Word: mccomb
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...budget of $131,000, about half provided by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. For the rest, says President Robert M. Stevens, "we just have to do a lot of hustlin'." Now gifts are vanishing. Campbell is solidly behind civil rights agitation in the nearby town of McComb. Says Stevens wryly: "I could raise half a million in no time if we suddenly began promoting the idea of segregation...
Rolling up on schedule at the pink stucco bus depot in McComb, Miss. (pop. 15,500), a Greyhound discharged six Negro passengers. While a crowd of some 600 whites pushed against police cordons, the Negroes walked into the terminal's white waiting room, sat for three minutes while their baggage was unloaded. It was the first time a public facility had been integrated in Mississippi...
Even such small success came hard. Last September the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered an end to all bus depot segregation, but in McComb, no sooner were "white" and "colored" signs removed from the depot than local police set them up on the sidewalk outside. A federal court ordered the new signs removed. Early last week three Negro men and two girls were dispatched by the activist Congress of Racial Equality to test McComb's obedience to federal authority. In the depot they were set upon, beaten, and driven into the street by young white toughs...
That brought the threat of drastic federal action, and a detachment of U.S. deputy marshals began assembling in New Orleans. But Attorney General Robert Kennedy called McComb from Washington, got Mayor Charles H. Douglas' promise to keep order. Thus, when the second group of CORE riders arrived in McComb, 15 cops, the sheriff and nine Pike County deputies were at the depot. They picked up four troublemakers who attacked visiting newsmen (including TIME's Atlanta Bureau Chief Simmons Fentress), protected the CORE riders until an afternoon bus took them back to New Orleans...
There are already 18 SNCC field workers in McComb. But the group is so low on funds that the workers receive only apiece each week and may have to quit entirely...