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The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964
A History in Documents
James P. Marshall
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eBook - ePub
The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964
A History in Documents
James P. Marshall
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In the early 1960s, civil rights activists and the Kennedy administration engaged in parallel, though not always complementary, efforts to overcome Mississippi's extreme opposition to racial desegregation. In The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960–1964, James P. Marshall uncovers this history through primary source documents that explore the legal and political strategies of the federal government, follows the administration's changing and sometimes contentious relationship with civil rights organizations, and reveals the tactics used by local and state entities in Mississippi to stem the advancement of racial equality.A historian and longtime civil rights activist, Marshall collects a vast array of documents from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and excerpts from his own 1960s interviews with leading figures in the movement for racial justice. This volume tracks early forms of resistance to racial parity adopted by the White Citizens' Councils and chapters of the Ku Klux Klan at the local level as well as by Mississippi congressmen and other elected officials who used both legal obstructionism and extra-legal actions to block efforts meant to promote integration. Quoting from interviews and correspondence among the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members, government officials, and other constituents of the Democratic Party, Marshall also explores decisions about voter registration drives and freedom rides as well as formal efforts by the Kennedy administration—including everything from minority hiring initiatives to federal litigation and party platform changes—to exert pressure on Mississippi to end segregation.Through a carefully curated selection of letters, interviews, government records, and legal documents, The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960–1964 sheds new light on the struggle to advance racial justice for African Americans living in the Magnolia State.
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1
THE EARLY MOVEMENT
JACKSON, MCCOMB, AND HIGHLANDER IN 1961 AND AFTER
The following documents bring together the elders of the pre–1960 civil rights movement in Mississippi with the post–1960 student movement. The former group included World War II and Korean War veterans who were local Mississippians and voter-registration activists who had organized and worked through the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) and the NAACP. (Rev. George W. Lee was murdered in the Delta in 1955, as was the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was visiting from Chicago in the same year.) The latter group of activists was composed of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) staff members, college students, and local young people mentored by Mississippi elders who worked quietly wherever they were able. At times, though, these elders were subject to violence and murder in the 1960s in southwest Mississippi—Herbert Lee was murdered on September 25, 1961, and Louis Allen on January 31, 1964—just as the student movement experienced later in 1964 the murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.
Source: Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 1–102. Delta elders included Amzie Moore, Dr. Aaron Henry, Dewey Greene Sr. (and his children), Ruby Hurley, Cleveland Jordan, Laura McGhee (and her children and her brother Gus Courts), Vera Pigee (and her daughter), and Dr. T. R. M. Howard. These long-time activists passed the message on to the youth who then followed their elders into the fight for civil rights. However, they did their work quietly and sought to vet the young people in order to make sure their activism did not endanger them.
Bob Moses, at the advice of Ms. Ella Baker, then of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), was in contact with Mississippi elder Amzie Moore, a NAACP activist from the Delta in 1960. Moses had initially wanted to begin his Mississippi work in the Delta but Moore could not get an office for him there, while Curtis C. Bryant, also a local NAACP leader, found space for him in McComb in the Southwest that he could work out of. This group of movement elders in the Delta region and in Southwest and Southeastern Mississippi included Amzie Moore, Curtis C. Bryant, E. W. Steptoe, Webb Owens and Vernon Dahmer among others.
During this initial period in McComb in August 1961, Burgland young people Brenda Travis, Bobby Talbert, and Isaac Lewis were arrested, tried and convicted on charges of breach of the peace and spent 30 days in jail. However, Brenda Travis, 16, who was a minor, was expelled from school and sent to the Colored Girls Industrial School for one year in Oakley, Mississippi, while Ike Lewis and Robert “Bobby” Talbert were sent to jail. When Travis’ fellow students tried to get her reinstated in school, the principal refused, resulting in the students walking out in support of Travis.
