"Do Not Despair"

McComb, Miss., a town of 12,400 people set in the harsh, pine-dotted country in the southwestern corner of the state, quaintly refers to itself as "the Camellia City of America." In recent years McComb has justly earned a reputation as the toughest anti-civil rights community in the toughest anti-civil rights area in the toughest anti-civil rights state in the Union.

By rough count (which is the way McComb counts such things), during the past year at least 13 Negro homes, churches or business places have been bombed, another half-dozen burned. Local cops have harassed more than they have helped, and the courts have offered little comfort. When nine whites were arrested and pleaded guilty or nolo contendere (no contest) in the bombing of Negro homes--a charge that carries a maximum penalty of death--County Judge W. H. Watkins freed them all with suspended sentences. As Watkins explained, they had been "unduly provoked" by civil rights workers, some of whom "are people of low morality and unhygienic." Besides, said Watkins to the defendants, "you are mostly young men" [five were 35 or older] who "deserve a second chance."

So hopeless seemed McComb that even the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, most militant of the major civil rights groups, closed its McComb office three years ago and never reopened it because, as one worker explained, "we just couldn't hold on without endangering lives." But last week it appeared that not even McComb was hopeless.

Trying to Be Fair. In a federal district court in Biloxi, civil rights lawyers requested that Pike County (of which McComb is the principal town) Sheriff R. R. Warren, McComb Police Chief George Guy, Mississippi State Public Safety Director T. B. Birdsong and three McComb patrolmen be enjoined from interfering with Negroes' civil rights. In their brief, they cited instance after instance in which rights workers were arrested and imprisoned on questionable charges. Last month, they said, local cops arrested 13 workers for operating a food-handling establishment without a permit--when all they were doing was cooking their own meals. Others told of being kicked, punched, and poked in the genitals while being booked for trespassing, then being tossed into crowded cells with concrete shelves for beds and overflowing holes in the floor for toilets.

The defendants seemed astonished by such news. "We have tried to be fair," said Chief Guy. "Sometimes that's very difficult." When German-born Laurie Smith testified that she had volunteered to work on a project for helping Mississippi's Negroes get registered for voting, Assistant State Attorney General William Allain demanded: "Have you asked to help any of the good white folks in Mississippi? Well, have you?" After two days of testimony, Federal Judge Sidney Mize adjourned the hearing until next week, will probably rule in December.

Concerted Conspiracy. The second legal attack came before a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, where a battery of civil rights lawyers attempted to invoke an 1866 Reconstruction statute empowering federal courts to appoint special U.S. commissioners to police areas where citizens are being denied their rights. Judge Mize had thrown the case out of his court last July, and the lawyers were appealing.

In their brief, they accused a formidable array of Mississippi officials and organizations of a "concerted, planned and organized conspiracy" to deny the Negro his rights. Among the defendants named: Sheriff L. C. Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price of Neshoba County, where three young civil rights workers were murdered last summer, the white Citizens Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and Americans for the Preservation of the White Race.

In a brief supported by more than 250 affidavits, the lawyers pleaded for the application of "judicial remedies against the carnage that is today occurring" throughout the state. As things stand, they said, "the Negro seeking his civil rights and liberties and the fulfillment of his status as a citizen and a human being has become a virtual outlaw in Mississippi."

A mere temporary restraining order, argued Lawyer Arthur Kinoy, would go a long way toward remedying this situation. "Even if it has no effect on the perpetrators of violence," said Kinoy, "it will tell the Negroes of Mississippi and the people of America, 'Do not despair, do not despair of the American system of government. There is rule of law, there is a judicial tribunal that will answer your pleas for justice.'

The Time to Speak Out. The most remarkable thing was that even Mc-Comb, consistently the most intransigent of the intransigent, was obviously awed by the fact that there is a rule of law. The day before the Biloxi hearing started, 650 of the town's leading doctors, lawyers, ministers and businessmen placed a full-page ad in the Mc-Comb Enterprise-Journal declaring that "the time has come for responsible people to speak out for what is right and against what is wrong." Said the ad's signers, who described themselves as "Citizens for Progress": "There is only one responsible stance we can take and that is for equal treatment under the law for all citizens regardless of race, creed, position or wealth." To restore peace, they urged an end to "harassment arrests" by local lawmen, cancellation of "economic threats and sanctions against people of both races" and the reopening of "avenues of communication and understanding."

Apparently, the ad had a salutary effect. The day after it appeared, 20 Negroes led by Charles Evers, brother of murdered Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers, turned up at a segregated theater and several restaurants and motels.

With 60 state highway patrolmen and FBI agents standing by, they ran into nothing more serious than cold stares. At the formerly all-white Continental Restaurant, two white patrons ostentatiously walked out, but the Negro group was served.

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