July 23, 2026 • 58 mins
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Segregated schools didn't react right away, but segregationists did. Within months, the Citizens' Councils began to form in counties across Mississippi. And Byron de la Beckwith was one of the group's earliest and most enthusiastic members.
Sources & Further Reading:
Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.
Rolph, Stephanie (2018). Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989. Louisiana State University Press
Silver, James W (1963). Mississippi: The Closed Society. Harcourt Brace & World Inc.
Vollers, Maryanne (1995). Ghosts of Mississippi. Little Brown & Company.
Williams, Michael Vinson (2011). Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr. The University of Arkansas Press
Cook, James Graham (1962). The Segregationists. Appleton Century Crofts
McMillen, Neil (1971). The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964. University of Illinois Press
Mendelsohn, Jack (1966). The Martyrs. Harper & Row
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/buried-truth-unresolved-disregarded-lamar-smith-murder-haunts-lincoln-county/
Cashion, S. A. (2013). "And So We Moved Quietly": Southern Methodist University and Desegregation, 1950-1970. Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Delao, Frank Delao, "Containing Communism in Texas: How the Right Interpreted the Cold War, 1945-1965" (2016).Open Access
Theses & Dissertations. 633
Rich, Evelyn (1988). "Ku Klux Klan Ideology, 1954-1988" Graduate Theses and Dissertations
https://supremecourthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Volume-37-Number-3-2012.pdf
https://usm.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/SO_eea548ac-a609-4b6f-be15-7ae300c2206b
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/7/27/al-aqsa-one-encroachment-too-many
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Thousands of people packed into the Mississippi Coliseum on Monday night,
May seventeenth, nineteen sixty five. Just as the newspaper ads
had promised, There was ample free parking, and the state
owned coliseum, built just a few years earlier, was air
conditioned inside. Alan Thompson, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, welcomed
(00:30):
the crowd. Former Mississippi Governor Hugh White, current Mississippi Lieutenant
Governor Carol Garden, Mississippi State Attorney General Joe Patterson, State
Senator George Yarborough. A whole parade of government officials passed
and present crowded onto the platform to show their support
for the evening's message. The crowd waved their little Confederate
(00:54):
flags and cheered. As former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett took
the stage, scattered voices in the audience shouted Where's Paul
angry at the conspicuous absence of the state's current governor,
Paul Johnson. Ross Barnett was introducing the evening's main attraction,
a man he described as absolutely a son of the South.
(01:18):
I wish I could say President George Wallace, the former governor,
said a comment that brought the crowd to their feet
with excitement as Governor of Alabama, George Wallace approached the microphone.
Wallace had concluded his own inaugural address two years earlier
with his infamous promise segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
(01:45):
But as the nineteen sixties wore on, it was looking
less and less likely that he would be able to
fulfill that promise of eternal separation of the races. Still,
he told that crowd in Jackson, Mississippi, in nineteen sixteen,
it ain't over yet. Even though we have suffered some
(02:06):
loss of battles here, we haven't lost the war yet,
he said. We must return our schools to our states.
We must not give up, he shouted, calling the federal
intervention to integrate Southern schools every bit illegal. The true
(02:26):
highlight of the evening, though, according to reporting in the
Clarion Ledger, was a surprise guest. Sheriff Jim Clark had
been flown in at the last minute on a chartered
flight at a Selma, where he'd been in court all
day facing contempt charges for violating a court order barring
him from interfering with the civil rights of black voters
in Alabama. He'd become an overnight sensation among diehard segregationists
(02:52):
when he led the charge against civil rights marchers on
Bloody Sunday a few months earlier. The newspaper ads for
this event and billed it as White Monday, a name
they surely thought was very clever, perhaps too clever. As
the date drew nearer, one final quarter page ad and
(03:12):
the Jackson Newspaper put a big asterisk next to the
name so they could explain at the bottom of the
ad that May seventeenth, the date of the rally, was
the anniversary of the infamous Black Monday Supreme Court decision.
This is our answer to those who say it's all over,
(03:33):
explained William Simmons, the national director of the organization putting
on the event. The Citizens Council will never deviate from
the belief that the separation of the races is best
for both races. I'm Molly Conger, and this is where
the Blue guys. In all the books in old newspapers
(04:12):
I could scrounge up describing that White Monday rally in
nineteen sixty five, there were relatively few actual quotes from
any of the speeches, but there are quite a few
from George Wallace's keynote. But I couldn't tell you a
word of what Jim Clark said that night, nor any
of the Mississippi politicians. So maybe somebody said something that
(04:36):
explained the theme a little bit better. Maybe somebody explained
what white Monday is. I mean, I guess it's sort
of a nineteen sixty five version of that black pill
white pill terminology that right wing weirdos use today. They're
trying to convey some optimism for a continued fight against integration.
(04:58):
This White Monday rally on May seventeenth, nineteen sixty five,
was the eleven year anniversary of the day they'd been
calling Black Monday, the day the Supreme Court announced their
decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, the
opinion that held that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional.
(05:20):
Everything changed on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four. Things were
already changing. The change was inevitable. And maybe it's foolish
or reductive or downright wrong to say that any one
thing changed everything. But in this history of American right
wing political violence that I'm building, one meandering episode at
(05:44):
a time, there's a bright line right here. There is
a world before May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, and the
world that came after it. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision
in the Brown case did not actually desegregate schools for
(06:09):
such a pivotal moment in American history. The decision itself
didn't immediately set anything into motion, not by court order anyway.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
The Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Didn't set out what was to be done. There was
no deadline, There was no prescribed remedy for ending segregation.
The decision overturned the eighteen ninety six decision in plus
E v. Ferguson the case that had formalized the separate
but equal doctrine of legal segregation. They ruled that segregation
(06:42):
on the basis of race is unconstitutional, but they didn't
propose that anything in particular be done about that. They
decided they would need to hear more argument on the
issue before they could wade into that territory. But still
the dam was broken. The door was open for civil
(07:04):
rights litigation that built on this foundation of equal protection.
Change was coming, and for a certain kind of white Southerner,
it was a change that threatened to destroy everything. Think
back to the Jack Kershaw episodes from earlier this year.
(07:25):
He reoriented his entire life after the Brown Decision, co
founding a segregationist group in Tennessee and taking night classes
to get a law degree so he could spend the
rest of his life tilting at windmills, taking unwinnable cases
for racist clients who were fighting legal battles that had
already been fought and lost for segregationists. May seventeenth, nineteen
(07:49):
fifty four, the day the Brown decision was announced, quickly
earned the name Black Monday. That's a name the day
has to share with a lot of other days. There
have been a lot of Black Mondays. It's just a
traumatic way to refer to a historically significant bad Monday.
(08:14):
There are Black Tuesdays, and Black Fridays, and Black Sundays,
a lot of bloody Sundays. There's just certain ways we
refer to days of the week where shit goes wrong,
and a lot of bad things can happen on a Monday.
A lot of the Black Mondays in the modern era
are court decisions and stock market crashes, things that are
(08:36):
more likely to happen on a Monday, because that's the
day of the week. The Supreme Court announces decisions, and
the day the market opens after investors have been panicking
all weekend out of idle curiosity and maybe some subconscious
desire to punish those of you who hate these tangents,
I found some other black mondays. It's a term that
(09:00):
I can definitively say has been in use for more
than four hundred years. It appears in Shakespeare's play The
Merchant of Venice, and according to an eighteen seventy nine
issue of Notes and Queries, a still running scholarly journal
on lexicography, the phrase dates back to Easter Monday of
thirteen sixty, when a sudden hailstorm killed one thousand English
(09:22):
soldiers who were hoping to lay siege to some French
cities during One Hundred Years War. Whether or not the
phrase was continually in use between thirteen sixty and fifteen ninety,
I couldn't tell you. I didn't check, but it has
been used to refer to a lot of bad mondays.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
In Ohio.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
In nineteen seventy seven, the closure of Youngstown Sheet and
Tube left thousands of steel workers unemployed. That Black Monday
devastated the local economy and holds a significant place in
the history of de industrialization of the Ross Belt. Alaksa
massacre in Jerusalem, where Israeli security forces shot and killed
(10:04):
seventeen Palestinians and injured more than one hundred and fifty others,
is also sometimes called Black Monday. At least nine separate
stock market crashes since the Big one in nineteen twenty
nine have been called Black Monday in the press, but
two of those were different Mondays in March of twenty twenty.