Source: Hollis Watkins, Brother Hollis: The Sankofa of a Movement Man (Clinton, MS, 2016), 73–91, provides a first-person eyewitness account of those initial confrontations between local African American Mississippi participants in the civil rights movement with whites in southwest Mississippi; see Laura Visser-Maessen, Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016), 48–59, for Moses’s interaction with movement elders Amzie Moore, Curtis C. Bryant, Webb Owens, E. W. Steptoe, Dr. Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, and others whom he had met when he traveled through the Deep South—with contacts set up by Ms. Ella Baker—to extend an invitation to attend the SNCC meeting scheduled for October 1960; and pages 61–91 for a picture and an understanding of Moses’s early actions in the civil rights movement in McComb in southwest Mississippi with Curtis C. Bryant. Among other ideas, Moses apparently supported local people in their actions when inspired by movement activists to carry out direct-action involvement even when endangering themselves, as being “Ella Baker’s idea that decisions should be made by those who executed them, even if failure surely followed” (Visser-Maessen quoted on page 74; see also chapter 2, document 3, paragraph 3, below, of Marion Barry interview on the decision to run direct-action and voter-registration programs at the same time, as prompted by Ms. Ella Baker).
In addition, young Mississippians like Joyce and Dorie Ladner of Palmer’s Crossing near Hattiesburg became involved and stayed active all of their lives. Joyce Ladner recently described Vernon Dahmer’s part in the Hattiesburg struggle which led to his lynching by the Ku Klux Klan. During these years Dahmer would take Ladner and her sister to NAACP statewide youth meetings in Jackson; he also gave Hollis Watkins and Curtis (Muhammad) Hayes a place to stay on his farm while they were conducting voter-registration campaigns in the Hattiesburg area in the spring and summer of 1962—they paid their room and board by working on the farm when they weren’t busy organizing. According to Ladner, “For Mr. Dahmer, voting was the only way to move from second class citizenship to full citizenship.”
Source: Joyce Ladner, “Vernon F. Dahmer: Civil Rights Martyr and American Hero,” in Teaching for Change, January 10, 2016; see Patricia Michelle Boyett, Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods (Jackson, 2015), which examines the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in eastern and southeastern Mississippi in Jones and Forrest counties and their murders of Vernon Dahmer and others; see also Visser-Maessen, Robert Parris Moses, 101, 127, 317; Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston, 1964), 16–39, 62–78; John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, IL, 1994), 102–15; James P. Marshall, Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960–1965 (Baton Rouge, 2013), 17, 19, 114–15; Eric R. Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi (New York, 1994), 20–70; also view the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance DVD: A Time for Justice, narrated by Julian Bond, about pre-1960 Mississippi and the lynching of Emmett Till; and Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering’s DVD, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (2012), about the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) and its part in the movement; see also the important study by Michael Vinson Williams, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (Fayetteville, 2011).
The events of 1961–62 were different aspects of what was to later become a unified Mississippi civil rights movement with different approaches to but a single objective: freedom and justice for Mississippi African Americans. The events in McComb and southwest Mississippi as a whole involved local direct-action events, voter registration, and a great deal of violence leading up to the murder of Herbert Lee by E. H. Hurst, his neighbor and a member of the Mississippi state legislature. As the movement was reinvigorated in the early 1960s, questions arose as to how the elders and the young people would be able to work together and what they could do when they were attacked by white Mississippi and who would defend them.
Document 1 relates information about events in Jackson, Mississippi, where Medgar Wiley Evers was the field secretary of the NAACP. Evers was active from the late 1950s until 1963, when he was assassinated. He was a veteran of World War II and a graduate of southwest Mississippi’s Alcorn State College. He was also an insurance agent, and his work took him to numerous locations throughout the state, where he quietly encouraged people to register to vote and become members of the NAACP.
