When the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi had the highest concentration of blacks of any state in the Union (42.3 percent), and it was there that black people endured the nation’s harshest Jim Crow practices. Mississippi also led the nation in lynchings. Led by racist organizations and government agencies such as the White Citizens’ Councils that arose throughout the state—Indianola established the first on July 28, 1954—and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, established by the state legislature during the Montgomery bus boycott, “segs” in the state not only fought to perpetuate segregation; they also protected those who inflicted violence on civil rights activists. Sandwiched between the 1954 Brown decision and the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County near Philadelphia, for example, were the assassinations of George Lee, an NAACP member and voting registration advocate, on May 7, 1955 (no arrests were made, and the coroner declared the death from “unknown causes”); Chicago teenager Emmett Till, who was visiting family in Money, on August 28, 1955; Herbert Lee, a voting rights advocate murdered by a state legislator who was never tried for the crime, on September 25, 1961; and Mississippi NAACP director Medgar Evers on June 11, 1963 (not until 1994 was White Citizens’ Council member Byron De La Beckwith convicted for the murder).
After Congress passed a Civil Rights Act in 1957 to strengthen black voting rights—only 4 percent of Mississippi’s eligible black voters were registered, the lowest in the country—the nation’s black press began to pay more attention to injustices against Mississippi’s black population. Editors had a lot to report. When NAACP state secretary Medgar Evers criticized the conviction of a black man as a “mockery of justice” in 1958, he was jailed and fined $100. Shortly thereafter, a white lawyer who had raped his children’s black babysitter was given a suspended jail sentence, but a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1959 was lynched. Additionally, black parents who signed petitions protesting school segregation six years after Brown were frequently fired from their jobs.1 Yet in some Mississippi towns—either because they observed events surrounding the Jackson Public Library in 1963 and recognized Jim Crow public libraries had a limited life span, or because they considered it a less objectionable compromise in a larger game of resistance that stopped at the schoolhouse door—white officials integrated their local public library without demonstrations by black youths.
Across the South, white public librarians were conflicted about how they should respond to desegregation activities. Mississippi librarians were no different. Many were for segregation, some openly, most quietly. Yet others were sympathetic toward the integration of public library services but worried that open confrontation would lose them their job and friends, as happened to Ruth Brown in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; subject them to harassment, as in the case of Juliette Morgan at the Montgomery Public Library; or damage progress toward what they saw as a greater good—providing any public library services to Mississippi blacks.
In early 1961, for example, African American Frankie Bethea wrote the Mississippi Library Commission to request assistance under the Library Services Act of 1956 to develop a public library for black people in McComb. Commission director Lura G. Currier sent back two letters, one an official refusal, the other an unofficial response written as “an individual librarian” that shows how conflicted and fearful were sympathetic public librarians working in the Jim Crow South. “If there is anything that I can do to help you . . . as a private citizen and as a professional librarian whose entire life is devoted to getting books for people to read, by all means let me hear from you. Any advice I can give you, any work I can help you do, any plans I can assist you with are yours for the asking,” she wrote. “I am enclosing an envelope addressed to me at my home for your convenience in the event that I can be of any assistance to you.”2 It is telling that librarians such as Currier felt so alone; their professional organization, the American Library Association, seemed to offer them no assistance at all.
GREENVILLE AND MERIDIAN
“Desegregation was often carried out under a blanket of non-publicity, by agreement with local newspapers,” notes historian Gavin Wright.3 That’s what happened in Greenville, Mississippi, where city officials “quietly integrated” the public library in the spring of 1964. Even a year later “many Negro people don’t know about it,” and because others were shy about testing its reality, a librarian noted, “it will take some time before any degree of comfortable library use is reached.”4 Similarly, on July 2, 1964, the day the Civil Rights Act was signed, the Meridian Public Library integrated “without fanfare and without disturbance” and absorbed the black branch into the library system, the librarian later wrote. “It seems probable,” library historian Karen J. Cook suggests, “that, due to the absence of fanfare, few if any in the African-American community were aware of the sudden change in the library’s status.”5
JACKSON
Among NAACP branches that organized and mobilized throughout the South following the early 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins was an NAACP Youth Council established at the historically black Tougaloo Southern Christian College (now Tougaloo College), four miles north of Jackson. And it was there, in early 1961, that a group of college students under the guidance of Medgar Evers planned Mississippi’s first sit-in demonstration to take place at the main library of the Jackson Public Library system. If whites attacked, Evers admonished them, “do not retaliate. Follow the principles of nonviolence.”6
Shortly after she opened the Jackson Public Library on the morning of March 27, 1961, acting director Frances French was asked by reporters from United Press International and the New Orleans Times-Picayune if she was aware a group of black students was coming to the library that day. She was not, she said, but after the reporters left, she immediately phoned the police. Contact us when students arrive, they responded.7
While she was talking to police, nine Tougaloo students—four women and five men, all of them NAACP members—were preparing for their first sit-in. NAACP mentors told all to dress well, sit quietly in the library, and avoid violence at all costs. The four women wore dresses, the men dress shirts and ties, some in sport coats. First they visited the black George Washington Carver branch and requested books they knew were not there. At about 11:00 a.m., they walked to the main library on State Street. “I went into the library and I stood up by the card catalogue and was thumbing through it,” Ethel Sawyer, one of the students, later recalled: “After I didn’t see the . . . title of the book I wanted, I went over and sat at one of the tables, and I had other textbooks with me that I read up until the time I was interrupted.” (Once arrested, she noticed the book she had taken from the shelf was upside down in front of her, an embarrassing sign of her nervousness.) “One or two” of her colleagues “were at the reference table,” she noted, while “others were thumbing through the card catalogue. Some were seated at the table.”8
