A PIECE OF THE SCRAPBOOK (BITS AND PIECES
OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT)
The historic first picketing in the history of downtown Jackson: December 12 1962. We were immediately arrested by almost 100 Jackson police officers. This launched the extremely effective boycott of downtown Jackson which grew, in time, into the massive Jackson Movement. In addition to Eldri and me, the arrested pickets were Ms. Bette Anne Poole, Mr. Walter Mitchell, Mr. Ronald Mitchell, and Mr. Rupert Crawford -- all Tougaloo students of mine.
Throwing down the gauntlet to the Mississippi power structure: May 12, 1963. I made the motion before a special meeting of the Mississippi State Board of NAACP Branches -- of which I was the only non-Black member -- which sought the broadening of the Jackson Boycott into a massive non-violent protest movement. My motion was approved unanimously. Following this, Medgar Evers and I went to my house at Tougaloo College and I then typed this individual letter many times: to Governor Ross R. Barnett, Mayor Allen C. Thompson, City Commission, Bankers Association, Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Jackson Association, Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the Mississippi Economic Council. Medgar and I signed each letter at that point and he left for Jackson to get Mrs. Doris Allison's signature. The power structure, dominated by the powerful White Citizens Council, stonewalled. It brought in thousands of (white) " law enforcement officers " -- the many hundreds of Jackson city police, the thousand member Jackson police auxiliary, sheriffs and deputies and constables from every one of Mississippi's 82 counties, the entire Mississippi Highway Patrol, and finally the National Guard. Turning the State Fairgrounds into a gigantic concentration camp, it arrested thousands of our people. Klan types poured into Jackson from the entire region. Medgar was murdered, I was almost killed, and now -- decades later -- Mrs. Doris Allison and I talk by phone at least once a week. My collected papers are held by the Mississippi State Department of Archives and History (as well as at State Historical Society of Wisconsin) and I am a Life Member of the august Mississippi State Historical Society.