Word: naacp
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...magazine and other Northern journals which referred to "lynching") obscured the issues so completely that the white people of the state retreated to their old position of distrust of the North and to white supremacy. The cause of better racial relations was deeply harmed. Another instance in which the NAACP seems to have hurt itself here was by its recent protest over a decision by Federal Judge Marion Boyd involving segregated universities in Tennessee...
...case was protested. But to the surprise of almost everyone it was not criticized by angry Southerners but by NAACP lawyers. This was the first official gradual- desegregation order, and the NAACP said it would protest because it feared Boyd's ruling might be used as a precedent throughout the South. Yet the order struck most observers here as completely in keeping with the Supreme Court's idea for implementation of its decree-- a ruling tempered and fitted to the particular circumstances of the area...
...weeks after the crime, in Money, the scene of the murder, an already-growing reaction was setting in against outside interference. A good many intelligent people here feel that the NAACP deliberately aggravated the local populace in order to create a propaganda martyr, on the assumption that if the two defendants, Milam and Bryant, were convicted, its crusade would suffer. This indictment may be untrue, but the NAACP could not have gotten better results, even if it had tried. The obvious injustice of its accusations against the state has made residents more convinced than ever that they are right...
...enough evidence for a conviction. Such a verdict would have been miscarriage of justice. That the body was never positively identified is due to the antiquated methods of the Mississippi police, which has never been noted for scientific medico-legal methods. What is surprising, however, is that the NAACP, which certainly knew that the body's identification would be the crucial issue, did not use some of its own resources to pin down the identification. It may have been, of course, that such was done, and that no positive evidence (dental records, X-rays, etc.) could be obtained...
...important thing is that the state, the legally constituted authority, acted in all apparent good faith to see that justice was done, but that as soon as the crime was announced, the NAACP began a heated denunciation of the state and its political morality. This kind of shot-gun slander produced the predictable result--the local citizens began to turn their condemnation from the murder of a Negro boy to the NAACP. This reaction was so strong that the subsequent acquittal of Milam and Bryant in another trial for kidnapping, in which the state's case was much stronger, appears...