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8. “A Communist under Every Bed”
- University Press of Mississippi
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94 8 “A COMMUNIST UNDER EVERY BED” In New York City in August 1956, a year after the Till kidnapping and murder , the Mound Bayou physician and voting rights activist who had spurred the middle of the night race through the backwoods to find prosecution witnesses solemnly told Jet that he had left the Mississippi Delta forever. With a 1,000 bounty placed on his head by white racists, forty-eight-year-old Dr. T. R. M. Howard said he felt he could “do more in the battle for Negro rights alive anywhere in the North than dead in a weed-grown grave in Dixie.” Dr. Howard and his wife left behind a thriving medical clinic, a solid block of modern homes—described as probably the best housing for Negroes in the area—and hundreds of acres of rich farmland, ultimately sold, lot by lot, to Negro farmers. One 360-acre lot of cotton land, surrounded on all sides by white plantations, was sold to a white syndicate. He estimated his total losses at more than 100,000, but concluded that his own life and the safety of his family were worth the price. Dr. Howard resettled on Chicago’s South Side, accepted a post as medical director of a black-owned firm, and moved up to the presidency of the National (the Negro) Medical Association, where he proposed a broad educational campaign toward the integration of Negro doctors and patients into white hospitals. The most dramatic change, however, was in his political outlook. After twenty-five years as a Democrat, the Mississippi activist announced that he would support the Republican ticket that year and indefinitely into the future, explaining, “A vote for any Democratic candidate anywhere for any office is simply a vote for my former neighbor, Senator James Eastland,” the diehard segregationist from Mississippi’s Sunflower County. Reminded that Republican bedfellows would include the likes of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, Dr. Howard acknowledged it was not a great choice, but he’d rather side with McCarthy “who thinks there’s a Communist "A Communist under Every Bed" 95 under every bed, than with Senator Eastland who thinks there should be a Negro dangling from every rope.” In 1958, Dr. Howard ran unsuccessfully against Democratic Congressman William Dawson for the latter’s House seat, and although he never sought office again, by the time of his death in 1976 he was still a major figure in South Side Chicago politics and medical care, and remained an outspoken proponent of civil rights and equal opportunity for blacks. Even before he left the Delta, he had proven his fearlessness in confronting not only white supremacists, but also the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Starting in late 1955, Dr. Howard provoked the anger of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by wondering publicly why the FBI, despite its almost legendary crime solving scorecard, could not solve the murders of so many Negroes in the South. Dr. Howard’s criticism of the bureau followed unsuccessful pleas that the FBI take over the Till case and others involving racial violence against Negroes. The exchange made front-page news and included Hoover’s angrily accusing Howard of making “false and irresponsible charges.” A few years later, Dr. Martin Luther King’s similar criticism of the FBI would not only erupt into a public feud, but would escalate into Hoover’s extraordinary effort to destroy the civil rights leader. The full extent of Hoover’s campaign against King would not come to light until the late 1970s (when both were deceased), after congressional hearings on intelligence activities and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) opened miles of government files, including the FBI’s, to public examination. We knew very little in the mid-1950s about what the FBI, or more speci fically J. Edgar Hoover himself, thought about the growing civil rights movement. The rights Negroes were seeking to exercise were constitutional rights, as the federal courts were confirming, and the FBI’s repeated demurrer that it lacked jurisdiction in case after case of kidnap, murder, lynching, beating, and an unbelievable array of other crimes against Negroes, was provoking criticism and distrust of the bureau. Jet reported the criticism and in the interest of fairness repeatedly invited Hoover to respond. How that played out is documented in my own FBI file, which I requested under the FOI and Privacy Acts. The day before Thanksgiving 2009, I received it, and...