used, to take a new look at this city we call home. If read and appreciated, readers, especially white readers, will come away with a renewed respect for the African-American forebears who helped build this city.
Dick Conville
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