1. Evers and Higgs Demonstrations in Jackson, 1961
On March 28, I [Burke Marshall] received a telephone call from Mr. William Higgs, a lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi, concerning the demonstrations taking place in that city. The demonstrations arise from the arrest of nine Negro students from Tougaloo College for a sit-in at the Jackson Municipal Library, which is not open to Negroes. A Bureau [FBI] investigation has been requested into the circumstances of the arrest. Mr. Higgs reported that on the evening of March 26 a demonstration of some 700 Negro students took place on the campus of Jackson State College to protest the arrest of the sit-ins. The demonstration was broken up by police action, apparently initiated at the request of the president of Jackson State College. . . .
Mr. Higgs also said another mass rally called by the local NAACP was scheduled to take place on the evening of March 28 at a Negro church. He stated that the situation in Jackson was tense because of the wide publicity given to the demonstrations and the sit-ins and because of a contemporaneous celebration of the 100th anniversary of the secession of the State of Mississippi [from the United States]. . . .
I also received a call from Frank Reeves at the White House stating that on the afternoon of March 28 there had been a demonstration of 50 Negroes in downtown Jackson which had been broken [up] by police action with tear gas and the use of billy clubs. . . .
I discussed this matter with former Governor Coleman of Mississippi. Governor Coleman informed me that in his judgment Mayor Allen Thompson of Jackson would control the police department with the cooperation of Police Chief Rayfield and would not permit racial violence to take place in the city. The Attorney General [Robert F. Kennedy] and I also discussed the matter with the wife of Mayor Thompson after being unable to reach the Mayor.
On March 29, I was informed by Medgar Evers, the local NAACP leader in Jackson, . . . that the nine original sit-in demonstrators had been released on bail.
On March 29, I also received a call from Mr. Thomas Watkins, a lawyer in Jackson, who informed me that he had been retained by the city for consultation and advice on the racial problems in Jackson and that he wanted the Attorney General and me to know that the Mayor appreciated the Attorney General’s interest and telephone call and that he believed that the situation was under control and would be worked out peacefully.
Mr. Watkins asked that I feel free to discuss any matter with him at any time. I told Mr. Watkins that I did not know whether Jackson would be able to maintain its segregated libraries but that that was a matter which would have to be worked out in the courts.
Source: Evers and Higgs Demonstrations in Jackson in MS, Mar. 29, 1961, BMPP-001-004; see Williams, Medgar Evers, 197–204; Dittmer, Local People, 116–18, provides a capsule look at the Jackson movement in 1961; view also the DVD by Loki Mulholland, An Ordinary Hero: The True Story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Taylor Street Films, 2012, about her earlier period in Mississippi as a freedom rider and a sit-in demonstrator in Jackson.
Document 2 is a recap by Robert Parris Moses of SNCC 1961 voter-registration work in southwest Mississippi in Walthall, Pike, and Amite counties.
2. Robert Parris Moses Talk on SNCC Voter-Registration Work, June 20, 1963
My name is Robert Moses; I am a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; I first came south in July of 1960, on a field trip to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, gathering people to go to the October [SNCC] conference [in Atlanta]. This is the first time that I met Amzie Moore, and at that time we sat down and planned a voter registration drive for Mississippi. I returned in the summer of 1961 to start that drive. We were to start in Cleveland, Mississippi, in the Delta, however we couldn’t. We didn’t have any equipment, we didn’t even have a place at that time to meet. So we went down to McComb at the invitation of C. [Curtis] C. Bryant, who was local head of the NAACP there. And we began setting up a voter registration drive in McComb, Mississippi. What did we do?
Well, for two weeks, I did nothing but drive around the town, talking to business leaders, the ministers, the people in the town, asking them if they would support ten students who would come in to work on a voter registration drive. We got a commitment from them to support students for the month of August and to pay for their room and board and some of their transportation while they were there. The project began August first, and lasted, as it turned out, till December, not just through the month of August.