(10:26):
I think we might be overusing it. In the NFL,
it's what they call the first Monday after the end
of the regular season, because that's the day coaches and
managers find out if they're getting fired. And this isn't
the only Supreme Court decision to be dramatically memorialized as
having been announced on a Black Monday. Nineteen thirty five's
(10:48):
Black Monday was the day the Court handed down three
decisions that struck down major components of FDR's new deal.
This one even has a corresponding White Monday. Two years later,
the Bard upheld the constitutionality of state minimum wage laws.
In nineteen seventy three, then Congressman Gerald Ford entered into
(11:08):
the Congressional record, an article written by a psychiatrist in
a Christian magazine that referred to the day Roe V.
Wade was decided as a Black Monday. Circling back around
to the point, though, the congressional record is a really
interesting place to look for this phrase. Like the rest
(11:31):
of the world, Congressmen use it to refer to really
bad Mondays of all kinds.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
In a nineteen twenty five.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Debate about prohibition, it was used to describe the loss
of economic productivity due to Monday hangovers. In nineteen seventy one,
Ed Koch used it to refer to the Attica prison riot.
In nineteen seventy five, a congressman from Wisconsin conveyed a
message from the state's Polish community condemning the agreements made
(11:59):
at the U. S. Aalta Conference in nineteen forty five
as a Black Monday for the Polish people. I'm not
sure what he expected the United States Congress to do
about that thirty years later, but it's there on the record.
The phrases sprinkled throughout the Congressional record, referring to all
sorts of odd things, but for about fifteen years it
(12:21):
only ever meant one thing. From nineteen fifty four to
the end of the nineteen sixties. It was only used
when Southern congressmen were complaining about school desegregation, and in
the case of Rounbey Board of Education, we know exactly
(12:42):
who started calling that decision day Black Monday. John Bell Williams,
a congressman from Mississippi, used the phrase on the House
floor two days after the decision came down in May
of nineteen fifty four, during discussion of a bill that
would have appropriated funds for a White House Conference on edgection,
allowing the President to convene a gathering of educators and
(13:03):
other experts to discuss the current.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Needs in the field of education.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
According to remarks published in the Congressional Record, Williams stood
to speak on the bill, saying, mister Speaker, in view
of what happened to the Supreme Court on Black Monday,
I am at a loss to understand what the purposes
of this President's White House conference might be, adding that
I do not think too many of us in the
(13:31):
South are going to need much advice. He concluded his
remarks by suggesting that the proposed seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars in spending for the conference, quote could be
much better spent by providing scholarships to some good law
schools for the nine members of the Supreme Court, which
(13:51):
he said, quote might equip some of them to earn
a living practicing law in the event they ever leave
the court. John Bell Williams was quite proud of having
been the first one to assign the name to the day.
He bragged about it for many years, but he wasn't
the one to popularize it. That distinction belongs to Lincoln County,
(14:14):
Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Thomas Pickens Braddy, his now infamous
Black Monday speech inspired the creation of the Citizens Council,
and all of the evidence seems to suggest that when
Braddy gave that speech for the first time, one of
(14:35):
the men sitting in that hotel dining room in Greenwood, Mississippi,
was Byron Dela beckwith Tom Braddy spelled exactly like Tom Brady,
the football guy, but apparently not pronounced that way. I
did check was an ardent segregationist, obviously, I.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Mean he was racist in a way that.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Must have been distracting to him in his day to
day life. It is intense, and that's unfortunate. Because he
was a judge. He spent the last ten years of
his life nineteen sixty three to nineteen seventy three on
the Mississippi State Supreme Court. But here in nineteen fifty four,
(15:20):
he's just a circuit court judge in Lincoln County, and
shortly after the Brown decision came down, he delivered this
Black Monday speech, and that speech is what inspired the
creation of the Citizens Council. On July eleventh, nineteen fifty four,
two months after the Brown decision, the first ever meeting
(15:41):
of the Citizens Council was held in the home of
Dave Hawkins in Indianola, Mississippi. That first meeting, called by
founder Robert Patterson, was very small. There were only fourteen
founding members of what would quickly become a massive network
of organized opposition to racial progress. The formation of the
(16:03):
Citizens Council was in every way a direct reaction to
the Brown Decision. They did this because integration was coming
and they wanted to stop it. This week I read
an entire book for this tangent, which I don't normally do.
(16:25):
The book is called Resisting Equality. The Citizens Council nineteen
fifty four to nineteen eighty nine by Stephanie Rolfe, a
history professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. And I
have to admit, if we're being honest, I had a profound,
fundamental misunderstanding.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Of the Citizens Council.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
If you'd ask me a week ago, I probably would
have said something like the white citizens Councils existed so
that respectable people who had the same politics as the
Clan could organize in a more spectable, middle class fashion.
But there are quite a few cases where the groups
had more in common than just the ideas. They often
(17:08):
shared members It was the same guys in different outfits
on different days of the week. As a matter of fact,
that is exactly what I would have said, because that's
what I wrote in one of the Jack Kershaw episodes
back in April. And it's I mean, it's not entirely wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
It's a thing that you could say.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
The Citizens Council and the Clan had a lot of
really similar ideas, but they had very different levels of
public respectability. They tended to differ in membership in terms
of the class and educational background of their members. Those
things are true. The clan more openly advocated violence whereas
(17:54):
the citizens Council claimed they did not. That's all true
sometimes in some places, but there isn't really any such
thing as the clan or the Citizen's Council. I'm not
saying those organizations didn't exist. I'm saying neither of those
(18:16):
organizations was ever one single thing that could maintain a
cohesive identity over time or space, depending on where and
when you are. The clan is not the same people,
it's not the same organization. There have been many, many clans.
(18:40):
And I don't just mean the three waves, the first
wave of the clan during reconstruction after the Civil War,
the second of the nineteen teens and twenties, and the
third reemerging in the fifties. No, I mean even within
the third wave of the clan, the modern clan, there
are dozens of separate groups claiming to be the one
(19:01):
true clan at any given time, sometimes way more than that.
Sometimes they're friends and collaborators, sometimes they're sworn enemies. Groups
collapse and reform, They have warring leaders. Sometimes there's two
groups that have the same name and they're arguing about
which one of them is real. Some clan groups are
powerful and dangerous and well connected, some many who were
(19:26):
riddled with federal informants. Some did lynchings and bombings, and
sometimes a clan chapter is just one guy who makes pamphlets.
I knew that, but I don't think i'd quite wrapped
my head around the idea that the same is true
of the Citizens Council as a concept. These citizens councils
(19:51):
existed all over the country, but the way they functioned
varied widely. It might just be a racist reading group
that meets at a diner once a month to exchange
racist pamphlets. In some states there were chapters and dozens
of counties, but there was no statewide coordination between them,
(20:11):
limiting their ability to organize beyond their local governments. And ultimately,
what I didn't understand is that it was different in Mississippi.