Youth Council chapter president Joseph Jackson Jr., however, approached the circulation desk. With his heart thumping and his body going numb, he later recalled, he stammered a message he had memorized. “Ma’am, I want to know if you have this philosophy book; I need it for a research project at Tougaloo College.” “You know you don’t belong here!” the library assistant yelled, adding, “You go back to your library!” “When I saw the expressions on those white people’s faces,” Jackson remembered, “it was a hush.”9
Ten minutes passed. During that time, acting director French called the local police, then approached the students and asked, “May I help you?” We’re doing research, they responded. “There’s a colored library on Mill Street,” she said. “You are welcome there.”10 She suggested they visit one of the two black branches, as was the “custom” in Jackson. Immediately thereafter, a “group of policemen and plain clothes men came in and told us to get up and get out of the library, that we were welcome to use the colored branch.” But “nobody moved,” Sawyer said. “About a minute later, I think, the same person [she later learned he was chief of police] . . . told us that we were under arrest.”11 Six officers placed all the students in squad cars and at the station charged them with breach of the peace because they had failed to leave the library when ordered. They were booked into the local jail, where each was held on $500 bond. Because the students had notified the press in advance, reporters were able to capture the events in photographs and stories. The same day, after hearing of the arrests, students at the black state-supported Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) staged a protest outside the campus library. Some attempted to march downtown but were stopped by the police. They disbanded only after the college president threatened them with dismissal.12
In jail that evening, the Tougaloo students worried. “Reflecting back on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” Joseph Jackson later recalled, “the later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.” He began rehearsing what he would say if the Ku Klux Klan came for them. “Please, Mr. Klansman, don’t hang me. I have a wife and two little children in Memphis, Tennessee, and if you release me this night, I promise you I will never, ever come back here to Jackson, Mississippi, and violate your Jim Crow laws.” His colleagues teased him for his naïveté. “Well, that sounds very good,” one responded, “but you know what the Klansman would say? ‘Nigger, you should have thought of that before you entered our segregated public library!’”13
A few days later, the Tougaloo students were taken to the courthouse to be tried, and again reporters were ready. Several blocks away, hundreds of whites were marching through city streets under a huge Confederate flag. At the courthouse, however, a hundred black supporters had gathered to cheer on the group who were now referred to as the “Tougaloo Nine.” The possibility that the two groups would collide increased the potential for violence. Fourteen police officers, two with German shepherds, lined the courthouse stairs, turning away black observers after the small courtroom section reserved for them had filled. When the crowd began to applaud the nine students as they arrived for their trial, the chief of police yelled: “That’s it! Move ’em out! Get ’em!” Police set upon the crowd with nightsticks and dogs, as once again reporters captured the event with cameras snapping. In the melee, Medgar Evers and several women and children were pistol-whipped (some required stitches for their injuries), two black ministers were bitten by the dogs, and Willis Randall Wren, age eighty-one, who only went to the courthouse “to hear the case,” suffered a broken arm when police beat him “with a club.”14 For Jackson, Evers later argued, the brutality exercised on black people supporting the library protesters set broader desegregation activities in Mississippi “in motion.” “This act on the part of the police officials brought on greater unity in the Negro community and projected the NAACP in a position of being the accepted spokesman for the Negro people.”15
On the evening of March 29, fifteen hundred people attended an NAACP-sponsored mass meeting to protest police brutality. One headline quoted a telegram sent to Mississippi’s governor by the NAACP, which had formed “Operation Mississippi”—an “all-out and continuous” drive to eliminate discrimination in the Magnolia State, NAACP secretary Roy Wilkins announced. “Call Off Dogs . . . Slavery Is Over,” it read. SNCC officials sent a telegram of protest to the governor as well, calling the police response “barbarous and uncivilized.” Another article compared the response to South African apartheid, except that the “Jackson gendarmes swung night sticks and loosed vicious dogs” instead of rifles and guns. Perhaps most significantly, however, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the police actions.16
White segregationists defaulted to their canned response. In his daily column, for example, a white Jackson Clarion-Ledger staff writer complained: “A quiet community has been invaded by rabble-rousers stirring up hate between the races, and following are the ‘unbiased’ publicity media feeding an integrated North the choicest morsels from the Mississippi carcass. . . . There will be little acceptance of the NAACP demands that white people fraternize with Negroes.” And, he warned, “the Negro who has so long held the guiding and helping hand of the white may lose that hand as he climbs the back of his benefactor and teacher to shout into halls where he is not welcome.”17
Amid the din, the Tougaloo Nine went to trial two days after their arrests. They were quickly found guilty of breach of the peace under a 1960 law that criminalized any refusal to disperse when ordered to by a law enforcement officer. Each student was fined $100. Their thirty-day sentence was suspended on the condition that they “participate in no further demonstrations.” None of the students testified, but a police captain said they had been arrested because their presence at the library could have caused “trouble.” But the Tougaloo Nine fueled long-dormant resentment that quickly spread to other institutions and public accommodations. On April 19, four members of Tougaloo’s NAACP chapter took seats on a city bus in the section normally reserved for whites. They were promptly arrested and charged with breach of the peace. Operation Mississippi was under way and included not only protests and demonstrations but also legal challenges to Mississippi’s segregation of public spaces, including its libraries, parks, zoos, golf courses, playgrounds, and auditoriums.
