Economic reprisals against anyone, black or white, who favored racial equality were the Councils’ standard method. Black teachers who overstepped Jim Crow’s boundaries, openly favored racial equality, or were known to have joined the NAACP could count on losing their job. Black sharecroppers who registered to vote, signed a school desegregation petition, attended an NAACP meeting, or otherwise made known their dissatisfaction with the prevailing social order were in for trouble. “We won’t gin their cotton; we won’t allow them credit; and we’ll move them out of their houses if necessary, to keep them in line,” said one Yazoo County planter.43
Council members would obtain the names of dissidents and then contact their employers. If the employers were sympathetic, the member would ask them to tell the offending employees to take a vacation. If they ceased the offending activity, the employer might let them come back to work. If not, the “vacation” was permanent. In cases where the intransigent citizen was an independent merchant, farmer, or craftsman, credit could be cut off or wholesalers persuaded to stop providing necessary supplies. If these means did not prove effective, a visit from a local Citizens’ Council member was in order. “They’d come and tell them, ‘You’ve lived in this community a long time and if you want to stay here in peace, you’d better get your name off this list,’?” explained Medgar Evers. Personal visits tended to be persuasive as the implied threats grew more and more clear. The Citizens’ Councils could publicly declare their unwillingness to use violence because other whites, including Council members, were reliably willing to exercise it, and African Americans, without meaningful benefit of laws or police, were grossly exposed. The NAACP did what little it could. “We are investigating every case of intimidation that comes to our attention and action is being taken as fast as we can move,” reported Ruby Hurley of the NAACP’s Southeast Regional Office in September 1955. “We have conferred with officials in the Department of Justice about the murders and other acts of violence and intimidation which have occurred in Mississippi.”44
The state NAACP president E. J. Stringer reported all manner of pressures and reprisals against him in the wake of the 1954 school petitions. His dental supplies vendor suddenly refused him credit. His insurance company canceled his policies. Loyal patients told him they had to patronize other dentists or risk losing their job. The IRS audited his finances. Banks in Mississippi refused to loan him money. His wife lost her teaching job. Death threats made answering the telephone a dicey proposition. The Stringers began to sleep in a middle bedroom as a precaution against bombings. “I had weapons in my house,” he recalled. “And not only in my house, I had weapons on me when I went to my office, because I knew people were out to get me.” He kept a pistol out of sight but close at hand even when he worked on teeth or did his paperwork. “I would take my revolver with me and put it in the drawer, right where I worked.” Brave soul that he was, Stringer decided not to run for reelection in late 1954, and Dr. A. H. McCoy, a physician from Jackson, replaced him.45
McCoy was barely in office before the death threats began. The Jackson Daily News warned that if the NAACP persisted in pushing school integration petitions, “bloodshed” would be inevitable. After the NAACP filed its local school petition in Jackson, Ellis Wright, president of the local Citizens’ Council, snapped, “We now tell the NAACP people they have started something they will never finish.” McCoy took the U.S. Supreme Court at its word, however. He replied, “We just gave them the courtesy title of petitions. They were more in the nature of ultimatums.” If violence erupted, he assured the newspaper’s readers, black blood would not run down the streets alone: “Some white blood will flow, too.”46
The editors of the Jackson Daily News warned in a front-page editorial that McCoy had crossed a line with his defiant remarks and that “self-respecting, law-abiding, peace-loving, hardworking Negroes” would not “follow [McCoy] in an attempt to force Negro children into white schools.” They could not possibly want these radical measures. It was therefore up to this respectable class of African Americans to “openly repudiate McCoy, put a padlock in his mouth and [make] a summary end to his activities that will, if left unchecked, inevitably lead to bloodshed. . . . If not suppressed by his own race, he will become a white man’s problem.”47
The Citizens’ Councils primly disavowed the violence and the kind of threats that had worn down Stringer. Judge Brady even claimed that the Councils “were the deterrent, the one deterrent, that kept [out] the organization of mobs and the operation of lynch laws in Mississippi.”48 Their day-to-day language, however, was the language of battle. Their flyers openly reflected intimidation and threats. The national office of the NAACP granted that perhaps the Citizens’ Council did not itself order or commit acts of terrorism, violence, and murder, but it did create “the atmosphere in which it was possible for the Chicago boy, Emmett Till, to be murdered and for the perpetrators of the crime to escape justice.” The power of the Council surely encouraged terrorists to believe they could act without fear of punishment.49