Midway through his senior year Rubin decided he had no interest in a law career so he discarded all his law school applications and graduated, much to his parents chagrin, with no job or concrete plans for the future. Since his most marketable assets were his linguistic skills and writing ability, he thought he might land a job in journalism. Finding such a position in his home town of New York seemed laughable, but the trade magazines for journalists offered some hope. It looked too good to be true when he found an ad for a sports editor for a small daily paper in Greenwood, Mississippi, that did not require a degree in journalism. There was a catch, of course. The pay was not very much ($240 a week), but he didn’t need a journalism degree and they didn’t ask if he could type. (He couldn’t.)

Rubin quickly experienced culture shock in a big way. All the idealistic racial equality of a fully integrated south that he had expected to find in 1988 was a pipe dream. Certainly the public schools were integrated, but many white families in Mississippi sent their children to private “academies” (often the physical building was little more than a shack) that had no black students. In Greenwood, as in other small towns, whites lived in certain areas of towns and blacks in others, churches were white or black, as were stores and restaurants.

The issue of race aside, people in Greenwood were warm and friendly, and considered him, a New York Jew, one of them. While it was easy to fit in, he had a niggling feeling that something was wrong. According to his boss, his job was to report on football because that was the only sport in which the readership had any interest in the fall.

Although other schools got a mention, he was to concentrate on Greenwood High School, which had traditionally had a great team. In covering the high school games Rubin found the one anomaly in the “separate but equal” lifestyle that Greenwood adopted. In 1988 the high school was half black, half white and both races were represented on the football team. That year the quarterback was Hardy Campbell, a black senior who had never played high school ball. The coaches had recruited Hardy after seeing him throw the ball in scratch games at his housing development. The coaches were not wrong in their assessment of the young quarterback’s ability. Hardy led his team to the high school championship and was recruited by Mississippi State and the University of Mississippi . Rubin often thought during that year, that his fledgling year at the Greenwood Commonwealth paralleled Hardy’s at Greenwood High. Both were destined for something far greater than success in a small Mississippi town.

After a year in Greenwood, Rubin felt it was time for him to leave. While everyone in the community had gone out of their way to welcome him and make him fit in, he was, by not opposing their separate but equal stance, tacitly accepting it. Having experienced some degree of prejudice as a Jew, he had empathy for the blacks. Life went on and six years later in a phone conversation with Jack Henderson, the man he replaced as sports editor who had become a good friend, he learned some alarming news. Hardy Campbell, the boy he felt destined for NFL greatness was in jail, accused of the murder of Freddie Williams, another black that Rubin had also known. Rubin couldn’t believe that the mild mannered Hardy could be guilty of such a crime. He decided to return to Greenwood to get some answers.

A Confederacy of Silence, a nonfiction work is at once a memoir of Richard Rubin’s year as a cub reporter, a look at race relations in the rural south in 1988, the coverage of a bizarre murder, and the even more bizarre trial of a black man accused of killing another black man. Rubin clearly and concisely presents “a true tale of the new old South.”

Although he admits to his own opinions he dispassionately relates the views of others. An eye opening picture of the Mississippi Delta emerges from these pages. “The Delta is a third-world country in the middle of America. The Delta is poverty and poverty is the Delta. The two are inseparable, and have been, I suspect, since Emancipation. And, like everything else in the Delta, poverty exists and persists and flourishes in two varieties : black and white.”

--Andy Plonka