In Mississippi, the Citizens Council was everywhere. They were in
almost every county, and they had members at every level
(20:33):
of government. When the governor established the Mississippi State Sovereignty
Commission in nineteen fifty six, employees of this state agency
worked directly with the Citizens Council, providing them with money
and intelligence. They were working with the police, they were
getting state funding members of their board or members of
(20:56):
this state agency. In nineteen sixty two, in an interview
with journalist Ben Bagdichian, Medgar Evers described this combined force
of the State Sovereignty Commission and the Citizens Council as quote,
a secret police with huge sums of public money to
spend on going around and spying on private citizens. This
(21:17):
has a tendency to intimidate negroes, whether economically or by
causing a fear of violence. As for the councils being
a sort of more publicly acceptable alternative to the clan, well,
that was true in some places. In some places, both
(21:38):
organizations existed at the same time, publicly disagreed with each other,
had a few duel carters, but largely differed in the
makeup of their membership. And they certainly presented themselves this way.
This was how that Citizens Council talked about themselves. They're
different from the clan, better than the clan. In nineteen
(22:03):
fifty five, Texas Attorney General John ben Sheppard told reporters
that his office was investigating reports that clan chapters had
been forming in a few counties.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
In East Texas.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
He notes that some of these counties are also starting
to form Citizens Council chapters, which he says is something
very different. The clan uses illegal violence, the Council suppose
integration through legal means. In fact, Shepard claimed, these clan
promoters have actually been rebuffed. These clan chapters have failed
(22:38):
to form because of the actions of these responsible local
citizens groups. The Citizens Council is preventing the clan from
taking hold. The article does not note that John Ben
Sheppard was the founding member of the Citizens Council group
in Dallas, Texas. What it's worth, I did not delve
(23:01):
into the history of the clan in East Texas, so
I don't know if these groups coexisted in that place
at that time. But here we have a state Attorney
General who is a member of the Citizens Council positioning
these two groups in this way. And here's where I
(23:22):
have to admit something else that I've had wrong in
my head all this time. The Mississippi Citizens Council wasn't
a more respectable alternative to the Ku Klux Klan when
it formed in nineteen fifty four. It couldn't be any
kind of alternative to the clan because there was no
clan to join in Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. That
(23:47):
doesn't sound right. I checked that twenty times. I checked
books about the clan, biographies of clan leaders, FBI files,
old newspapers, histories of Mississippi Clan newsletters. I re read
the doctoral dissertation on the history of the clan written
by the life partner of one of America's leading white supremacists.
(24:10):
It's true the Ku Klux Klan did not exist in
any meaningful way in Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. I
guess I just never thought about it. Someone willing to
kill for the cause of segregation living in the Mississippi
Delta in nineteen fifty four, they wouldn't have been able
(24:30):
to find a Klan group to join, even if they
wanted to, because the clan didn't re establish itself in
Mississippi until nineteen sixty three, a few months after Byron
dela Beckwith killed Metgar Evers. So when I told you
(25:02):
a few weeks ago that Byron de la Beque, a klansman,
killed Medgar Evers, that's a little bit dishonest, isn't it.
I'm using that shorthand to quickly imply that he did
this murder because he was racist, because you understand what
a clansman is, but he wasn't in the klan when
he did it. He didn't become a klansman until afterwards.
(25:27):
In the nineteen fifties, the Citizens Council had to fill
the needs of segregationists at every level. It was a
one size fits all solution for every kind of racist
in Mississippi. They were everywhere, from the lynch mob to
the governor's office. When Mississippi judged, Tom Braddy, the man
who inspired the whole idea in the first place, was
(25:49):
asked in nineteen sixty two about the group's involvement in
violent activity. He said, quote, at the very beginning, I
told the group in Indianola, this thing will die a
born and if lawless people are brought into it.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
But I've checked and I found.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
The membership and the council's impeccable. I think this organization
has been a good thing, a necessary thing. That interview
was obviously conducted a year before Byron Dela beckwith shot
and killed Medgar. Ever, so maybe it's not entirely fair
to read this statement in the context of a member
(26:27):
of their state board of governors assassinating a civil rights leader.
He didn't know that yet, But there is actually no
way to argue that Judge Brady didn't know Council members
had killed before.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
But we'll come back to that now.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Like I said, the first meeting of the Citizens Council
was on July eleventh, nineteen fifty four. That's consistent in
the source material. There is primary source evidence of this
that dates pretty firm. And that first meeting was private,
just fourteen people at Dave Hawkins House, and then a
(27:07):
week later there's a much bigger meeting in Indianola. That
one's public, and within six weeks the Citizens Council had
established itself in seventeen counties across Mississippi. By the end
of the year, it was fifty. Oddly enough, the group's
founder says he got the idea to form the Citizens
(27:30):
Council after he read Tom Braddy's Black Monday Speech, and
the speech was eventually released in book form, but not
until long after July of nineteen fifty four. It's not
possible that he read this speech and then organized the
(27:52):
meeting if he was already familiar with the contents of
the Black Monday Speech on July eleventh, he would have
had to have heard it in person. Sources vary in
a concerning way when it comes to the date that
Braddy gave that speech for the first time. Don't tell
(28:14):
me what the Wikipedia article says. You can't trust Wikipedia,
because right now it says he gave this speech in October.
But that's the date he gave this speech to a
different crowd when it was already very famous. Raddy himself
said in an oral history in nineteen seventy two that
it was just days after May seventeenth. But that's not
right either, because here's the thing. It was July eighth, nineteen.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Fifty four, I promise.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I mean, maybe he had some of these talking points
in May or June, and he gave some kind of
speech at a small women's college in his hometown of
Brookhaven in May. But the historical record is pretty clear
that the Black Monday speech was given for the first
time at a meeting of the Suns of the American
Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi. And if that's the case, it
(29:04):
was on July eighth. The local newspaper, the Greenwood Commonwealth,
had this habit that was quite common back then of
announcing every meeting of any organization in Greenwood in the newspaper.
So every meeting of the Sons of the American Revolution
Chapter in Greenwood, Mississippi was announced ahead of time in
(29:25):
the Greenwood Commonwealth, and the day after the meeting, the
Greenwood Commonwealth ran a summary of the meeting. You'd know
who presided over it, if there were any new members
who spoke, what they talked about. You'd know what happened
at the meeting, because it's in the Greenwood Commonwealth. And
Judge Tom Braddy gave this speech to the Sons of
(29:46):
the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi, on July eighth, nineteen
fifty four, from the July ninth issue of the Greenwood Commonwealth.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Judge Brady held his listener spellbound with one of the
most brilliant and interesting speeches that it has been the
privilege of the members of the Chapter to hear. Judge
Braddy spoke on the recent Supreme Court decision affecting segregation
of the races. His masterful handling of this very important
subject and his well developed and expressed ideas for the
handling of a difficult situation greatly impressed his audience, and
(30:21):
according to the Greenwood Commonwealth, the local chapter of the
Sons of the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi, had an
active membership of eighty seven people in the summer of
nineteen fifty four, one of whom was Byron Dilla Beckwith.
I have a copy of the membership application he submitted
earlier that year, and the newspaper says he attended his
(30:42):
first meeting in March. By the following month he was
on the membership committee. He'd always been a Joiner, and
most sources say Byron Dilla Beckwi was one of the
earliest members of the Citizens Council in Mississippi. But there's
not a lot of connective tissue there. But if the
(31:05):
idea was born when Tom Braddy gave his Black Monday speech,
and Tom Brady gave that Black Monday speech to a
small room with Byron de la Bequit in it, it
sounds like he wasn't just one of the first members.
He was there when the idea was born.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
As for the.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Content of that speech, I'm not sure we can really know.
The newspaper's write up was pretty vague, but Braddy said
everyone loved it. They loved it so much they wanted
to read it in a pamphlet, so he allowed the
content of the speech to be reproduced in pamphlet form,
but the people, they just clamored for more Black Monday content.
