In the 1960s, McComb, Mississippi, was a small railroad town a hundred miles north of New Orleans.
It was a place where the white folks, numbering about 9,000, lived on one side of the tracks and the 4,000 Black folks lived on the other.
There was a separate school for white children and another for Black children. The Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions of the 1950s had changed nothing.
The city government was run by white people who controlled every decision made in City Hall.
Black people got their community information at a Black-owned barbershop.
Black men who grew up in McComb have said they were taught as young boys to step off the sidewalk when a white man approached and to look down.
To do less would be interpreted as a sign of disrespect and could cause the white man to strike you.
In McComb in the 1960s, there were no interracial relationships of any kind. At least, not out in the open.
The Mississippi state constitution forbade interracial marriage; and this sentiment applied broadly to all forms of interracial friendships.
To become a registered voter in Mississippi in the 1960s, a citizen had to pass a state-mandated literacy test of twenty-five questions administered by the local voter registrar.
The test required the applicant to state his place of employment. When a Black person applied, this information would then be passed on to others who would pressure the applicant’s employer to fire him.
Other questions required the voter to interpret provisions of the Mississippi state constitution which the registrar designated. White applicants were asked to interpret easy sections, such as ‘what does it mean to have an election by ballot?’ Black applicants were given difficult sections, such as those dealing with corporate income tax.
Voter registration forms intentionally omitted political party affiliation designations to prevent Black people from participating in primary elections or running for office on a political party’s ticket.
In August 1961, some Black high school students took part in a non-violent sit-in at the ‘whites only’ lunch counter in the town’s Woolworth’s store. They were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace.
Around this same time, a civil rights worker was murdered in a nearby town while attempting to register Black voters. His killer, a white state legislator, was found not-guilty in the case by an all-white jury who believed his claim of self-defense.
When 115 Black high school students walked out of school to protest the student arrests and the murder of the civil rights worker, they were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace.
Many Black parents became scared for their children’s safety and gave their children public beatings in front of City Hall to elicit loud, pleading promises from them that they would never participate in the civil rights movement.
In 1963, the federal Justice Department urged Black activists not to send any more civil rights workers to McComb because of dangerous levels of violence there; but they returned anyway to register Black voters.
White resistance stiffened.
More than a dozen Black homes, churches and businesses owned by those suspected of helping the civil rights workers were bombed or burned down. One Black woman was arrested on charges she had bombed her own home.
Crosses were burned in the front yards of white people who were believed to be sympathetic to the civil rights movement.
The McComb police chief was the local leader of the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, an organization of white supremacists with twenty local chapters in Mississippi and Louisiana. His police force offered no protection to the Black community and often arrived at crime scenes to hide evidence and intimidate victims.
The civil rights precept of non-violence became impossible for some Black residents. They retaliated for the bombings, burning police cars and white businesses. Several white people were killed.
Twenty-four Black men were then rounded up and jailed on charges of “criminal syndicalism.”
This crisis was defused when President Johnson threatened to send National Guard troops to McComb to restore order. Local law enforcement agreed to arrest local members of the KKK who were suspected in the bombings, but the KKK members were released after a few weeks in jail.
When the New York Times carried a scathing editorial describing the violence in McComb, the editor of the town newspaper ran his own editorial calling for prominent white city fathers to issue a written statement calling for law and order.
Soon after his editorial ran, the newspaper’s office was vandalized and a cross was burned in the editor’s front yard.
After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Charles Evers, the older brother of Medgar Evers, who had been assassinated in nearby Jackson, led Black McComb residents into whites-only commercial establishments, including the Woolworth lunch counter.
But this act did little to improve the day-to-day life of Black people in McComb.
They remained brutalized, second-class citizens.
This is McComb’s story.
America’s Deep South is filled with hundreds of other stories like this.
When we fail to teach the country’s boys and girls these stories — when we allow them to learn only selected portions of America’s history — they become easy marks for power-hungry adults espousing seductive white supremacy messages.
A great country is not afraid to look in the mirror.
So, look and make children learn all of it.
Knowledge is power.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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