The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870â?"1980

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CRACK IN THE WALL: School Desegregation Begins

96 THE CRACK IN THE WALL School Desegregation Begins On August 31, 1964, with twenty federal marshals and local law enforcement officials on hand and a“backup emergency force”of eighteen hundred members of the Mississippi National Guard ready to be federalized, twenty-one of an expected twenty-three black students enrolled in four previously all-white elementary schools in Biloxi. The next day, though more trouble was expected in rural Leake County, the home of rabid segregationist and former governor Ross Barnett, a similar assemblage of state and federal forces prevented any harm to Debra Lewis as she became the first black student to attend the formerly all-white Carthage Attendance Center. Other black children had planned to join the desegregation attempt, but their parents backed down after a campaign of intimidation by local whites. In Jackson on September 14, Jean Fairfax, a member of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker group involved in a number of peace and social justice causes around the world, observed that “history was made—most uneventfully,” as thirty-nine black six-yearolds attended eight previously all-white schools. An effort by a group of white women, organized as the Mississippians for Public Education, encouraged white parents to stick with the public schools and ultimately had more success than the Jackson’s Citizens’ Council chapter’s effort to create a system of white-only private schools.1 CHAPTER FOUR This first implementation of the Brown decision in the state, which occurred fast on the heels of the violent Freedom Summer of 1964, worried President Lyndon Johnson, among other observers, which explains the show of federal force that accompanied Mississippi’s first school desegregation. The previous year, Alabama (a holdout since 1961) had resisted court orders to dismantle its dual school system with state plans to close the public schools and white violence against black parents. Federal intervention was required to enforce the court decrees in Alabama. In response, whites fled from the affected schools. Despite the anxiety of Johnson and others, the initial school desegregation in Mississippi occurred with somewhat less drama, though not without problems. Brown II effectively placed the burden of effecting school desegregation squarely on the backs of black parents. They would have to sue to force reluctant whites to implement the Brown mandate. So it is not surprising that the first school desegregation successes in Mississippi were undertaken by individuals and communities involved in the wider campaign to eliminate Jim Crow and disfranchisement in the American South. Mississippi segregationists could not keep the civil rights movement out of their state forever, despite sustained efforts to block it. A number of local black citizens, emboldened by the successes of civil rights activities in other southern states, decided to stand up to the violence and intimidation utilized by white Mississippians to defend the racial status quo. Often with help from national civil rights organizations, local black activists launched a variety of protests and demonstrations against Jim Crow and disfranchisement in the early 1960s. In Biloxi, Leake County, and Jackson,improving black education had been a priority that predated the civil rights movement. The state’s equalization and consolidation program offered only the most recent proof of the inequalities of segregated education. As a consequence, an attempt to bring about school desegregation became part of the larger battle against segregation in these locales. The first direct-action civil rights protest in Mississippi took place on the Gulf Coast in 1959 when Dr. Gilbert Mason and eight other citizens of Biloxi waded into the Gulf of Mexico from the city’s all-white beach. In the spring of 1960, Mason, a Jackson native who had moved to Biloxi in 1955 to open a medical practice after earning his degree from Howard University Medical School, helped organize a branch of the NAACP in Biloxi. The group, led by its president, Mason, immediately organized two additional wade-ins that THE CRACK IN THE WALL 97 involved a small group of Gulf Coast blacks. The second wade-in sparked a violent reprisal from area whites. Local law enforcement officers looked on indifferently while eight blacks and two whites sustained injuries in the melee. Although the battle to desegregate Mississippi’s beaches bogged down in a long legal dispute, unresolved until the early 1970s, Mason, his wife, Natalie, and other members of the Biloxi NAACP continued to fight on a number of civil rights...