In the midst of all these activities, Freedom Riders arrived by bus in Jackson on May 24. Wary of drawing national media attention, white officials had learned from Birmingham and Montgomery not to expose Riders to mob violence. Instead, in the process of arresting them, police showed Riders courteous treatment before the public, but after they were convicted and many Riders refused bail, Mississippi judges sent them to the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as the “Parchman Prison Farm,” where outside the public eye they were strip-searched, denied mail, and for the duration of their sentence housed in filthy conditions, poorly fed, and constantly harassed by prison guards. The “Farm” itself was run like a slave plantation and inspired a number of blues songs because of its horrible conditions.18 Jackson remained tense that summer. On July 6, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to a crowd of fifteen hundred Jacksonians, most of them black. “Segregation is dead,” he declared. To combat local segregation practices, he shouted, “let the Negroes fill the jail houses of Mississippi!” The crowd roared.19
While demonstrations like these continued for the remainder of the year, NAACP attorneys prepared their suit for the library protesters. On January 12, 1962, they filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court. Representing the plaintiffs was Jack H. Young, a self-taught black civil rights attorney who lived in Jackson with his wife, Aurelia, and their two children. He had been sworn into the Mississippi Bar in 1952 and immediately became the point person for the civil rights movement in Jackson. His home served as the central meeting place for activists who streamed into the state in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Aurelia Young noted in her diary: “Our house is no longer like Grand Central Station; it seems more like International Airport. It is the only place in Jackson where people are integrated.”20 As usual in civil rights cases filed during this time, the NAACP furnished attorneys to assist local attorneys in the field. In this case two attorneys assisted Young—Robert L. Carter and Thurgood Marshall. Carter served as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc. and later as legal assistant to Marshall; in 1956 he became general counsel for the NAACP. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall had already experienced library desegregation cases by serving on Jesse Turner’s counsel team in Memphis.
The complaint named three plaintiffs, though it also requested that the action be certified as a class action on behalf of “others similarly situated” as the named plaintiffs. Eighty-one-year-old W. R. Wren, who had suffered a broken arm during the police attack, was one of the named plaintiffs, along with sixty-six-year-old Reverend L. A. Clark and fifty-six-year-old Mary A. Cox, both victims of beatings and dog bites. It is unclear why none of the arrested students were named as plaintiffs, given that attorney Carter had earlier written Young to include both children and adults among the plaintiffs. It is possible, however, that none of the students were willing to subject themselves to the rigors and dangers involved in filing the suit. It is also possible their status as students only temporarily living in the Jackson area weakened the case. The suit proceeded with the three older plaintiffs.
The defendants included Jackson’s mayor, the chief of police, the director of the parks and recreation department, and the chairman and each member of the library board. The lawsuit challenged Mississippi segregation statutes and alleged violations under both the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights statutes. The case itself involved numerous depositions and evidence, both oral and documentary, and revealed much about the state of segregation in Mississippi in the early 1960s. The state painted a picture of blacks and whites living in harmony, voluntarily living among “their own,” and using their own facilities and schools, all by choice.
The plaintiffs instead focused on a Mississippi statute that explicitly prohibited integration. After the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Brown that separate schools were inherently unequal and mandated integration, the Mississippi legislature adopted Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 125. It stated that the Supreme Court had acted unconstitutionally and impinged on state sovereignty and that in Mississippi the Court’s school integration decisions were “unconstitutional, invalid and of no lawful effect.” Following the resolution, the legislature passed Mississippi Code Section 4065.3, which mandated that the entire state executive branch, including local governments, police, county education superintendents, “and all other persons falling within the executive branch of said state and local government,” give “full force and effect” to the resolution. Mississippi officials were “required to prohibit, by any lawful, peaceful and constitutional means,” compliance with the Supreme Court’s “integration decisions.” Furthermore, they were ordered to prohibit “the causing of a mixing or integration of the white and Negro races in public schools, public parks, public waiting rooms, public places of amusement, recreation or assembly” in the state. Finally, Mississippi law section 2056(7) made it a crime for two or more persons to conspire “to overthrow or violate the segregation laws” of the state “through force, violence, threats, intimidation, or otherwise.” Conviction could result in a fine of at least $25 or imprisonment for one to six months, or both.21
Depositions and live testimony at a March 12, 1962, hearing produced ample evidence of widespread discrimination in Jackson. In the weeks following the arrest of the Tougaloo Nine, other black youths were arrested for various transgressions. At the hearing, witnesses testified that blacks could not use the “white” playgrounds, auditoriums, and other public recreational facilities. James Hopkins, a Jackson State student arrested for sitting on a bench in the Livingston Park Zoo, testified that although blacks were permitted to use the zoo, they were not permitted to sit down. The city attorney responded: “Friction between the races does not arise as long as the two races are mixed on a stand-up basis, . . . like in the bank and elevators and the post office. . . . But in places where there is occasion for them to be seated next to each other, friction usually often does occur. Hasn’t that been your experience?” Before Hopkins could respond, the attorney noted that “since your arrest and before this lawsuit was filed, all the benches have been taken out of Livingston Park”—another form of “vertical integration.”
The library board chairman, also a local judge, testified that the students were trespassers in the library because they were not residents of Jackson. If they had been, “I would say legally they were entitled to come into the library . . . that is, if they don’t come like these people came—planned it and notified the press before they came.”22 But other evidence demonstrated the students had not been asked about their residency—at least one was a Jackson resident—and also that they had been told to use the black library, which operated under the same residency rules. The chairman was obviously grasping at straws. He also admitted that no written rules or regulations prohibited blacks from using the library.
