The poor whites didn’t really have anything going for them except their whiteness and the fact that blacks had to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to them. Since that was about all they had, they held on to it real tight. That’s why I developed a strong dislike of poor white folks for a while—they were the ones who did most of the damage to blacks in rural Mississippi. For example, the deputies who beat me in jail were poor whites. They had a little bit of authority and a black man to hate.