(31:47):
So he locked himself away and he spent ten days
working NonStop to produce a ninety page version building on
the ideas of the speech. In the book's introduction, he
quite specifically says it took him ten days to write,
and then he finished on July twenty third, nineteen fifty four.
(32:09):
So that timeline leaves room for the possibility that he
decided to expand on the idea after the formation of
the Citizens Council on July eleventh, right, So it's sort
of symbiotic. The speech inspires the formation of the organization,
and the formation of the organization inspires him to go
back and fine tune the ideas from the speech. The
(32:32):
longer version of the Black Monday Speech was published as
a book in nineteen fifty five, and it became one
of the Council's foundational texts. Brady gave the organization the copyright,
and selling copies for a dollar was a reliable source
of funds for many years. Whether the text of the
pamphlet or the book matches the original speech as anybody's guests,
(32:56):
but they are surprisingly racist, even if you're coming into
it prepared, even if you are a connoisseur of racist texts.
I was a little surprised, honestly. It's ninety some pages
of just maniacal fear mongering about misgenation. That's the foundational fear. Right.
(33:20):
This is about desegregation of public schools, This is about
brown v Board of education.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
But the underlying fear here is sex.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
It's race mixing. It is racial purity. You know, there's
a heavy emphasis on the usual States rights rhetoric of
segregation logic, but at its core this is a frantic
rumination on the purity of white blood. Because if you
allow even the slightest crack in the dam of total segregation,
(33:56):
people are gonna start kissing.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
You cannot place little white and Negro children in classrooms
and not have integration. They will sing together, dance together,
eat together, and play together.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
They will grow up together.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
And the sensitivity of the white children will be dulled constantly.
The Negro will be endeavoring to usurp every writing privilege,
which will lead to intermarriage. I read the pamphlet version
first because that's easy to find, and the full book
was a little trickier. But I was surprised when I
(34:34):
got my hands on the book to see that by
page seven we're already getting all caps headings that say
things like mark of the Beast. The subsequent section about
the purity of Jewish blood explains that in his interpretation
of the Old Testament, the beast means black people, so
(34:56):
the mark of the beast is anyone with mixed blood.
It's a little dramatic. He says things like, whenever and
wherever the white man has drunk the cup of black hemlock,
Whenever and wherever his blood has been infused with the
blood of the Negro, the white man, his intellect, and
(35:17):
his culture have died.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
You get the idea.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
The Jews are using Marxism to force you to allow
your child to have black friends, and this is going
to wipe out Western civilization. Basically, it is all the
high points of the genre. Black people aren't smart enough
to do this on their own, They're just being controlled
by a more sinister force. That sinister force is obviously communism.
Communism which is inherently Jewish and segregation is key to
(35:46):
winning the Cold War, because this is obviously a Soviet
plot to weaken America. It's just white genocide anxiety shot
up with Cold War paranoia. It's bizarrow anti Semitic biblical interpretation.
It's old school Southern racism, comparing black people to chimpanzees
and using the language of scientific racism to explain the
(36:07):
various ways in which they are believed to be biologically inferior.
I mean, it's got everything, it's got a little bit
of every flavor. And ultimately he proposes some solutions. Some
are a little far fetched, like forming a new state
and shipping all the black people off to a place
he imagines will be something like Haiti, and other suggestions
(36:32):
are pretty well in line with what segregations are about
to actually do, like closing public schools rather than complying
with court orders to integrate. And others are things the Citizens'
Council would go on to excel at, like producing mountains
of racist propaganda and applying economic pressure to force black
(36:53):
people to abandon civil rights demands.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
So that's the speech.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
That Byron Dela beck With heard in the dining room
at the Greenwood Lafloor Hotel in July of nineteen fifty four.
That's Black Monday, and he loved it. According to one
of his relatives, Batty's speech changed him, saying quote that
speech changed dayla overnight, he became rabbit on the race question.
(37:25):
It sounds like he was a man who got saved
at a tent revival.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
He came away from the experience completely transformed and determined
to convert as many people as he could to this
new gospel. But before we rejoined Byron Dela beck With
in the summer of nineteen fifty four, let's catch up
to this point in our timeline for both of these
sons of Mississippi. We've been following Beckwith and the Man
(37:54):
He's going to Murder in nineteen sixty three and DOAACP
Field Secretary Medgerevers.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Last week. We left them.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
In nineteen forty six, both men were freshly home in
Mississippi after serving in World War II. Beckworth was shipped
home with a bullet wound and he met his first wife,
Mary Louise Williams called Willie, while he was working at
a base in Tennessee.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
In nineteen forty six.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
The couple had moved back to Greenwood, and they were
living in Beckwith's crumbling old family home. Shortly after the
birth of their son, Beckwith bought a home of his
own for his young family and not far from Greenwood
in Decatur, Mississippi. Medgar and Charles Evers returned home from
the war with a new sense of clarity about the
injustices of daily life as black men in Mississippi. They'd
(38:42):
fought for a country that saw fit to put them
in uniforms and send them off to war.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
But wouldn't let them vote.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
The brothers registered to vote in nineteen forty six, but
didn't end up casting their ballots after a standoff with
an armed white mob at the courthouse. Medgar Evers had
left high school in the eleventh grade to volunteer for
the army, so in nineteen forty six he went back
to school and finished his high school education, and after
(39:10):
that he used his GI benefits to enroll at Alkhorn
A and M College. He played football, ran track, was
on a debate team, edited the yearbook, and he met
his future wife, Merley. He graduated in nineteen fifty two
with a degree in business administration. He got a job
as a traveling salesman for a black owned insurance company,
(39:32):
and he worked at the local level as a voting
rights organizer with the Regional Council of Negro Leadership.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
In nineteen fifty.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Four, Medgar Evers applied to law school. He dreamed of
becoming a lawyer since he was a little boy, but
he didn't choose Olemiss by accident. His application to the
all white State School was submitted with the help of
the NAACP. In the first few months of nineteen fifty four,
they were still waiting on an uncertain outcome in the
(40:02):
Brown v. Board of Education case, so Thirdgod Marshall was
waiting in the wings to take on this case if
they needed to go back to court on the issue.
But in the spring of nineteen fifty four, while Medgar
Evers was still waiting on a decision from ole Miss,
his father died. The hospital where Jim Evers died was
(40:23):
segregated and the Negro ward was in the basement. Recounting
that night to journalist been BAGDICKI and eight years later
Ever said, my daddy was dying slowly in the basement
of a hospital, and at one point I just had
to walk outside so I wouldn't burst. And when he
walked outside to get a breath of fresh air that night,
(40:46):
he accidentally stumbled into the middle of an armed white
mob in the hospital parking lot somewhere in Union, Mississippi.
That evening, a black man had been shot in the
leg after arguing with a white man. The police had
brought the victim here to the negro ward in the
basement of the hospital, and the armed white mob that
(41:07):
had followed him there was waiting outside.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
I just stood there. Everything was too much for me.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
My daddy was dying in the basement. A white mob
was yelling to get out a wounded Negro, and it
seemed that this would never change. It was that way
for my daddy, it was that way for me, and
it looked as though it would be that way for
my children.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
I was so mad. I just stood there, trembling. Tears
rolled down my cheeks. The white mob just.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Stared at me, he said, And that's when he quit
the insurance business and went to work for the NAACP
full time as the organization's first field secretary in Mississippi.
His law school application was rejected that fall. They knew
it would be it was clearly because of his race,
(41:58):
but the NAACP didn't end up bringing a legal challenge.
Segregation had already been ruled on it was unconstitutional. Nothing
looked any different yet, but the ruling was in and
the game had changed. In March of nineteen fifty five,
(42:31):
just a few months into his new job at the NAACP,
Medgar Evers went to bell Zona. Bell Zona is a
tiny little town the county seat of Humphreys County. In
nineteen fifty three, two black residents of bell Zona had
formed a local chapter of the NAACP. Gus Courts, a grocer,
and George Lee, a reverend. Together the pair had registered
(42:55):
nearly one hundred black voters in Humphreys County, and that
fact is didn't sit right with the local citizens Council.
