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XI INTRODUCTION September 1, 1966, began as a rainy Monday morning in Grenada, a town in central Mississippi on the border between the Hills and the Delta. That day, about 150 black children attempted to enter the all-white schools of the town for the first time,per anAugust 6 federal court order by Judge Claude Clayton mandating freedom-of-choice school desegregation. By early afternoon, at least eight black children, one black adult, and a number of white reporters had been beaten by several groups of angry white men and women.1 Well before the opening bell rang, whites gathered in the vicinity of John Rundle High and Lizzie Horn Elementary (the two all-white schools shared a campus). Before any children arrived, some of the whites stopped a carload of blacks on their way to work, pounded on the car with wooden clubs, and unsuccessfully tried to pull the occupants out of the car before the driver was able to race away. This weapon-wielding assembly soon saw a group of black children on their way to begin their first day of classes; the mob rushed toward the students, who fled. Many of the children immediately went to regroup at Belle Flower Mount Baptist Church, the physical home of the Grenada civil rights movement. Meanwhile, the white toughs received additional weapons when a truck delivered a shipment of metal pipes to the crowd. An hour later, about forty of the black students set off from Belle Flower, accompanied by a small group of adults,to march to the schools and enroll.Several blocks shy of their destination, the group was met by thirty white men toting sticks, clubs, ax handles, and metal pipes. At least one, Justice of the Peace James R. Ayers, had a gun, which he fired into the air. Most of the black group beat a quick retreat, except for a group of elderly women, who stood their ground. The white thugs ignored the old women but pursued the slowest of the escaping children.Two were beaten,one an eleven-year-old girl,Emerald Cunningham, afflicted with polio. She was pushed down by Ayers, who threatened to kill her with the pistol. While she lay on the ground, another man clubbed her legs with one of the metal pipes. This early-morning confrontation was only the beginning of the day’s violence. Groups of armed whites continued to roam the area around the schools, where at least one hundred black children had managed to enter and were now attending classes. When classes were dismissed shortly after noon (only a half day had been scheduled for the first day of classes), gangs of whites chased and attacked black children leaving the school grounds.At least six black students and one black parent were injured in a series of assaults. In one of the incidents, a white mob broke the leg of Richard Earl Sigh, an elementary student, as he left his new school. Approaching a group of whites yelling at him to “run nigger run,” Sigh was first assaulted by a white woman with an umbrella.When he did start to run,a white man kicked him in the leg, and another hit him with a billy club. Once he was on the ground, the white mob kicked him and tried to choke him. Although the whites threatened to kill Sigh, they let him escape, and he staggered back to Belle Flower Church with a broken right leg. Irate groups of whites also turned on the reporters who had begun to gather near the schools as classes were dismissed for the day, assaulting Jack Cantrell and Jim Reid of the Memphis Press-Scimitar.3 When the noontime violence began, many of the black students successfully retreated inside the school, protected by the Mississippi Highway Patrol and local law officers, although angry and armed whites continued to linger around the school grounds. The arrival of United Press International (UPI) reporter Robert Gordon, just in town from Jackson, revived the ire of the mob. A man in “the uniform of a service station attendant” punched Gordon in the face after he identified himself as a newspaper reporter, and then a number of other white men fell on him, beating him with “their fists and some unknown objects,” according to Gordon. Escaping from the group, he ran across the street to the school, but a Grenada policeman told him to get off school grounds. When he did, the white...

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