Jackson’s mayor testified that segregation was entirely voluntary. He claimed Jackson “never had any of the trouble they have had in other cities” because Jackson had built facilities for both races. He cited the black golf course, “built over the years at the insistence of some fine negro citizens who kept coming to me. . . . We knew it would cost a lot of money but we went right ahead and did it.” Apparently he considered the cost of preventing Jackson’s white citizens from having to share their golf course with black people worth the duplication of services. The mayor placed the blame for recent “trouble” on outside “agitators” who had stirred things up. Before their arrival, he said, the peaceful coexistence resulting from voluntary segregation “made this city the outstanding city, frankly in the whole world.”23
The mayor’s view of his outstanding city did not mesh with evidence presented by members of Jackson’s black community. Reverend Clark testified that race separation was not voluntary. When asked if “your people prefer to live in neighborhoods with other members of your own race,” he said no. Mary Cox testified that she had tried to purchase tickets to a Porgy and Bess production at the local white auditorium, but her money was returned, and she was not permitted to attend. And W. R. Wren described how police broke his arm with a club at the courthouse. “That is the reason,” he said, “I haven’t been going to your places.”24
Chief of police W. D. Rayfield testified that Clark, Cox, and Wren were arrested not because of their race but because of “fear of public disturbance”; in other words, he feared that whites would be disturbed and this might create controversy. He claimed a breach of the peace occurs “where one or more people by their actions or intentions congregate or do something that their mere presence where they are resented would constitute a breach of the peace.” He admitted the defendants were not doing anything to provoke a disturbance, “but the resentment and the reaction of . . . those white people in there, I could tell they had a hostile attitude toward those people.” Thus, fearing that the whites might attack the blacks, Rayfield arrested the blacks. When the judge expressed skepticism, the chief continued, explaining that the blacks came into a city where residents “were getting along very nicely.” Demonstrators intended “to cause something and to test out something,” he said, so he decided to remove the source of trouble. And “they were the source, to my way of thinking. Why not remove the source? And your situation cleared up.” He stood his ground, arguing that the black students’ mere presence in the library constituted a crime because they had come “with an intention and purpose, giving it notoriety.” The city’s final argument was based on an affidavit from the executive secretary of the state board of health, who stated that in Mississippi black people had more communicable diseases than whites; they had more than twice as many cases of tuberculosis; and particularly troublesome, they had many more cases of venereal disease. If the races mixed in places like public libraries, he argued, the rate of both diseases among whites would increase.25
The case initially focused on what might seem a fine point of law—whether or not it should be tried by one judge or by a three-judge court. Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued strenuously for a three-judge court, required only when the constitutionality of state statutes was at issue. The city argued that if there was any discrimination, it was not because of the statutes, and thus a three-judge court was improper. The debate had an important subtext, however. Sidney C. Mize, the local federal district judge, was not a friend to black people. If a three-judge court were required, two of the judges would be drawn from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the plaintiffs stood a better chance of reaching a friendlier audience. Judge Mize had established a well-deserved reputation as a segregationist during James Meredith’s attempted integration of the University of Mississippi the previous year. Mize had repeatedly delayed decisions on Meredith’s application to “Ole Miss,” regularly ruled against Meredith’s attorneys, and ultimately ruled in favor of the university, finding that it had not discriminated nor had it denied Meredith admission on the basis of race. At the prospect of facing the same judge, Jackson plaintiffs were not optimistic.
In their initial January 12, 1962, complaint, the plaintiffs requested a three-judge court, and by law they were given the expanded court, at least until that particular issue could be resolved. A month after the March 12 hearings, however, the judges issued their ruling: Judge Mize would hear the case. The panel agreed that the defendants had not relied on the three state statutes in denying blacks use of public facilities (the plaintiffs had already conceded this), but they also opined: “If any one or more of the statutes should be construed to permit or encourage the denial to plaintiffs . . . the use of public recreational facilities, including public libraries, on an integrated and equal basis solely on the grounds of race and color, then it would be so plainly unconstitutional as not to require a three-judge court.”26 By means of this statement the court’s two appellate judges—including Judge Richard T. Rives, who had served on the appellate panel that reversed Mize’s opinion in the Meredith case—clearly signaled to Mize that the court would not tolerate segregation in public facilities.
Judge Mize now owned the case, and on May 15, 1962, he rendered his opinion. He first asserted that the three plaintiffs were all older residents and had not themselves been denied the right to use any public facility in the city. Jackson was “a clean, progressive city” with 150,000 people, one-third of whom were Negroes, he said. It was known “for its low crime rate and lack of racial friction except for the period in 1961 when the self-styled Freedom Riders made their visits.” As Jackson “rebuilt from the ashes of the Civil War,” however, “its white citizens occupied one area, and its colored citizens chose to live together in another.” Because this situation had evolved without friction, Mize said, “the city duplicated its parks, playgrounds, libraries and auditoriums in the white and colored areas.” As a result, “members of each race have customarily used the recreational facilities located in close proximity to their homes. The defendants believe that the welfare of both races will best be served if this custom is continued. They do not claim the right to require or enforce separation of the races in any public facility.”27
Although Mize cited “no evidence of the arrest . . . of any Negro . . . before the Freedom Riders aroused strained racial feelings in 1961,” he acknowledged that “two colored girls [members of the Tougaloo Nine] had testified that they were arrested after they refused a police officer’s order that they leave the North State Street [main] library.” But these arrests were not because of segregation, he asserted; rather, it was because they were not there to use the library in good faith. They were not Jackson residents, and because they notified the press and television stations “of their intentions to break the customary racial use of the library facility,” it was clearly a “deliberate attempt to create racial friction.” They were, Mize said, “isolated publicity stunts.”28
In his conclusion, Mize entered a declaratory judgment that the plaintiffs were “entitled to an adjudication of their personal claims of right to unsegregated use of public recreational facilities.” But he also held that the defendants did not deny that right; they were simply encouraging voluntary separation of the races. Thus, he refused to enter an injunction against them. Instead, he noted that the “individual defendants . . . are all outstanding, high class gentlemen and in my opinion will not violate the terms of the declaratory judgment. . . . They know now what the law is . . . and I am definitely of the opinion that they will conform.”29 While refusing to blame local officials for any of the strict racial segregation of the past, Mize signaled that times had changed and he could no longer stop integration in public facilities, including the local public library. Shortly thereafter, the Jackson Public Library quietly desegregated.