In late nineteen fifty four, in the middle of their
voter registration drive, Gus Courts was taken for a ride.
That's the phrase he uses. The newspaper reporting on the
(43:16):
incident is very vague. A group of white men snatched
Courts up and drove him around for a while. And
on this involuntary car trip, these white men heavily implied
that it would be very good if he resigned from
his role as the local NAACP president. So he did,
(43:39):
and for a few months Gus Courts lived in peace,
and then in early nineteen fifty five, those white men
showed up again, and this time they were advising him
that it would be very good if he took his
name off the voter rolls and stopped helping other people
put theirs on.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
But he refused, and.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Then suddenly he received a notice to vacate the premises
on the property where he operated his grocery store. So
in the spring of nineteen fifty five, MegaR Evers is
in Bellzona to offer the NAACP support, but there's not
a lot they can do. In public statements, Medgar Evers
specifically called out the Citizens Council already well established tactic
(44:25):
of using economic pressure to force black residents to comply
to just voluntarily stop pursuing civil rights. The threat of
violence is there under the surface. But really they hadn't
hurt Gus Courts right. All they did was raise his
(44:48):
rent so high that he couldn't possibly pay it. Then
a victim, he found it another location, opened the store
back up, and he didn't take his name off the
voter rolls. Six weeks later, Reverend George Lee was murdered.
Lee was the bell Zona andacp's other co founder. It
(45:12):
was after eleven PM when he ran out for a
quick errand he'd been busy all day at his printing press,
printing church programs and making flyers from upcoming INUAACP rally
to help black voters figure out how to pay their
poll tax and get registered, and he'd nearly forgotten he
needed to go to the dry cleaners. It was the
day before Mother's Day and he wanted to look his
(45:35):
best for the congregation in the morning. It didn't matter
that it was almost midnight. The dry cleaner was owned
by a friend of his who lived in the back.
He knew they'd open up. He needed his suit. As
he was making the short drive to the cleaners, a
car pulled up alongside him and fired two shotgun blasts
without stopping. Lee was hit in the face, and he
(45:58):
crashed his car into the home of the lower midwife.
She was thankfully unhurt and he survived for nearly an hour,
but the shotgun had blown most of his jaw off,
and he couldn't speak to identify his attackers.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
The local sheriff initially.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Declared that Reverend Lee's death had been from a car accident.
He just crashed into that house and hid his head.
That's what happened to his face, just crashed and died.
The county's only black undertaker was the one who carefully
removed the shotgun pellets from the reverend's face, and that
(46:38):
evidence would later be sent to an FBI crime lab
to prove that Lee had indeed been shot. Medgar Evers
was in Bellzona by morning, accompanied by Ruby Hurley, the
NAACP's regional director.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
There were witnesses.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
People saw what happened to George Lee, but they were
too scared to talk. The NAACP asked for state intervention
in the case, but Governor Hugh White told reporters that
he never answers requests from the NAACP. The threat of
federal involvement prompted an actual coroner's inquest, but the results
(47:17):
really weren't much better. The coroner ruled that Lee's death
had been due to quote hemorrhage and possibly asphyxiation from
a wound, the cause of which is not clear. The
sheriff called it a puzzling case, saying if Lee was shot,
it was probably by some jealous n word, and he
(47:39):
added that Lee was quite a ladies man. Again, this
is such a common trope, right, He's saying, well, it's
black on black violence. You know, he's a womanizer, he's
a sexual aggressor, these racist tropes that we still see
applied to black victims. And before Lee even be buried,
(48:01):
the local Citizens Council had put the black undertaker who'd
examined Lee's body on their boycott list. Now that's a
little puzzling. Maybe white members of the Citizens Council are
not going to a black undertaker in the first place.
They're not patronizing that business, So what do you mean
they're boycotting it. They weren't saying they were going to
(48:22):
boycott this business. They're publicly declaring that you better, you
better stay away from this business. If you know what's
good for you, something bad might happen to you.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
For him, it.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Was a strategy they employed thousands of times all over
the state for years, often with devastating efficacy. People were scared,
and the buckshot in the reverend's face proved they were
right to be. In their plea for federal protection. On
the day of Lee's funeral, the NAACP wrote in a
(48:59):
telegram the Attorney General quote, in some sections of the state,
the pretense of law enforcement officers to protect Negro citizens
has collapsed since the advent of the White Citizens Council.
This was ten months after the formation of the Citizens Council,
not even a year, and Medgar Evers twenty nine years
(49:20):
old and brand new at this job of statewide civil
rights organizing. He's begging the federal government to step in
because cops in Mississippi were never a great friend of
the black man, but it's worse now. They are letting
the Citizens Council get away with murder. No one was
(49:41):
ever charged with George Lee's murder, despite the months Medgar
Evers spent trying to force an investigation. The local sheriff
didn't care, and the witnesses were too afraid to talk
even to Evers. But Gus Courts still refused to take
his name off the voter rule. That's why lead been shot.
(50:03):
They came to these men and they said, take your
name off the voter rules, and they didn't, and he
still wouldn't. A few months after Lee's murder, someone walked
into Gus Qurt's grocery store and shot him twice. He survived,
but he never went back to bell Zona. He spent
several weeks in the hospital, and the sheriff didn't even pretend.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
To come visit him.
Speaker 2 (50:25):
When he got out of the hospital, he moved straight
to Chicago, and he never looked back. The FBI opened
a file but never followed up. And in August of
nineteen fifty five, a few months after George Lee's murder
in May and a few months before Gus Qurtz was
shot in November, there were two other unsolved murders of
(50:47):
black men in Mississippi. The lynching of em At Till
is a story you've probably heard, but two weeks before that,
on August thirteenth, nineteen fifty five, Lamar Smith walked up
the steps of the Lincoln County Courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
He was carrying a stack of absentee ballots. He'd been
(51:08):
working to get black voters in Lincoln County registered, and
he was helping them cast absentee ballots. It was safer
for them that way. Before he made it to the
door of the courthouse, a group of white men blocked
his path and wouldn't let him enter. The men argued,
and then Noah Smith shot him in the chest. It
(51:31):
was Noah Smith. He was never convicted, but he's dead.
I don't think he can sue me for libel. And
more than fifty people saw it happen. The county sheriff
was one of dozens of people who watched Lamar Smith
tumble down the steps before collapsing on the courthouse lawn,
and one of those white men shouted at the crowd
(51:52):
warning them not to touch him, saying nobody carries that
end word to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
So they didn't. They just let him die.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
He just laid there on the grass until he died,
and then he kept laying there. They left his body
on the lawn at the courthouse for hours, and the
sheriff watch Noah Smith, covered in his victim's blood, just
walk away. Lamar Smith had attended George Lee's funeral in May,
(52:23):
and now three months later he's dead too. And there's
another Mississippi sheriff shrug in his shoulders, suggesting this was
some kind of impossible mystery. The Lincoln County District Attorney
miraculously was interested in trying the case. He tried desperately
to indict the man that everyone had seen commit this murder,
(52:44):
but when it came time for a grand jury, nobody
saw anything. I don't even know if I was there
that day, Gosh, I couldn't tell you.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
And when the DA.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
Asked the governor for state assistance in this investigation, Governor
Hugh White said, it's a local matter. He just doesn't
even have the authority to do anything here. The state
could only intervene. Oh, I don't know if there was
a request from the local sheriff or the local judge.
