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14 “TIME IS RUNNING OUT” The voting rights rally proved to be, as expected, the largest ever in Mississippi , with an astounding 13,000 black men, women, and children in attendance—an assemblage unseen in the area since 1909, when Booker T. Washington dedicated the town’s oil mill, the largest black business venture of the early 1900s. Despite the numbers, not one white reporter covered the event. In the racial climate at the time, the most an event of this magnitude would merit would be a line or two in “News From The Colored Community ,” normally located adjacent to the want ads section. But two black Mississippi weeklies covered the event: the Jackson Advocate, which had an editorial policy so conservative that it was often referred to as “neo-segregationist ,” and the Southern Mediator Journal, “The South’s Progressive Negro Weekly,” published in Little Rock. David Jackson and I roamed through the crowd of sharecroppers, cotton farmers, schoolteachers, clergy, and businesspeople who came by truck, bus, cars, and even wagons from other parts of Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee , and Louisiana. In one interview after another, they confided that they’d come to the rally at the risk of being evicted from their homes, having their loans foreclosed, or finding their lives in jeopardy when they returned home. A large tent had been pitched, which could only accommodate 5,000 people, while some 8,000 others sat or stood in the warm sun. The twomile -wide town could barely handle the overflow. Townsmen rerouted vehicles and blocked highway traffic in order to accommodate 5,000 additional folding chairs brought from the Tri-State Fair Grounds. They built temporary wood-plank seating facilities on two wings of the tent to hold 2,000 additional people. Some fifteen soft drink and candy stands were set up. During the day, visitors consumed a ton of hot fish, three tons of barbecued chicken and ribs, 500 cases of soda pop, and 300 gallons of ice cream—and took home 13,000 voter registration forms. In the evening, Dr. and Mrs. Howard entertained some 1,000 guests at a buffet supper at their showplace country home. 2 "Time Is Running Out" 15 In his opening remarks at the rally, Dr. Howard’s booming voice announced that more blacks had been registered to vote in Mississippi during the past twelve months than in any previous year. Pledging a statewide drive to further increase black voter registration and end a wave of police brutality, he emphasized the importance of the vote as the best way of unseating vicious sheriffs, cops, and judges. The crusade against police brutality was almost as much a priority for Dr. Howard as the voting rights drive. He introduced me to a woman whose family had considerable real estate in the Delta, but she refused to buy a family car for fear one of her sons would be arrested while driving it and roughed up by police for no reason. This kind of fear reached every Negro, including children. Dr. Howard also called for increased contributions to the NAACP supported “war chest,” which now totaled 300,000, to help militant blacks denied loans or credit by white institutions, a tactic supported by the White Citizens’ Councils. Fourteen white Democrats had formed the first White Citizens’ Council almost a year earlier, in the nearby Delta town of Indianola in Sunflower County. They were reacting to the activities of Dr. Howard and the Negro Leadership Council, but the Brown decision was another big concern. The White Citizens’ Councils quickly attracted some 5,000 members in Mississippi alone, before spreading to all the other Deep South states, and swelling to tens of thousands of members. They drew their membership from among the town leadership, which often proudly erected a billboard announcing, “The White Citizens’ Council of . . . Welcomes You.” Their members were different from the Klan in that they dressed like everyone else, and claimed to be non-violent, although that, too, soon appeared to be an unsupportable claim. The Councils kept lists of “militant” Negroes who were urging blacks to vote, as well as those who tried to register, and went after them where it hurt most: in the wallet, evicting them from their homes, denying them credit, refusing them farm services. To underscore his point, Dr. Howard quoted directly from the Citizens’ Councils’ credo: The Negro who insists upon registering and voting and who insists upon integration in Mississippi...

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