STANDING FOR JUSTICE: MISSISSIPPI and the TILL CASE

Standing For Justice
Mississippi and the Till Case

"Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me - the fear of being killed just because I was black." From Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody's autobiography.

Black Monday. that was what southern segregationists came to call the day the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education. "On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court's decision," said Mississippi senator James Eastland. "You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent [and based on] sociological considerations."
In Linden, Alabama, state senator Walter C. Givhan railed against the NAACP campaign to end school segregation. What, he asked his white audience, is the real purpose of the campaign? "To open the bedroom doors of our white women to Negro men."
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision, it did not include instructions on how the order was to be implemented. Desegregation began almost immediately in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, bout most of the nation waited for the Court to provide specific instructions on how to end school segregation.
A year later, the Court still had not acted. Instead, the justices asked the lower federal courts, closer to the local school districts, to ensure that those districts "admit to public schools on racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the [black children]."
To many blacks, the Court's delay and the vague wording of its eventual decree were a bitter disappointment. "I remember the great elation that I had-how wonderful I felt the country was and the Constitution [after the 1954 ruling]...," said one civil rights attorney. "I felt and equally strong sense of depression and bitterness a year later when the Court came out with the "all deliberate speed' formulation. I had the feeling that we'd won a hollow victory."
President Eisenhower distanced himself from the Court's actions. "It makes no difference whether or not I endorse it," he said. "The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it and I must conform to that and do my very best to see that it is carried out in this country." But later he commented that his appointment of Earl warren was "the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made." He told one of his aides in the White House, "I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the South at least fifteen years."In Mississippi, unarguable the most supremacist and segregated state in the country, whites' anger over the ruling fueled violent segregationist backlash. Gangs of whites committed beatings, burnings, and lynchings-murder by mob. The Supreme Court decision also spurred the formation of a new kind of white hate group, composed of urban, middle-class whites determined to fight desegregation. They called themselves the Citizens' Council, and civil rights activists dubbed them the "white-collar Klan," after the Ku Klux Klan.

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