Sheriff Bob Case wasn't asking. He insisted he was doing
(53:16):
his best, but there just weren't any witnesses. And the
local judge in Lincoln County, Mississippi, well, he was too
busy to involve himself. The circuit court judge for Lincoln County, Mississippi,
in nineteen fifty five was Tom Braddy. A few days
after Smith's murder, a story about the shooting ran in
(53:37):
the newspaper, alongside an unrelated story. Judge Tom Braddy was
on the other side of the state, delivering his ninety
sixth consecutive speech on behalf of the Citizens Council. That's
about two speeches a week in the years since the
organization was founded. He's crisscrossing the states spreading the Gospel
(53:58):
of Black Monday. And when he got home after that speech,
he was in Brookhaven, That's his hometown. He worked in
that courthouse. He would have had to step over Lamarth
Smith's blood on the front steps of that courthouse to
get to work. So when he said in nineteen sixty
(54:21):
two that he was confident no council members ever did
any kind of violence, he knew. He knew exactly how
the council worked, and he had since day one. He's
just lying. When the Supreme Court's decision in the follow
up case to brownby Board was issued in the summer
of nineteen fifty five, NAACP chapters across Mississippi started filing
(54:43):
desegregation petitions at the county level. County by county, petitions
came in, and without fail, the local Citizens Council would
publish the list of signatories. They made implications. They said
it would be best if you took your name off
(55:04):
this list. Maybe you'd lose your job, maybe you'd get evicted.
Maybe the bank finds a problem with your loan, or
or you don't even really need to finish the sentence.
Speaker 1 (55:21):
In nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
With men like Tom Brady on the bench, with sheriffs
like Bob Kase and Ike Shelton, it just wasn't illegal
in Mississippi for a white man to kill a black man.
Nobody had ever been convicted for something like that, and
it wouldn't happen for the first time for another twelve years,
(55:44):
when the Citizens Council published the names of every black
resident who signed a petition or registered to vote, When
the Citizens Council advised black residents to stop shopping at
a store owned by a voting rights activist, when they
took people for those little rides, those tactics worked because
of the very real, very mutually understood threat of violence. Yeah,
(56:10):
it's just economic pressure, but it's economic pressure. And a
picture of the reverend from your church with buckshot in
his face. In his state report that year, Medgar Evers
dutifully listed out each incident. The pressure from the Citizens
Council was devastating to black activism in many Mississippi counties.
(56:34):
In nineteen fifty five, Medgar Evers was faced with the
reality that no one was coming to save Mississippi. Over
the next eight years, he'd get pistol whipped, followed home,
shot at, arrested, his home was firebombed. The Citizens Council
didn't just get a pass from state and local governments.
(56:57):
They were the government, and they were growing fast. And
Byron Dilla Beckwith knew all that too. He rose rapidly
through the ranks of his local council chapter, joining the
organization's state Board of Governors within a few years. He
was obsessed.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
It was all he talked about, and.
Speaker 2 (57:19):
Maybe he too understood that a council member could just
shoot a black man if there wasn't any other way
to control him. Weird Little Guys as a production of
(57:47):
Coolshone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me,
Molly hunger Harg. Executive producers are Sophie Lichtreman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Taker. You can
email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(58:08):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Call Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Thousands of people packed into the Mississippi Coliseum on Monday night,
May seventeenth, nineteen sixty five. Just as the newspaper ads
had promised, There was ample free parking, and the state
owned coliseum, built just a few years earlier, was air
conditioned inside. Alan Thompson, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, welcomed
(00:30):
the crowd. Former Mississippi Governor Hugh White, current Mississippi Lieutenant
Governor Carol Garden, Mississippi State Attorney General Joe Patterson, State
Senator George Yarborough. A whole parade of government officials passed
and present crowded onto the platform to show their support
for the evening's message. The crowd waved their little Confederate
(00:54):
flags and cheered. As former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett took
the stage, scattered voices in the audience shouted Where's Paul
angry at the conspicuous absence of the state's current governor,
Paul Johnson. Ross Barnett was introducing the evening's main attraction,
a man he described as absolutely a son of the South.
(01:18):
I wish I could say President George Wallace, the former governor,
said a comment that brought the crowd to their feet
with excitement as Governor of Alabama, George Wallace approached the microphone.
Wallace had concluded his own inaugural address two years earlier
with his infamous promise segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
(01:45):
But as the nineteen sixties wore on, it was looking
less and less likely that he would be able to
fulfill that promise of eternal separation of the races. Still,
he told that crowd in Jackson, Mississippi, in nineteen sixteen,
it ain't over yet. Even though we have suffered some
(02:06):
loss of battles here, we haven't lost the war yet,
he said. We must return our schools to our states.
We must not give up, he shouted, calling the federal
intervention to integrate Southern schools every bit illegal. The true
(02:26):
highlight of the evening, though, according to reporting in the
Clarion Ledger, was a surprise guest. Sheriff Jim Clark had
been flown in at the last minute on a chartered
flight at a Selma, where he'd been in court all
day facing contempt charges for violating a court order barring
him from interfering with the civil rights of black voters
in Alabama. He'd become an overnight sensation among diehard segregationists
(02:52):
when he led the charge against civil rights marchers on
Bloody Sunday a few months earlier. The newspaper ads for
this event and billed it as White Monday, a name
they surely thought was very clever, perhaps too clever. As
the date drew nearer, one final quarter page ad and
(03:12):
the Jackson Newspaper put a big asterisk next to the
name so they could explain at the bottom of the
ad that May seventeenth, the date of the rally, was
the anniversary of the infamous Black Monday Supreme Court decision.
This is our answer to those who say it's all over,
(03:33):
explained William Simmons, the national director of the organization putting
on the event. The Citizens Council will never deviate from
the belief that the separation of the races is best
for both races. I'm Molly Conger, and this is where
the Blue guys. In all the books in old newspapers
(04:12):
I could scrounge up describing that White Monday rally in
nineteen sixty five, there were relatively few actual quotes from
any of the speeches, but there are quite a few
from George Wallace's keynote. But I couldn't tell you a
word of what Jim Clark said that night, nor any
of the Mississippi politicians. So maybe somebody said something that
(04:36):
explained the theme a little bit better. Maybe somebody explained
what white Monday is. I mean, I guess it's sort
of a nineteen sixty five version of that black pill
white pill terminology that right wing weirdos use today. They're
trying to convey some optimism for a continued fight against integration.
(04:58):
This White Monday rally on May seventeenth, nineteen sixty five,
was the eleven year anniversary of the day they'd been
calling Black Monday, the day the Supreme Court announced their
decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, the
opinion that held that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional.
(05:20):
Everything changed on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four. Things were
already changing. The change was inevitable. And maybe it's foolish
or reductive or downright wrong to say that any one
thing changed everything. But in this history of American right
wing political violence that I'm building, one meandering episode at
(05:44):
a time, there's a bright line right here. There is
a world before May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, and the
world that came after it. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision
in the Brown case did not actually desegregate schools for
(06:09):
such a pivotal moment in American history. The decision itself
didn't immediately set anything into motion, not by court order anyway.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
The Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Didn't set out what was to be done. There was
no deadline, There was no prescribed remedy for ending segregation.
The decision overturned the eighteen ninety six decision in plus
E v. Ferguson the case that had formalized the separate
but equal doctrine of legal segregation. They ruled that segregation
(06:42):
on the basis of race is unconstitutional, but they didn't
propose that anything in particular be done about that. They
decided they would need to hear more argument on the
issue before they could wade into that territory. But still
the dam was broken. The door was open for civil
(07:04):
rights litigation that built on this foundation of equal protection.
Change was coming, and for a certain kind of white Southerner,
it was a change that threatened to destroy everything. Think
back to the Jack Kershaw episodes from earlier this year.