HATTIESBURG
Unlike other states in the South, Mississippi witnessed the birth of a number of bootleg libraries in 1964 that were established specifically for its black citizens. In order to more effectively coordinate civil rights activities—particularly voter registration drives—throughout Mississippi, in 1962 a coalition of civil rights groups formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), with SNCC’s Robert Moses serving as director and the NAACP’s Aaron Henry serving as president. In the summer of 1964, Moses led COFO’s “Freedom Summer Project,” which brought hundreds of white volunteers, mainly from the North, to Mississippi to register black voters and train black activists for the civil rights battles sure to come. But some Mississippians reacted to Project activities and personnel with violence. That summer, for example, three civil rights workers—Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—were murdered, scores of others were beaten and arrested, and churches were burned to the ground. As a result, the Freedom Summer Project helped focus America’s attention on the plight of black Americans in Mississippi and is credited with leading to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Besides organizing college students, teachers, lawyers, clergy, and local citizens to register voters, COFO also ran summer “Freedom Schools” and in the “Community Centers” that housed them established nearly fifty “Freedom Libraries,” staffed largely by volunteers and stocked largely with donated books and periodicals. For many Mississippi blacks, these libraries constituted their first contact with library books. One student later recalled, “I read Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois” for the first time. “From all that, I knew that I could be somebody and that I was somebody and that I could excel.”30 In most cases (and unbeknown to their managers), these libraries replicated the model for black public library services established nearly a half-century earlier by Louisville librarian Thomas Fountain Blue—hosting story hours, poetry readings, and songfests; providing materials that fostered pride in black history and culture; and opening their spaces for community meetings and organizations. Rita and Mickey Schwerner opened a Freedom Library in Meridian in January 1964; local black teenager James Chaney helped build the shelves, and within months, through donations, the collection numbered ten thousand volumes. While these Freedom Libraries provided valued new services to many black communities, their existence also exacerbated feelings about Mississippi’s segregated public library services. “Once local residents had been exposed to the information and entertainment value of books,” argue library historians Donald G. Davis Jr. and Cheryl Knott Malone, “they might be moved to sit in at the local public library.”31
In the summer of 1963, Sandra Adickes, a white New York high school English teacher, volunteered to teach in a Virginia Freedom School. The following summer she volunteered for a Freedom School in Mississippi, this time with her friend Norma Becker. Together the two recruited forty teachers. All packed their bags when their New York school term was over and headed into the steamy Mississippi summer. Adickes taught classes in Priest Creek Baptist Church in Palmers Crossing, then in a Hattiesburg suburb. She relied on textbooks contributed by northern publishing company workers.
Years later, when asked what they most remembered about the Freedom School summer, Adickes’s students replied, “The books.” For them, access to books was a new experience, one that changed their lives.32 “It was after the passage of the Civil Rights Act,” one student later recalled. “We discussed in class what it meant to us as kids; it meant we could legally do things that we couldn’t previously do. . . . We talked about the fact that we’d been reading all summer.” Thus, it was natural that they would question why they were not permitted access to books in most branches of the Hattiesburg Public Library system. Fully aware of the significance of the new Civil Rights Act, six of Adickes’s students decided to celebrate their “freedom summer” by testing it at the white main library. They invited Adickes to join them, and she agreed.33
Students could have gone to the black branch that, like many other communities in the South, had opened the previous year to accommodate public library service needs of black communities within Jim Crow society. But the Hattiesburg Public Library board’s decision to open the separate branch angered director Carlton Rochell. “I am disgusted, frustrated, cynical and unwilling to back petal [sic] or compromise myself any further,” he wrote Mississippi Library Commission director Lura Currier. “After recent, rather heated, conversations with the Board, Mayor, Commissioner, and supervisors, I cannot bring myself to see one brick laid which might involve me in the original sin of Mississippi.” Rather than follow the dictates of city officials, Rochell resigned in 1963. Currier’s response reflects the dilemma in which Mississippi librarians who favored library services to blacks found themselves. She wrote: “I have decided to stay with this until they run me out. . . . Your comment about Mississippi’s original sin . . . was interesting. . . . If I had taken that attitude . . . I would never have given any Negro a book at all. . . . So many, many times I have asked myself: am I making things worse by setting up a branch library for Negroes? Then, I come back to the statement made by the Negroes themselves in Starkville. ‘It is not a question of whether we have books with the white people; it is a question in this day of whether we have books at all. Perhaps some other day we will have the other question to answer but for now this is the best we can do and we are glad to have this.’”34
Hattiesburg Freedom School students were not satisfied with the new black library, a one-room facility largely containing “rejects from the public library downtown that should have gone into the garbage,” as one student described them, “like our [segregated public school] textbooks at the time.” On Friday, August 14, 1964—ten days after the bodies of fellow Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were found on a farm near Philadelphia, Mississippi—Adickes and six of her black students, five girls and one boy, all wearing blue denim SNCC “Freedom” shirts, took a bus from Palmers Crossing to the main white library, thirty minutes away. “Our class was a very aggressive freedom class,” Jimella Stokes-Jackson later remembered. “It was the time and our spirits were that we’re going to change this so our children won’t have to.”35 “Going to the library was important, not frivolous,” student Diane Moncure Sutton later recalled. “Walking down Main Street [to integrate it] was a good feeling.”36
