One month before the Selma march, your editor, then 27, went to Jackson, Mississippi, to cover the hearings of the US Commission of Civil Rights.
Sam Smith, 1965 - Last February, the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights went the other side of Memphis, to Jackson, Miss., to view for itself this state, that, 100 years after the end of Civil War, remains morally and philosophically seceded from the Union.
We attended the week of hearings and took a look around. This is our story:
Alfred Whitley is a Mississippi Negro who works at a Natchez rubber plant. Coming home from work one evening, he was stopped by a road block. Hooded men with robes appeared, hauled Whitley out of the car, took him into some nearby woods, stripped and beat him.
The hooded men accused Whitley of being "the leading nigger in the NAACP" and demanded to know the name of the white man in charge.
The beating continued, punctuated by the crack of a bullwhip. Whitley was forced to drink a bottle of castor oil. One of the men said, "He's the toughest one I ever beat." Then Whitley was told, "Get up and run." He took off in the Mississippi dark, ran about fifty feet, and fell on his stomach. Searchlights glared above him. Then the sound of guns. Bullets whizzed overhead. Finally it stopped. The men were gone.
Whitley got dressed and went home.
Archie Curtis is a Negro who runs the Curtis Funeral Home in Natchez.
One year ago, late on a February evening, Curtis received a phone call asking that he bring his ambulance to a remote rural spot to pick up a sick person. The funeral director called his ambulance driver, Willie Jackson, and the two of them drove off on the call.
They had been told to come to a crossroad where someone would be waiting to lead them to the proper house. Reaching the rendezvous, the two Negroes found no one. They proceeded a bit further, then stopped to ask directions from those in a car behind them.
It was an ambush. Four men with white hoods stepped from the car.
Curtis and Jackson were blindfolded, taken a distance, made to strip, then struck with whips.
Cnrtis pleaded, "Man, don't be whipping me like this." But the men continued.
One suggested, "We ought to kill them." But they didn't: instead left the pair with the warning, "You better not tell anybody about this." Curtis turned to his driver and, with the resignation of a man to whom such an experience came as no surprise, said simply, "Well, Willie, we got to get dressed and go home."
T. V. Johnson, a Belzoni Negro, has not been beaten or whipped. He even registered to vote back in 1954.
But he hasn't voted.
During his testimony before the Civil Rights Commission, the following exchange took place :
Q. Are you going ro
try (to vote) .'
A. No, not until the intimidation
Q. When will you vote?
A. When they all go down.
Q. Who are you afraid of?
A. Everybody .
And why not? Tomorrow it may be T. V. Johnson's night in the woods.
It is hard to be more specific in a state where hooded men appear in the night with bullwhips, bombs are thrown from passing cars, and phone calls bring anonymous threats.
It is said that the Mississippi Negro is fighting for equality. That is not true. He hasn't even gotten that far.
His struggle of the moment is to gain a foothold so he may begin the fight, for equality.
Mississippi is a state where a pronouncement by the Governor or the Chamber of Commerce calling for law and order is a novelty. It is a state where members of a federal panel appointed to look into the rights of citizens solemnly applauds a city not because of any great strides in promoting equality, but because no heads have been bashed in there recently.
It is a state where many appear to believe that the limits of progress are reached when terror is eliminated.
In such an atmosphere sophisticated arguments over civil rights lose their meaning. Until some of the most primitive concepts of democracy are accepted - such as the right of a citizen to vote and the obligation of government to protect its citizens - it matters little who uses which washroom.
The Negro in Mississippi is not only segregated: he has been isolated from almost every mechanism that might possibly change his condition.
You do not have to experience the brutal nights of Archie Curtis or Alfred Whitley to learn the high cost of being a Negro in Mississippi.
The story of these incidents spreads through their county and beyond, bringing with them the tacit moral: don't try to change things.
Over the past few years Negroes have been trying to change things and the most fundamental change they have sought is the right to vote.
Henry Rayburn, a 63-year-old farmer from near Charleston, was approached by a man with a club when he went to vote. Rayburn says the man told him "he would kill me if I tried to vote." The Commission wanted to know if the police had been notified of the threat. No, Rayburn replied, because "the law coincides with what the other side does insofar as Negroes are involved." Alena Hamlett of Scobey registered in 1962. When her name was published in the local newspaper, as required by Mississippi law, a female effigy was hung near her home.
Dorothy Mae Foster went to register with her husband at Fayette in 1963. She was later visited by three men who presented a card that read: "Thousands of Klansmen are waiting, watching, Don't be misled. Let your conscience be your guide. Ku Klux Klan."
She was told, "If you don't take your name off the list you will be sorry." Mrs. Mary Welch of Humphreys County said she was told by a county official that "I was going to get in trouble and wasn't going to get any more commodities." Rural Negroes in Mississippi depend upon surplus agricultural commodities for survival.
When the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee attempted to organize a voter registration drive in Macomb, 16 bombings occurred.
Mrs. Mary Thomas, a high school graduate, had her photograph taken by county police when she went to register. She was asked why she wanted to register. "We've always given you commodities." a county official told her.
Shortly after her return home, a deputy sheriff arrived and arrested her for selling beer without a county license.
She was fined $365.71 for failure to have a $15 license. She had never been told whether she passed the registration test.
Jesse James Brewer, a farmer from Tallahatchie County, went to register last summer. He was told by the sheriff that he had gone to the wrong place. On the way to the proper courthouse, the sheriff passed him. Upon his arrival, Brewer and other Negro registrants were surrounded by a group of men.
One of them said. "You niggers get away from the courthouse. You don't have no business here." For the next three weeks trucks with gun racks on the back repeatedly drove up and circled Brewer's house.
He finally registered on the fourth try.
Brewer is a World War II veteran.
He told the Commission, "The only time I felt like a man was when I was in the Army. After I got out it seemed my freedom run out." And he added, "I want to vote because there are some things I want to get straight."
The Negro community was indicated by a survey of Negro teachers presented to the Commission by James W. Protho.
Teachers in four counties were interviewed.
In one county, 62% of the teachers refused to be interviewed because the school superintendent had warned them not to discuss' civil rights with anyone.
Registration of teachers ran from a low of 0% to a high of 74%. In every county at least 40% of 'the teachers volunteered expressions of fear concerning voting. In one county 79% expressed fear.
They did not like talking about it.
As one teacher put it, "The walls have ears." Mississippi, pollster Protho concluded, is a "totalitarian local system." Beatings, bombings, burnings, threats of violence, warnings that commodities will be cut off, loss of jobs, removal of credit, as well as photographing, trumped up charges, and other harassment by police, are routine methods of voter intimidation.
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