Word: mississippi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have studied Mississippi politics and power structure for more than ten years, and I think that the former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Justice Department, its civil rights division, the Negro leaders-in Mississippi, and the civil rights organizations are barking up the wrong tree in Mississippi, with their lawsuits, contempt trials against registrars, their voting schools, registration projects, freedom parties, etc. This is nothing more or less than political foolery...
Voting in Mississippi is no simple civil rights issue. It is purely and clearly a political issue, and it must, therefore, be dealt with by the rules of the game of politics. The Negro in Mississippi, as elsewhere, does not need anyone to fight his political fight for him. What he needs is the security of his life, of his person, of his property, and of his family, while he fights his fight. Anyone who cannot offer this security to him may as well get out of Mississippi because he can only succeed in failing, thereby prolonging the life...
...Same." But in his blasts against the Warren Commission, Hoover was relatively mild. FBI agents in Mississippi, he said, had been rendered all but helpless because the state is "filled with water moccasins, rattlesnakes, and red-neck sheriffs, and they are all in the same category, as far as I am concerned." In even more vitriolic style, the FBI chief attacked the South's most revered integrationist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who, even as Hoover delivered his blast, was in the Bahamas working on his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, to be delivered in Oslo...
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...
...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...