They entered the library, approached the circulation desk, and asked for library cards. The librarian refused, citing “custom” and noting that the library board had “decreed that the library not be integrated.” Students then sat down at a desk, read newspapers, and waited. Stokes-Jackson heard the librarian call someone on the telephone. “I need some help down here,” she said. Shortly thereafter, the Hattiesburg police chief arrived, closed down the library, and forced Adickes and her students to leave. “We’d known all of our lives that we could not go to the [main] library,” Stokes-Jackson said, “but we hadn’t been confronted with ‘You are not good enough to use this library.’” The experience galvanized the group. “I was hurt, but not beaten,” Stokes-Jackson recalled. “If anything it was a rush.”37 The police chief had acted on direct orders from the mayor, who explained to the Hattiesburg American later in the day why the library had closed: “We decided to have a pre-school inventory of all our books. We hope to be finished with it by Monday and open again then.” He said nothing about the fact that the library had closed for an inventory earlier that summer.38
By this time it was noon; the group decided to eat lunch. They walked to Woolworth, but because it was crowded, they continued to the Kress store. There they found two empty booths and sat down. When the waitress came, she refused to take Adickes’s order. When Adickes asked why, the waitress replied, “Well, I am not going to.” Adickes asked, “Why not?” “Because,” the waitress answered, “my manager told me not to serve you.” “Do you realize that this is a violation of the Civil Rights Act?” Adickes responded. “Yes, but my manager told me not to serve you,” the waitress said. “We have to serve the coloreds, but we are not going to serve the whites that come in with them.”39 At that point, Adickes and her students left. Immediately outside the store, Adickes was arrested and charged with (and later convicted of) vagrancy, despite her assertions that she had $95 on her person and that she was regularly employed as a New York teacher at an annual salary of $7,200.40
In the meantime, other Freedom Summer students drew inspiration and energy from this initial volley at the public library. Although the police had closed the library on Friday, August 14, it reopened the following Monday. That day William D. Jones, a black New York schoolteacher, along with some of his Freedom School black students, decided to enter the white main library. Jones was born and reared in Birmingham, Alabama, where he lived until the early 1960s. He was an air force veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. Not until his mid-thirties did he move to New York and begin work as a public school teacher. In 1964 he volunteered to serve as a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi. In classes that summer, he and his students regularly discussed Hattiesburg’s segregated facilities, so after Sandra Adickes and her students had been removed from the library, Jones and some of his students decided to try again. Ben Achtenberg, a white Harvard University senior, and two other white Freedom School volunteers agreed to precede them and serve as observers.
About 1:00 p.m., Jones and six students, ages nine to seventeen, walked into the public library and waited patiently at the front desk while the librarian spoke on the phone. When she hung up, the students, one by one, politely asked her for “a specific book pertaining to Negroes.” The librarian told the first few students that the book they requested was unavailable but that she might be able to obtain a copy and send it over to the black branch library for the students to claim there. She explained they could retrieve the book only at that branch: “Yes, that is your branch.” Several students remained standing at the front desk. Others left the desk, selected a book or magazine from the stacks, then sat down and began to read quietly. When the librarian noticed the seated students, she left the desk to confront seventeen-year-old Jerry Wilson. “Do you intend to stay in here and read?” Wilson answered yes. “All right, I’ll just have to call the city [police],” she responded. She returned to the desk, made a phone call, and was soon joined by other white women and a white man, all probably library employees.
At one table sat nine-year-old Cynthia McCarty, studiously reading a gardening magazine. “She sat majestically with her chin barely able to reach the edge of the table where she had laid the open magazine,” Jones later testified. “I observed her in admiration, compassion, pity and amusement for a few minutes, then I asked her and the next older girl, Dorothy Jean, to go with me to the children’s section on the opposite side of the room. We went over and I directed them to a shelf containing story books for children.” Each selected a book and started to walk with it toward the librarian’s desk.41 At that moment police chief Hugh W. Herring and another officer confronted the two young girls. “Are those library books?” “Yes,” the girls offered. In a harsh voice he ordered, “Put them back.” The girls immediately returned the books and once again sat down at a table and resumed reading magazines.
One officer began questioning the white observers, while the other asked the black students for their names, addresses, and ages. Chief Herring then began to harass Jones. “Are they [the students] your children? . . . I mean are you their father? . . . If you aren’t their father, what are you doing with them? . . . Do you have their parents’ permission to have them with you?” Two more officers arrived. Chief Herring pressed Jones for his name and questioned him about his employment. “I told him that I was employed as a teacher in the public schools of Bellmore, New York, and showed him a faculty member card that certified it,” Jones said. “He copied information from the card, then inquired further as to the particular school, its name, address, the subject and grade that I teach. I answered the question fully, having the cumbersome task of spelling out almost every word. Upon hearing that I taught French to fourth grade pupils, he laughed incredulously and derisively. Then he asked me what I was doing in Hattiesburg, and I told him that I was a Freedom School teacher. He asked me whether I was paid for this and I replied no.”
