Flew to New York two days ago. Interview this morning with Time magazine in their new offices. They took photos and treated me with great cordiality. While I was at Time, the Dave Garroway show called. We were to have a preliminary interview that afternoon at five.
Unable to bear the silence from home, I returned to my room and telephoned to Mansfield. As a result of the two Paul Coates shows, my mother had received her first threatening call. It was from a woman who would not identify herself. The conversation had begun politely enough. The woman said they could not understand in town how I could turn against my own race. My mother assured her I had done this precisely for my race. The woman said: “Why he’s just thrown the door wide open for those niggers, and after we’ve all worked so hard to keep them out.” She then became abusive and succeeded in terrorizing my mother by telling her, “If you could just hear what they’re planning to do to him if he ever comes back to Mansfield - ”
“Who’s planning?” my mother asked.
“That’s all right. You just ought to be over at Curry’s [a local café and night spot on the highway leading into Mansfield, run by ardent segregationists]. You’d see to it he never showed his face in Mansfield again.”
My mother said she felt better when I talked to her. She had never been confronted by this sort of brutality before. She called my wife over and they sat together, frightened. Then they called Penn Jones, who came immediately and placed himself at their disposal.
Sickened that they would pick on a man’s mother and strike him through terrorizing her, I immediately made calls and asked for police surveillance of both my home and my parents’ home.