Civil Rights: Do Not Despair

McComb, Miss., a town of 12,400 people set in the harsh, pine-dotted country in the southwestern corner of the state, quaintly refers to itself as "the Camellia City of America." In recent years McComb has justly earned a reputation as the toughest anti-civil rights community in the toughest anti-civil rights area in the toughest anti-civil rights state in the Union.

By rough count (which is the way McComb counts such things), during the past year at least 13 Negro homes, churches or business places have been bombed, another half-dozen burned. Local cops have harassed more than they have helped, and the courts have offered little comfort. When nine whites were arrested and pleaded guilty or nolo contendere (no contest) in the bombing of Negro homes—a charge that carries a maximum penalty of death—County Judge W. H. Watkins freed them all with suspended sentences. As Watkins explained, they had been "unduly provoked" by civil rights workers, some of whom "are people of low morality and unhygienic." Besides, said Watkins to the defendants, "you are mostly young men" [five were 35 or older] who "deserve a second chance."

So hopeless seemed McComb that even the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, most militant of the major civil rights groups, closed its McComb office three years ago and never reopened it because, as one worker explained, "we just couldn't hold on without endangering lives." But last week it appeared that not even McComb was hopeless.

Trying to Be Fair. In a federal district court in Biloxi, civil rights lawyers requested that Pike County (of which McComb is the principal town) Sheriff R. R. Warren, McComb Police Chief George Guy, Mississippi State Public Safety Director T. B. Birdsong and three McComb patrolmen be enjoined from interfering with Negroes' civil rights. In their brief, they cited instance after instance in which rights workers were arrested and imprisoned on questionable charges. Last month, they said, local cops arrested 13 workers for operating a food-handling establishment without a permit—when all they were doing was cooking their own meals. Others told of being kicked, punched, and poked in the genitals while being booked for trespassing, then being tossed into crowded cells with concrete shelves for beds and overflowing holes in the floor for toilets.

The defendants seemed astonished by such news. "We have tried to be fair," said Chief Guy. "Sometimes that's very difficult." When German-born Laurie Smith testified that she had volunteered to work on a project for helping Mississippi's Negroes get registered for voting, Assistant State Attorney General William Allain demanded: "Have you asked to help any of the good white folks in Mississippi? Well, have you?" After two days of testimony, Federal Judge Sidney Mize adjourned the hearing until next week, will probably rule in December.