Chief Herring then announced he would arrest Jones for vagrancy. Jones couldn’t help himself. He laughed at the notion, having already told the chief that he had been fully employed the past year and had a contract for the coming year, which he offered to show the chief. “It’s funny to you, isn’t it?” Herring asked. “All of you people are funny to me,” Jones answered. “You make me laugh.” When asked how he could possibly be charged with vagrancy, Herring explained, “You aren’t employed around here, you are just hanging around without means of support.” Jones was promptly arrested, along with the three white observers, all charged with vagrancy. The children were ordered to return home.42 Again the library closed, and the mayor said it would remain closed until “we have had time to study the situation. We don’t know when it will be reopened.”43
Those arrested on August 17 needed lawyers willing to represent them and judges willing to listen. In Mississippi before 1964, both were hard to find. Fortunately, along with the many teachers who came south to teach in Freedom Schools in the 1960s, so did other professionals interested in racial equality. This included committed lawyers, most of whom, like the teachers, were volunteers working without pay. Among them was Eleanor Jackson Piel, a 1943 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Piel’s mother was a California concert pianist who had married a Jewish man. At an early age, Piel observed the anti-Semitism that her father regularly experienced. She also experienced sexism in the legal field. She was the only woman in her law school class, and no law firm would hire her after graduation. Not surprisingly, she spent her career representing those who weathered other forms of discrimination, first labor organizers and later political radicals.
After civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were murdered, Piel—who knew the mother of one of the young men—joined other lawyers in the National Lawyers Guild, an organization working for political and social change, and headed to the South. There she met Sandra Adickes,44 agreed to represent her, and, as a result of that friendship, also learned that William D. Jones and the three white observers had been arrested at the library on August 17. She agreed to represent them as well and to challenge their vagrancy arrests.
The first step for most of the civil rights cases was to remove them from Mississippi state courts, whose judges were not inclined to view such cases favorably. Federal judges, appointed for life, were deemed not as susceptible to local pressures as judges whose reelection depended upon winning the majority of a popular vote. Yet, as demonstrated repeatedly during the 1960s, some federal judges who lived and worked in local communities and shared local sentiments were not inclined to challenge local Jim Crow practices, even those declared illegal by federal courts and federal law. Generally, it was luck of the draw. For Adickes, Jones, and the others, their first draw was unlucky. Because of the vagrancy charges, their cases had to begin in state court, so their first step was to remove the cases to federal court. Their petition for removal landed on the desk of federal district judge William Harold Cox.
Cox had been appointed to the federal bench by President John F. Kennedy after intense campaigning on his behalf by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. He and Cox had been roommates at the University of Mississippi. Eastland reportedly told U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy, “Tell your brother that if he will give me Harold Cox, I will give him the nigger,” referring to Thurgood Marshall, whom Kennedy was hoping to place on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Cox did not disappoint his patron. He strenuously fought integration efforts, and though many of his decisions were reversed on appeal, his decisions generally delayed justice for many months. In one voter registration trial held in March 1964, Cox referred to a group of black witnesses as “a bunch of chimpanzees.” Cox also oversaw the trial of those accused of murdering the three civil rights workers in 1964. That trial took place the following year, after an extensive federal investigation. Cox immediately dismissed the charges against seventeen of the nineteen indicted. After the U.S. Supreme Court reversed him and reinstated the indictments, the cases finally went to trial in 1967. A jury convicted seven of the defendants. Cox then sentenced the defendants to terms of three to ten years for the murders. “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved,” he remarked.45
This was the judge positioned to determine if the Hattiesburg Public Library vagrancy cases would remain in federal court or be remanded to state court. For the defendants, staying in federal court was their best hope of obtaining justice, albeit on appeal. But for the federal court to have jurisdiction, the defendants had to demonstrate a “federal” interest; vagrancy charges stem from state, not federal, law. But the defendants had a federal component to their petition that formed the foundation of their plea. They asserted that the conduct of the government officials violated their rights as guaranteed by both the U.S. Constitution and the newly enacted Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cox was not convinced. When the state moved to remand the cases back to state court, he granted the motion. The defendants were probably not surprised. That year in open court Cox had commented on the new Civil Rights Act, “I don’t know anybody down here who don’t oppose it.”46 The defendants immediately appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, an area then encompassing Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. This time they got lucky. The case was assigned to Judge Elbert Parr Tuttle.
Tuttle was born in California, raised in Hawaii, and attended a racially diverse school in Honolulu.47 He also attended New York’s Cornell University for both his undergraduate and legal education. As a young man, he joined the army, served in World War I, then enlisted again in World War II at the age of forty-five. He served in the military for five years and was wounded in hand-to-hand combat on Okinawa. As a Georgia National Guard captain, he was once sent to Elberton, Georgia, to help face down an angry lynch mob determined to dynamite the town jail where two black detainees were being held, ostensibly for raping a white woman. He first lobbed tear gas into the crowd, then turned fire hoses on them, but the mob refused to disperse. Finally, he and other Guardsmen managed to disguise the two defendants and spirit them out of the jail for safekeeping during their trial. Tuttle was badly shaken by the experience.48
It was in Georgia that Tuttle met his wife, and after law school graduation in 1923, they agreed to locate his law practice in Atlanta. At the time Georgia had only one political party, the all-white Democratic Party, and even though Tuttle had political ambitions, he refused to join. Instead, he attempted to build a viable Republican Party presence in Atlanta, and President Dwight Eisenhower rewarded his efforts in 1954 when he named Tuttle to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1961, just in time for some of the most significant civil rights decisions of the time, Judge Tuttle became the Fifth Circuit’s chief judge.