(07:25):
He reoriented his entire life after the Brown Decision, co
founding a segregationist group in Tennessee and taking night classes
to get a law degree so he could spend the
rest of his life tilting at windmills, taking unwinnable cases
for racist clients who were fighting legal battles that had
already been fought and lost for segregationists. May seventeenth, nineteen
(07:49):
fifty four, the day the Brown decision was announced, quickly
earned the name Black Monday. That's a name the day
has to share with a lot of other days. There
have been a lot of Black Mondays. It's just a
traumatic way to refer to a historically significant bad Monday.
(08:14):
There are Black Tuesdays, and Black Fridays, and Black Sundays,
a lot of bloody Sundays. There's just certain ways we
refer to days of the week where shit goes wrong,
and a lot of bad things can happen on a Monday.
A lot of the Black Mondays in the modern era
are court decisions and stock market crashes, things that are
(08:36):
more likely to happen on a Monday, because that's the
day of the week. The Supreme Court announces decisions, and
the day the market opens after investors have been panicking
all weekend out of idle curiosity and maybe some subconscious
desire to punish those of you who hate these tangents,
I found some other black mondays. It's a term that
(09:00):
I can definitively say has been in use for more
than four hundred years. It appears in Shakespeare's play The
Merchant of Venice, and according to an eighteen seventy nine
issue of Notes and Queries, a still running scholarly journal
on lexicography, the phrase dates back to Easter Monday of
thirteen sixty, when a sudden hailstorm killed one thousand English
(09:22):
soldiers who were hoping to lay siege to some French
cities during One Hundred Years War. Whether or not the
phrase was continually in use between thirteen sixty and fifteen ninety,
I couldn't tell you. I didn't check, but it has
been used to refer to a lot of bad mondays.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
In Ohio.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
In nineteen seventy seven, the closure of Youngstown Sheet and
Tube left thousands of steel workers unemployed. That Black Monday
devastated the local economy and holds a significant place in
the history of de industrialization of the Ross Belt. Alaksa
massacre in Jerusalem, where Israeli security forces shot and killed
(10:04):
seventeen Palestinians and injured more than one hundred and fifty others,
is also sometimes called Black Monday. At least nine separate
stock market crashes since the Big one in nineteen twenty
nine have been called Black Monday in the press, but
two of those were different Mondays in March of twenty twenty.
(10:26):
I think we might be overusing it. In the NFL,
it's what they call the first Monday after the end
of the regular season, because that's the day coaches and
managers find out if they're getting fired. And this isn't
the only Supreme Court decision to be dramatically memorialized as
having been announced on a Black Monday. Nineteen thirty five's
(10:48):
Black Monday was the day the Court handed down three
decisions that struck down major components of FDR's new deal.
This one even has a corresponding White Monday. Two years later,
the Bard upheld the constitutionality of state minimum wage laws.
In nineteen seventy three, then Congressman Gerald Ford entered into
(11:08):
the Congressional record, an article written by a psychiatrist in
a Christian magazine that referred to the day Roe V.
Wade was decided as a Black Monday. Circling back around
to the point, though, the congressional record is a really
interesting place to look for this phrase. Like the rest
(11:31):
of the world, Congressmen use it to refer to really
bad Mondays of all kinds.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
In a nineteen twenty five.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Debate about prohibition, it was used to describe the loss
of economic productivity due to Monday hangovers. In nineteen seventy one,
Ed Koch used it to refer to the Attica prison riot.
In nineteen seventy five, a congressman from Wisconsin conveyed a
message from the state's Polish community condemning the agreements made
(11:59):
at the U. S. Aalta Conference in nineteen forty five
as a Black Monday for the Polish people. I'm not
sure what he expected the United States Congress to do
about that thirty years later, but it's there on the record.
The phrases sprinkled throughout the Congressional record, referring to all
sorts of odd things, but for about fifteen years it
(12:21):
only ever meant one thing. From nineteen fifty four to
the end of the nineteen sixties. It was only used
when Southern congressmen were complaining about school desegregation, and in
the case of Rounbey Board of Education, we know exactly
(12:42):
who started calling that decision day Black Monday. John Bell Williams,
a congressman from Mississippi, used the phrase on the House
floor two days after the decision came down in May
of nineteen fifty four, during discussion of a bill that
would have appropriated funds for a White House Conference on edgection,
allowing the President to convene a gathering of educators and
(13:03):
other experts to discuss the current.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Needs in the field of education.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
According to remarks published in the Congressional Record, Williams stood
to speak on the bill, saying, mister Speaker, in view
of what happened to the Supreme Court on Black Monday,
I am at a loss to understand what the purposes
of this President's White House conference might be, adding that
I do not think too many of us in the
(13:31):
South are going to need much advice. He concluded his
remarks by suggesting that the proposed seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars in spending for the conference, quote could be
much better spent by providing scholarships to some good law
schools for the nine members of the Supreme Court, which
(13:51):
he said, quote might equip some of them to earn
a living practicing law in the event they ever leave
the court. John Bell Williams was quite proud of having
been the first one to assign the name to the day.
He bragged about it for many years, but he wasn't
the one to popularize it. That distinction belongs to Lincoln County,
(14:14):
Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Thomas Pickens Braddy, his now infamous
Black Monday speech inspired the creation of the Citizens Council,
and all of the evidence seems to suggest that when
Braddy gave that speech for the first time, one of
(14:35):
the men sitting in that hotel dining room in Greenwood, Mississippi,
was Byron Dela beckwith Tom Braddy spelled exactly like Tom Brady,
the football guy, but apparently not pronounced that way. I
did check was an ardent segregationist, obviously, I.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Mean he was racist in a way that.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Must have been distracting to him in his day to
day life. It is intense, and that's unfortunate. Because he
was a judge. He spent the last ten years of
his life nineteen sixty three to nineteen seventy three on
the Mississippi State Supreme Court. But here in nineteen fifty four,
(15:20):
he's just a circuit court judge in Lincoln County, and
shortly after the Brown decision came down, he delivered this
Black Monday speech, and that speech is what inspired the
creation of the Citizens Council. On July eleventh, nineteen fifty four,
two months after the Brown decision, the first ever meeting
(15:41):
of the Citizens Council was held in the home of
Dave Hawkins in Indianola, Mississippi. That first meeting, called by
founder Robert Patterson, was very small. There were only fourteen
founding members of what would quickly become a massive network
of organized opposition to racial progress. The formation of the
(16:03):
Citizens Council was in every way a direct reaction to
the Brown Decision. They did this because integration was coming
and they wanted to stop it. This week I read
an entire book for this tangent, which I don't normally do.
(16:25):
The book is called Resisting Equality. The Citizens Council nineteen
fifty four to nineteen eighty nine by Stephanie Rolfe, a
history professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. And I
have to admit, if we're being honest, I had a profound,
fundamental misunderstanding.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Of the Citizens Council.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
If you'd ask me a week ago, I probably would
have said something like the white citizens Councils existed so
that respectable people who had the same politics as the
Clan could organize in a more spectable, middle class fashion.
But there are quite a few cases where the groups
had more in common than just the ideas. They often
(17:08):
shared members It was the same guys in different outfits
on different days of the week. As a matter of fact,
that is exactly what I would have said, because that's
what I wrote in one of the Jack Kershaw episodes
back in April. And it's I mean, it's not entirely wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
It's a thing that you could say.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
The Citizens Council and the Clan had a lot of
really similar ideas, but they had very different levels of
public respectability. They tended to differ in membership in terms
of the class and educational background of their members. Those
things are true. The clan more openly advocated violence whereas
(17:54):
the citizens Council claimed they did not. That's all true
sometimes in some places, but there isn't really any such
thing as the clan or the Citizen's Council. I'm not
saying those organizations didn't exist. I'm saying neither of those
(18:16):
organizations was ever one single thing that could maintain a
cohesive identity over time or space, depending on where and
when you are. The clan is not the same people,
it's not the same organization. There have been many, many clans.
