The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement

J. Oliver Emmerich and the McComb Enterprise-Journal

J. Oliver Emmerich and the McComb Enterprise-Journal David R. Davies J. Oliver Emmerich knew that trouble lay ahead. In the tense spring that preceded Mississippi's long, hot summer of 1964, Emmerich, editor of the McComb Enterprise-Journal^ predicted that the impending arrival of out-of-state civil rights workers could easily provoke a violent white backlash in his conservative southwest Mississippi town. Mindful of McComb 's turbulent racialhistory, Emmerich wrote a series of signed, frontpage editorials outlining community preparations for the "invasion" and pleading with McComb citizens to act responsibly. "Our conclusion is that we should all try to relax," Emmerich wrote on 29 May 1964. ". . . Maywe on Sept. i look back on the summer of 1964 and be able to truthfully say, 'We met a crisis with maturity. We did not panic. We exercised restraint. Weupheld the dignity of the law.Wemet a challenge intelligently .' " McComb did not respond as Emmerich had hoped. Between the spring and fall, there were twenty-five incidents of arson, as well as beatings , burnings, and widespread intimidation of McComb area blacks, and whites who were sympathetic to them. Sixteen homes and churches in the black community were dynamited, including the residence at 702 Wall Street where black and white workers of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) lived and organized black voter registration drives. McComb's violence drew the attention of the national news media, David R. Davies Mississippi Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr., and even President Lyndon Johnson, who promised quick action after meeting with three bombing victims. But if McComb's upheavalwas almost predictable, the sudden end to the violence was not. In early fall, business leaders, including Emmerich, got together first to raise reward money to catch the bombers, then to appeal for an end to the bombings in McComb. The bombers, all of them white, were arrested, and the Enterprise-Journal published a "statement of principles" on 17 November 1964 signed by hundreds of McComb citizens . The principles urged a return to lawand order, an end to harassment arrests, compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and greater communication between the races. Finally, the violence ended in McComb, partly a credit to editor Emmerich and his Enterprise-Journal. Emmerich was neither an arch-conservative on the race issue nor a flaming liberal, but an avowed segregationist softened by a belief in fair journalism. The ultimate businessman, Emmerich believed in doing what was good for business and what was good for his community, principles that lay at the base of growing business support for acceptance of civil rights laws across the South in the 19608. By no means had McComb solved its racial problems by the end of 1964, but like other communities then and later, it at least had begun to face them without violence. McComb 's story, then, is the story of the end of one community's resistance to desegregation, and how that evolution was reflected in the EnterpriseJournal ^ a medium that was the eyes and ears of white McComb. A town of 12,000 people in 1964, McComb isjust north of the Louisiana state line, seven miles north of Magnolia, the seat of Pike County. From personal experience, civil rights workers considered rural southwest Mississippi one of the strongholds of segregationist sentiment. Freedom riders had been beaten upon their arrivalin McComb in May 1961. Cleveland Sellers recalled in The River of No Return (1973) that he and fellow civil rights workers regarded southwest Mississippi as "the ninth circle of hell" and believed that area whites were willing to kill to defend segregation (pp. 47-50). Activists, in reports compiled for release to the media, called McComb a "hard core area." Indeed, McComb lived up to its reputation for violence when Bob Moses of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ar112 J. Oliver Emmerich and the McCombEnterprise-Journal rived there in August 1961 to spearhead a black voter registration drive. His first month in town, Moses was beaten on a McComb street when he tried to take two blacks to register to vote. A shotgun blast was directed at a car of civil rights workers. In September, a voter registrar in Tylertown pulled a pistol on two blacks attempting to register and pistol-whipped a SNCC worker. Then Herbert Lee, a blackman activein the voter registration campaign, was shot and killed in Amite County by a state legislator, E. H. Hurst...