Tut Patterson knew that white terrorism was endemic to the segregationist cause but dismissed occasional violence as the irresponsible errors of “certain crackpots, fanatics and misguided patriots,” for which the Citizens’ Council movement could hardly be blamed.50 In fact, the Councils claimed, their organization actually existed in large measure to avoid the clashes that the NAACP’s extremism made almost inevitable. Despite the official line, however, violence often followed when the local Council’s efforts to coerce or intimidate civil rights advocates did not have the desired effect. The Council’s relationship to violence went deeper than that, however. One of the founders and financiers of the Citizens’ Council movement said of the Till murder that it was “a shame that [Milam and Bryant] hadn’t slit open [Till’s] stomach so that his body would not have risen in the river.”51 Eight years after the murder, when a Council member murdered NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, three bank presidents in Greenwood headed the White Citizens Legal Fund that financed the defense of the killer. Stated the Council, “We do not condone the murder of Medgar Evers and, of course, we have no idea of the guilt or innocence of the accused but we feel he is entitled to a fair trial.”52 This reciprocal arrangement was transparent. When one small town debated swimming pool desegregation in the mid-1950s, a patrician Citizens’ Council member suggested, “I figure any time one of them gets near the pool, we can let some redneck take care of him for us.”53
Phillip Abbott Luce, a white scholar who infiltrated the Citizens’ Council in Mississippi soon after the lynching of Emmett Till, reported that he’d been told “the Council can do anything the Klan can do if it has to.”54 Only a few days before Till’s murder, Ruby Hurley wrote to Gloster Current, the NAACP’s national director of branches, to inform him that in the Mississippi Delta “the situation is at the point of explosion, particularly in the western part of the state, which includes the Delta.” Hurley cited the “inflammatory editorials and columns” in the Jackson Daily News. “The White Citizens’ Councils are becoming more brazen in their intimidation tactics—telephone calls, sending of hearses as was done to Jasper Mims of our Yazoo City Branch, threatening letters through the mails, circulation of the scurrilous literature enclosed etc. etc.” She noted, too, the popularity of Judge Brady’s Black Monday and the murder of a voting rights activist on the Brookhaven Courthouse lawn. “Reports from Cleveland”—Amzie Moore’s hometown—“are bad.” One of the FBI agents sent to investigate a murder in Belzoni was a close friend of Citizens’ Council officials in a nearby county, she lamented. The last sentence in her report, filed only days before the murder of Emmett Till, was this: “Something must be done to protect our people.”55
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Despite the terror of the mid-1950s, both the RCNL and the NAACP in Mississippi had some cause for modest optimism: the RCNL’s campaigns had won small victories, and their rallies attracted thousands, and NAACP membership grew steadily. Several thousand African Americans added their names to the voting rolls, swelling their number to the highest tally since the violent overthrow of Reconstruction eighty years earlier. Lawsuits and the NAACP’s long march through the nation’s courts persuaded two Mississippi governors in succession to begin to equalize teachers’ salaries and build new black schools. In 1953, a year before Brown, the state senate refused to pass a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the legislature to abolish public schools should the U.S. Supreme Court mandate school desegregation. In this volatile atmosphere Brown emboldened the Mississippi NAACP to strike hard at school segregation and to demand voting rights. The white response would plunge Mississippi into violent racial battles unmatched since the bloody 1870s.
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