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173 SUBVERSIVENESS IN MOST ALL OF ITS FORMS Sunday services at the collegiate-Gothic-style First Presbyterian Church in Tupelo began at 11 a.m. and lasted for about an hour. George and Keirsey McLean, along with their son and daughter, regularly sat a few rows from the front, near the lectern where the minister preached his sermon. There were hymns and prayers, Bible readings, announcements, donation collecting (the McLeans were generous givers),and a twenty-minute sermon.If the sermon ran long, McLean, never a very good listener, got visibly restless and, on occasion, pointedly raised his left wrist and looked at his watch in a gesture the minister could not fail to see. Other members of the congregation, many of whom had Sunday roasts cooking at home, grew fidgety as well. The minister did his best to stay on schedule. On Sunday, July 22, 1962, however, the ritual was upended by a troop of Boy Scouts who arrived in two buses. They were on their way home to Philadelphia , Pennsylvania, and their leader had called the minister, Rev. George Long, a day earlier to ask about attending First Presbyterian’s service; he wanted to make sure they would be allowed in because among the troop members were two black Scouts. Long did not hesitate. The Scouts were welcome to attend, he said. But immediately after talking to the troop leader, Long called the church’s elders—its governing board members—to let them know what was going on.A few were irate. They were not alone. On that sunny Sunday morning, N. E. Dacus, a Baptist and a stalwart segregationist , stood on the sidewalk across from the church, watching for the buses carrying the Scouts. Dacus was a Tupelo businessman who owned a drug-manufacturing company, but his passion was combating liberals wherever he found them.He had heard about the Scouts from one of the elders and decided to keep an eye on the church to see what happened. Just outside First Presbyterian, in the garden area, tempers were getting out of hand. A few of the members were loudly vowing to block the church doors 10 174 Subversiveness in Most All of Its Forms to keep the black Scouts from entering. The Reverend Long, along with George McLean and other moderates, managed to tone things down. These Scouts are our guests, they told the grumbling members. If you can’t handle that, then it would be best if you just went home. Some of them did. Others, still complaining , said they preferred to stay for the service but would not interfere. Dacus, from his post across the street, watched as the buses’ doors opened and the uniformed Scouts,white and black,stepped down into the midmorning sun. They went into the church, where they were seated in a section of pews up front that had been roped off for them (the McLeans had to find another place to sit that morning). While the tension in the church was overt,the service itself went off without a problem.Hymns were sung; prayers were said; Long,wearing his black clerical robes,welcomed the visitors and gave his twenty-minute sermon.Afterward the Scouts gathered in the garden area for a few minutes, then boarded their buses and drove away. Dacus was appalled.The next day,he telephoned the Mississippi segregation watchdog agency, the State Sovereignty Commission, asking that an investigator come to Tupelo and look into the incident. Commission investigator Tom Scarbrough arrived at Dacus’s office a few days later and listened as Dacus told him the whole story.1 “Mr. Dacus stated it was his understanding that this same group tried to arrange to attend church services at the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, but the request was refused by elders of the church,” Scarbrough wrote in his report.“I advised Mr. Dacus that there was nothing we could do in cases of this kind, but of course we were certainly interested to find out about this incident as . . . it appeared to be a well-planned breakthrough of our racial barriers in this state.” Next Dacus and Scarbrough went to see Rubel Bell, a First Presbyterian elder. Bell, too, “very much disapproved of what happened,” investigator Scarbrough wrote, adding that Bell and other members of the church had told the minister“they were going to cut off their contributions to the church as a result of this incident.” Scarbrough could not resist including a...

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