We began in McComb, canvassing for about a two-week period. This means that we went around house-to-house, door-to-door, in the hot sun, every day because the most important thing at the beginning was to convince the local townspeople that we meant business. That is, that we were serious, that we were not only young, but we were people who were responsible. What do you tell somebody when you go to their door? Well, first of all you tell them who you are, what you’re trying to do, that you’re working on voter registration, and the form that you are trying and get them to fill out. Now, the technique that we found best useable, I think was to simply present the form to them and say, “Have you ever tried to fill out this form, would you like to sit down now and try and fill it out? And psychologically, as they’re in the process of filling out a voter registration form, one of the questions asks them to do something right at the registrar’s office, so that psychologically they have to complete a gap, to go and imagine themselves as being at the registrar’s office. As you know in Mississippi, currently, you have to fill out a form which has about 21 questions on it, and aside from the routine questions, there is on it a place where you write and then interpret some section of the Constitution of Mississippi, and finally a section where you write and describe the duties and obligations of a citizen in Mississippi.
Now we did this for about two weeks, and finally began to get results. That is, people began to go down to Magnolia, Mississippi, which is the County Seat of Pike County, and attempt to register. In the meantime, quite naturally, people from Amite and Walthall County, which are the two adjacent counties to Pike County, came over asking us if we wouldn’t accompany them and conduct schools in their counties, so that they could go down and try and register also. This point should be made quite clear, because many people have been very critical of going into such tough counties so early in the game. . . .
Source: Copy of “Robert Parris Moses Taped and Transcribed Talk on SNCC Voter Registration Work in Southwest Mississippi,” June 20, 1963, in Jim Marshall files given to him by Howard Zinn. Also important are Jim Marshall retrospective interviews with Bob Moses in 1990 (five hours, taped but not transcribed).
Documents 3, 4, and 5 examine the case ...
Table of contents
- COVER
- TITLE PAGE
- COPYRIGHT PAGE
- CONTENTS
- ABBREVIATIONS
- INTRODUCTION
- MAP OF MISSISSIPPI
- CITIES AND TOWNS IN MISSISSIPPI BY COUNTY
- ATTACKS ON THE MISSISSIPPI MOVEMENT, 1961–1965
- PROLOGUE: A CHRONOLOGY OF SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
- 1 The Early Movement
- 2 Voter Registration Is Direct Action
- 3 The Democratic National Committee, the Voter Education Project, and the Movement
- 4 The Freedom Rides
- 5 The Department of Justice, Federal Litigation, and John Doar
- 6 Minority Hiring Efforts and Government Desegregation
- 7 James Howard Meredith and the University of Mississippi
- 8 The Department of Justice, the FBI, Mississippi, and the Movement
- 9 The Delta, Hattiesburg, and Jackson in 1963
- 10 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Hearings
- 11 Judge Cox, John Doar, Robert Kennedy, and the American Bar Association
- 12 The Mississippi Movement and the Lawyers, 1964
- 13 Freedom Summer and After
- 14 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Actions in 1964
- 15 Achievements of the Kennedy Administration
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX OF PEOPLE, PLACES, ORGANIZATIONS, AND LEGAL CASES
Citation styles for The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964
APA 6 Citation
Marshall, J. (2018). The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964 ([edition unavailable]). LSU Press. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/876819/the-mississippi-civil-rights-movement-and-the-kennedy-administration-19601964-a-history-in-documents-pdf (Original work published 2018)
Chicago Citation
Marshall, James. (2018) 2018. The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964. [Edition unavailable]. LSU Press. https://www.perlego.com/book/876819/the-mississippi-civil-rights-movement-and-the-kennedy-administration-19601964-a-history-in-documents-pdf.
Harvard Citation
Marshall, J. (2018) The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964. [edition unavailable]. LSU Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/876819/the-mississippi-civil-rights-movement-and-the-kennedy-administration-19601964-a-history-in-documents-pdf (Accessed: 14 October 2022).
MLA 7 Citation
Marshall, James. The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1964. [edition unavailable]. LSU Press, 2018. Web. 14 Oct. 2022.