Among other 1960s cases, Judge Tuttle ruled that Martin Luther King Jr. and others were free to conduct civil rights demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, during which time the Albany Public Library desegregated; the all-white University of Mississippi had to admit African American James Meredith; recently elected African American Julian Bond had to be permitted to be seated in the Georgia House of Representatives after white legislators twice refused to seat him; and the all-white University of Georgia had to immediately admit two black students, including Charlayne Hunter (who later become PBS and NPR correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault). Tuttle “led the way in disarming the southern states of the most effective weapon in their arsenal—delay,” his biographer argues. Although angry segregationists called him a “judicial activist,” he often said that the civil rights cases were “the easiest cases I ever decided. The constitutional rights were so compelling, and the wrongs were so enormous.” In 1981 Judge Tuttle received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.49
Although it took more than three years—the arrests in 1964, removal to federal court shortly thereafter, remand back to state court in 1965, and then the long process of appeal—in late 1967 the four vagrancy defendants were finally before a judge who bore no hostility to civil rights cases. Perhaps Mississippi anticipated an inevitable decision; perhaps enough time had passed that it was clear the tide was turning. In any event, the state did not even bother to file a brief in the appellate case. On February 5, 1968, Judge Tuttle reversed Judge Cox’s decision to remand the cases to state court. He held in no uncertain terms that William D. Jones and his students had a right to “enjoy equal public accommodations in the Hattiesburg City Library and a restaurant in the nationally known Kress store.” He referred to the “utter baselessness of any conceivable contention that the vagrancy statutes prohibited any conduct in which these persons were engaged.” And not only did he decide that the cases should not have been sent back to state court; he also ruled that the charges of vagrancy against the four should be dismissed. The case was over.50
But for the Hattiesburg Public Library, the case was moot. When the library reopened in November 1964, it claimed an integrated system but required Hattiesburg blacks who wanted to use the “white” library to “make a special application subject to review by the entire administrative board.” Ben Achtenberg, one of the observers arrested, reported: “As far as I am able to determine, no Negro has so far succeeded in obtaining a library card.”51 Months later, however, the library board reversed its practice, gave Hattiesburg blacks library cards, and integrated the library.
INDIANOLA
In 1954 Indianola became the first southern town to establish a White Citizens’ Council, and at the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, its public library still did not permit access to its black citizens. In September, however, eleven black teenagers (including three from the Council of Federated Organizations) approached the white public library. Six blocks from the library they were met by thirty police officers—“most of them deputized,” Baltimore’s black weekly Afro-American noted—who then walked next to them. Not surprisingly, by the time they arrived, the library had locked its doors; it remained closed for several days. But two weeks later black seventeen-year-old Alma Jean Dillard approached the library, now open, with her black friend, twenty-four-year-old Sam Randle, to ask for a book on the Mississippi state constitution. The librarian instead gave her application forms, told her to fill them out, and asked her to return on October 1, by which time, she said, the library board would have made a decision about whether to approve their applications. It “may prove to be the first crack in the solid wall of segregation in this small Delta city,” opined the Afro-American.52
But Alma Dillard did not get a library card on October 1. Instead of integrating the white library, city officials decided to open a “Negro” library. “They cleaned out a former grocery store in the Negro section of town, put in three tables, one large dictionary and four hundred books, and opened it for the Negro community,” a COFO official later recalled. “The [black] community did not accept it. The dedication ceremony was met by one hundred pickets demanding that the facility be closed.” A subsequent boycott “has been one hundred percent effective ever since the building opened.” To encourage use of the black library, city officials gave teachers in the black school cards that advertised the facility. “Many cards were torn up by the children; parents went to the school to protest.” Instead, Indianola’s black youths continued to picket the white library and ask for library cards there. Clubbings were common, victims frequently spent three or four days in jail, and several lost jobs “because of their requests for library cards,” one observer wrote.53
On March 4, 1965, the Indianola Freedom School and its Freedom Library—“which had painted on its front a black and white handshake”—was burned to the ground. The black community suspected that arsonists “knew that the Freedom School was to blame for all the ‘freedom’ trouble” at the white library. “So get rid of the school and you get rid of the trouble.” City officials, however, afraid of negative publicity and potential violence, decided it was in Indianola’s best interests to integrate the white public library without an announcement by the end of the year. Like many others, they temporarily removed all the chairs so that users—black and white—could not sit together. After a trial period without incident, however, chairs and tables were returned. Nonetheless, public schools remained segregated.54
VICKSBURG
In the Vicksburg Freedom Library in 1964, COFO officials hung a sign that read: “Do you have a card for the (heretofore) white library. Why not? Go get one. One Man—One Book.”55 Yet not until February 1965 did five Vicksburg black students enter the city’s main library and go to the stacks to retrieve books. When one asked the white librarian for assistance, she replied, “The colored books are in the other library,” and asked them to leave. “Other library” referred to the underfunded, dilapidated Jim Crow branch in the black neighborhood, not the nearby Freedom Library. When the students refused, she called the police, who took them to the station for questioning. Within a month, however, the main Vicksburg Public Library decided to follow Greenville, Meridian, and Indianola’s example and buckle to the pressure to integrate, and on March 15 it issued library cards to teenagers Eddie Thomas and Henry Coleman. Nonetheless, the system supplied separate cards for the two libraries, thus requiring black patrons to carry two. Public schools remained segregated, now more than ten years after Brown.56
* * *
On March 7, 1965, Mississippi Library Commission director Lura Currier wrote the editor of Harper’s Magazine that the state had signed a Statement of Compliance with the federal government that with one exception, which was not mentioned, “all of Mississippi’s public libraries” were now open to Mississippi “Negroes” and thus were eligible to receive federal funds.57 The successful journey to integrated public libraries in the Magnolia State had been long, painful, and often dangerous, and like the desegregation of most other southern public libraries, it had largely been forced into the media and the courts by Mississippi black youths who braved dogs, billy clubs, jail time, and constant police intimidation; who refused to be pushed around; and who had the courage and determination to insist on their rights in order to bend history in their direction.