The Blood of Emmett Till(36)

In the wake of Brown, the state’s NAACP president E. J. Stringer decided to follow the national NAACP’s agenda of seeking “the removal of all racial segregation in public education . . . without compromise of principle.” It was one thing to pass such resolutions in Atlanta or to approve of them in New York, but quite another to act on them in Mississippi. Nonetheless Stringer pushed the state branches to petition their local school boards to “take immediate steps to reorganize the public schools . . . in accordance with the constitutional principles enunciated by the Supreme Court on May 17” and to threaten legal action if necessary.56

The uncertain legal power of these petitions and the “communist-inspired” NAACP fueled paranoia if not panic among many white Mississippians. In Amite County a mob of twenty or so whites led by the sheriff and a member of the school board burst into an NAACP meeting at the local black school, snatched away the chapter’s records, and interrogated the members. In Kemper County a large mob of heavily armed whites led by the sheriff appeared on the first day of classes at an all-white school because of alarming rumors that a group of black parents intended to enroll their children. In the fall of 1954 the Mississippi state legislature resubmitted a constitutional amendment to give them legal power to abolish the public schools and replace them with publicly funded “private” academies.

That summer thirty African Americans in Walthall County petitioned to allow their children to attend the previously all-white public schools there. School officials responded by closing the local black schools for two weeks and firing a school bus driver who had signed the petition.57 At the subsequent hearing the board chair exclaimed, “Nigger, don’t you want to take your name off this petition that says you want to go to school with white children?”58 After further protests and threats from local whites, all thirty of the petitioners withdrew their names. Some insisted they had not understood the petition’s contents and thought it was seeking equal school facilities, not attendance at white schools.59

It is doubtful that the petitioners in Walthall County actually misunderstood their own desegregation petition. It is certain that they knew their pursuit of justice put their children directly in harm’s way, which helps explain why some African American leaders in the state declared equal facilities a sufficient ambition. Unable to reach any lasting consensus among themselves, many thought school equalization—the fulfillment of Plessy, not Brown—seemed both more likely and perhaps more desirable. J. H. White, president of Mississippi Vocational College, pleaded with the NAACP leadership to pursue “adequate facilities and other things that our people need first and when you lay that foundation you have made a great contribution and many other problems will be solved in years to come.”60 Neither side, White believed, was ready for full-blown integration. Far more often black leaders simply agreed with T. R. M. Howard’s astute assessment that “to petition school boards in Mississippi at the present time is like going to hunt a bear with a cap pistol.”61

That the NAACP in Mississippi proceeded to battle for school desegregation and voting rights in this atmosphere is remarkable. Six days after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown II, telling school authorities to move “with all deliberate speed,” the Mississippi NAACP directed its branches to organize black parents to petition local school boards to desegregate the schools. None of these parents could have had the slightest illusion as to the confrontation they were facing, the certainty that it would call forth violence, and the possibility of that violence being visited on their children. Percy Greene, the conservative black editor of the Jackson Advocate, called the NAACP’s school desegregation crusade “leading a group of unthinking and unrealistic Negroes over the precipice to be drowned and destroyed in the whirlpool of hate and destruction.” The Mississippi NAACP begged to differ. The Vicksburg chapter filed the first petition on July 18, calling on the local school board to “take immediate concrete steps leading to the early elimination of segregation in the public schools.”62

The white power structure responded with the strength of public opinion—and implicit threats. When the Vicksburg Post published the names of all those parents who had signed the petition, several asked that their names be removed. By mid-August NAACP chapters in Natchez, Jackson, Yazoo City, and Clarksdale filed similar petitions. As advised by the state conference, the Yazoo City branch asked the school board for “reorganization” of the school system on a “non-discriminatory basis.” In each case the Citizens’ Council published signers’ names, addresses, and phone numbers in large ads in the local newspaper. Reprisals, threats, and intimidation inevitably followed. “If the whites saw your name on the list,” said Aaron Henry, “you just caught hell.”63

Death threats became routine for the petitioners. Many lost their jobs, as did their loved ones. Local banks called in their loans or forced those who signed to withdraw their money. Rocks and bullets flew through their windows. Insurance companies canceled their policies. “In each instance there has been some form of economic reprisal or physical intimidation,” Medgar Evers reported to the national office. The number of petitioners who withdrew their signature grew quickly: in Clarksdale 83 of 303; in Vicksburg 135 of 140; in Jackson 13 of 42; and in Natchez 54 of 89.64

“In Yazoo City, in particular, signers have been fired from their jobs,” Evers reported. “Telephone calls threatening the lives of the persons, have created a continued atmosphere of tenseness which has the city’s two racial groups on edge.” Fifty-one of the fifty-three signatories of the Yazoo City petition soon removed their names; the other two had already left town. In fact, even though NAACP membership in Mississippi swelled in 1954 and grew by 50 percent in 1955, the Yazoo City branch, which before the petition had two hundred members, soon ceased to exist.65 Evers wrote to the national office a few months later, “Honestly, Mr. Wilkins, for Yazoo City there doesn’t seem to be much hope. The Negroes will not come together and our former president has not cooperated at all. It appears that [members of the Citizens’ Council] have gotten next to him and we can’t get any results, not even [to] call a meeting. One thing, the people are afraid—I would say it is worse than being behind the Iron Curtain.”66