So the Heffners Left McComb

<The shocking tale of a white McComb family ostracized and devastated after breaking bread with civil rights workersOn Saturday September 5 1964 the family of Albert W. Red Heffner Jr. a successful insurance agent left their house at 202 Shannon Drive in McComb Mississippi where they had lived for ten years. They never returned. In the eyes of neighbors their unforgiveable sin was to have spoken on several occasions with civil rights workers and to have invited two into their home. Consequently the Heffners were subjected to a campaign of harassment ostracism and economic retaliation shocking to a white family that believed that they were respected community members.So the Heffners Left McComb originally published in 1965 and reprinted now for the first time is Greenville journalist Hodding Carter's account of the events that led to the Heffners' downfall. Historian Trent Brown a McComb native supplies a substantial introduction evaluating the book's significance. The Heffners' story demonstrates the forces of fear conformity communal pressure and threats of retaliation that silenced so many white Mississippians during the 1950s and 1960s. Carter's book provides a valuable portrait of a family that was not choosing to make a stand but merely extending humane hospitality. Yet the Heffners were systematically punished and driven into exile for what was perceived as treason against white apartheid.