There was nothing like the Neshoba County Fair. Every July, farm families from across the middle of the state moved into elaborate on-site two-story cabins for a week, enjoying card games, bull sessions, and romancing on the front porch and balcony all night long, after spending long days enjoying the midway, the livestock displays, country and gospel music, mule races, beauty contests, pie-eating contests—and the only legal horse racing in the state. White families, that is. Blacks only participated as employees. In the 1950s and ’60s, the fair was the place where
