Word: byhalia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...early morning hours of last June 29, Butler Young Jr., a 21-year-old black laborer, was arrested by two white police officers from the town of Byhalia, Miss. (pop. 750), for hit-and-run driving. With the Byhalia police was a black deputy sheriff from adjacent DeSoto County, where the alleged hit-and-run incident had taken place. The sheriff climbed into the back of the Byhalia officers' car along with Young, and the three policemen set off to take their prisoner to jail. Young never made...
...incident has grown one of the longest civil rights boycotts in Mississippi history. Organized by the United League of Marshall County, a local civil rights group that claims to have 4,000 members, the boycott has been nearly 100% effective for eight months. It has cut business in some Byhalia stores by as much as 75%. Six white merchants have already declared bankruptcy, and others may soon follow...
Thus, as the summer turns into fall in Byhalia, the tension and fear remain. The burning of Hubert Mill's store and the apparent attempt to murder the United League leaders could be only a premonition of worse violence to come, as the businessmen lose more money, the blacks make more demands, and the political leaders flounder in indecision and inactivity. A clash of perspectives and values, unmediated by a viable and responsive political system, is inevitably a volatile situation...
...impression left to the observer is that what happened this summer in Byhalia is slightly anachronistic. The tactics of boycott, the picket signs demanding racial equality, the stridence of black demands, the inability of whites to respond--all are problems that confronted the South ten years ago, and were seemingly solved...
...still unresolved story of dusty, hot little Byhalia should belong to a traumatic and unhappy part of southern history. But the death of Butler Young, Jr., the tragedy of Hubert Mills, the threats to Alfred Robinson, the bewilderment of Dudley Moore indicate otherwise...