He and a character named Big Jim C. had arrested a young black Civil Rights leader in town.
"They had this line you know, to register, and they wouldn't stay where Big Jim C. wanted them", Jesse recounts to a half-sleeping Grace.
He beats him, shocks him with a cattle prod, and declares, "you are going to stop coming down to the court house and disrupting traffic and molesting the people and keeping us from our duties and keeping doctors from getting to sick white women and getting all them Northerners in this town to give our town a bad name—!"
As Jesse is about to leave the cell, the Civil Rights leader, now barely conscious, says to him, "You remember Old Julia?"
The scene is gruesome and violent yet treated as a good-natured spectacle for the whites, who leave the charred and mutilated body to rot while they settle down for a picnic.
Clark is widely remembered as a racist who employed violent methods (such as cattle prods) against Civil Rights protesters.
Perhaps the most notable formal aspect of the story is Baldwin's decision to focalize it through the point-of-view of a white police officer.
He does not comprehend the cause of this phenomenon, and so "works through" a series of associated memories, each time implicitly linking sexuality and violence (e.g., feeling his penis "violently stiffen" upon beating the young black man).
What Freud would call the "primal scene"—i.e., a traumatizing event in the child's early psychosexual development—is recovered at the end when Jesse remembers having attended the lynching.
In the cradle of the one white hand, the nigger's privates seemed as remote as meat being weighed in the scales; but seemed heavier, too, much heavier, and Jesse felt his scrotum tighten; and huge, huge, much bigger than his father's, flaccid, hairless, the largest thing he had ever seen till then, and the blackest.Jesse's racism could thus be interpreted as the result of a psychological trauma, which helps to explain why, upon finally returning to the "present", he fantasizes about being black in order to perform sexually with his wife.
As such, "Going to Meet the Man" suggests that Jesse's racism is so deep-seated that not only does it structure his political worldview, but his entire personality.
In the same debate with William F. Buckley Jr., in fact, Baldwin claims that "[t]he white South African or Mississippi sharecropper or Alabama sheriff has at bottom a system of reality which compels them really to believe when they face the Negro that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity".
[2] We can see this notion operative in Jesse's inability to understand why black folks would want to upset the social order, as well as in his outright hostility towards any challenge to white male dominance.