(18:40):
And I don't just mean the three waves, the first
wave of the clan during reconstruction after the Civil War,
the second of the nineteen teens and twenties, and the
third reemerging in the fifties. No, I mean even within
the third wave of the clan, the modern clan, there
are dozens of separate groups claiming to be the one
(19:01):
true clan at any given time, sometimes way more than that.
Sometimes they're friends and collaborators, sometimes they're sworn enemies. Groups
collapse and reform, They have warring leaders. Sometimes there's two
groups that have the same name and they're arguing about
which one of them is real. Some clan groups are
powerful and dangerous and well connected, some many who were
(19:26):
riddled with federal informants. Some did lynchings and bombings, and
sometimes a clan chapter is just one guy who makes pamphlets.
I knew that, but I don't think i'd quite wrapped
my head around the idea that the same is true
of the Citizens Council as a concept. These citizens councils
(19:51):
existed all over the country, but the way they functioned
varied widely. It might just be a racist reading group
that meets at a diner once a month to exchange
racist pamphlets. In some states there were chapters and dozens
of counties, but there was no statewide coordination between them,
(20:11):
limiting their ability to organize beyond their local governments. And ultimately,
what I didn't understand is that it was different in Mississippi.
In Mississippi, the Citizens Council was everywhere. They were in
almost every county, and they had members at every level
(20:33):
of government. When the governor established the Mississippi State Sovereignty
Commission in nineteen fifty six, employees of this state agency
worked directly with the Citizens Council, providing them with money
and intelligence. They were working with the police, they were
getting state funding members of their board or members of
(20:56):
this state agency. In nineteen sixty two, in an interview
with journalist Ben Bagdichian, Medgar Evers described this combined force
of the State Sovereignty Commission and the Citizens Council as quote,
a secret police with huge sums of public money to
spend on going around and spying on private citizens. This
(21:17):
has a tendency to intimidate negroes, whether economically or by
causing a fear of violence. As for the councils being
a sort of more publicly acceptable alternative to the clan, well,
that was true in some places. In some places, both
(21:38):
organizations existed at the same time, publicly disagreed with each other,
had a few duel carters, but largely differed in the
makeup of their membership. And they certainly presented themselves this way.
This was how that Citizens Council talked about themselves. They're
different from the clan, better than the clan. In nineteen
(22:03):
fifty five, Texas Attorney General John ben Sheppard told reporters
that his office was investigating reports that clan chapters had
been forming in a few counties.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
In East Texas.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
He notes that some of these counties are also starting
to form Citizens Council chapters, which he says is something
very different. The clan uses illegal violence, the Council suppose
integration through legal means. In fact, Shepard claimed, these clan
promoters have actually been rebuffed. These clan chapters have failed
(22:38):
to form because of the actions of these responsible local
citizens groups. The Citizens Council is preventing the clan from
taking hold. The article does not note that John Ben
Sheppard was the founding member of the Citizens Council group
in Dallas, Texas. What it's worth, I did not delve
(23:01):
into the history of the clan in East Texas, so
I don't know if these groups coexisted in that place
at that time. But here we have a state Attorney
General who is a member of the Citizens Council positioning
these two groups in this way. And here's where I
(23:22):
have to admit something else that I've had wrong in
my head all this time. The Mississippi Citizens Council wasn't
a more respectable alternative to the Ku Klux Klan when
it formed in nineteen fifty four. It couldn't be any
kind of alternative to the clan because there was no
clan to join in Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. That
(23:47):
doesn't sound right. I checked that twenty times. I checked
books about the clan, biographies of clan leaders, FBI files,
old newspapers, histories of Mississippi Clan newsletters. I re read
the doctoral dissertation on the history of the clan written
by the life partner of one of America's leading white supremacists.
(24:10):
It's true the Ku Klux Klan did not exist in
any meaningful way in Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. I
guess I just never thought about it. Someone willing to
kill for the cause of segregation living in the Mississippi
Delta in nineteen fifty four, they wouldn't have been able
(24:30):
to find a Klan group to join, even if they
wanted to, because the clan didn't re establish itself in
Mississippi until nineteen sixty three, a few months after Byron
dela Beckwith killed Metgar Evers. So when I told you
(25:02):
a few weeks ago that Byron de la Beque, a klansman,
killed Medgar Evers, that's a little bit dishonest, isn't it.
I'm using that shorthand to quickly imply that he did
this murder because he was racist, because you understand what
a clansman is, but he wasn't in the klan when
he did it. He didn't become a klansman until afterwards.
(25:27):
In the nineteen fifties, the Citizens Council had to fill
the needs of segregationists at every level. It was a
one size fits all solution for every kind of racist
in Mississippi. They were everywhere, from the lynch mob to
the governor's office. When Mississippi judged, Tom Braddy, the man
who inspired the whole idea in the first place, was
(25:49):
asked in nineteen sixty two about the group's involvement in
violent activity. He said, quote, at the very beginning, I
told the group in Indianola, this thing will die a
born and if lawless people are brought into it.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
But I've checked and I found.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
The membership and the council's impeccable. I think this organization
has been a good thing, a necessary thing. That interview
was obviously conducted a year before Byron Dela beckwith shot
and killed Medgar. Ever, so maybe it's not entirely fair
to read this statement in the context of a member
(26:27):
of their state board of governors assassinating a civil rights leader.
He didn't know that yet, But there is actually no
way to argue that Judge Brady didn't know Council members
had killed before.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
But we'll come back to that now.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Like I said, the first meeting of the Citizens Council
was on July eleventh, nineteen fifty four. That's consistent in
the source material. There is primary source evidence of this
that dates pretty firm. And that first meeting was private,
just fourteen people at Dave Hawkins House, and then a
(27:07):
week later there's a much bigger meeting in Indianola. That
one's public, and within six weeks the Citizens Council had
established itself in seventeen counties across Mississippi. By the end
of the year, it was fifty. Oddly enough, the group's
founder says he got the idea to form the Citizens
(27:30):
Council after he read Tom Braddy's Black Monday Speech, and
the speech was eventually released in book form, but not
until long after July of nineteen fifty four. It's not
possible that he read this speech and then organized the
(27:52):
meeting if he was already familiar with the contents of
the Black Monday Speech on July eleventh, he would have
had to have heard it in person. Sources vary in
a concerning way when it comes to the date that
Braddy gave that speech for the first time. Don't tell
(28:14):
me what the Wikipedia article says. You can't trust Wikipedia,
because right now it says he gave this speech in October.
But that's the date he gave this speech to a
different crowd when it was already very famous. Raddy himself
said in an oral history in nineteen seventy two that
it was just days after May seventeenth. But that's not
right either, because here's the thing. It was July eighth, nineteen.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Fifty four, I promise.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I mean, maybe he had some of these talking points
in May or June, and he gave some kind of
speech at a small women's college in his hometown of
Brookhaven in May. But the historical record is pretty clear
that the Black Monday speech was given for the first
time at a meeting of the Suns of the American
Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi. And if that's the case, it
(29:04):
was on July eighth. The local newspaper, the Greenwood Commonwealth,
had this habit that was quite common back then of
announcing every meeting of any organization in Greenwood in the newspaper.
So every meeting of the Sons of the American Revolution
Chapter in Greenwood, Mississippi was announced ahead of time in
(29:25):
the Greenwood Commonwealth, and the day after the meeting, the
Greenwood Commonwealth ran a summary of the meeting. You'd know
who presided over it, if there were any new members
who spoke, what they talked about. You'd know what happened
at the meeting, because it's in the Greenwood Commonwealth. And
Judge Tom Braddy gave this speech to the Sons of
(29:46):
the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi, on July eighth, nineteen
fifty four, from the July ninth issue of the Greenwood Commonwealth.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Judge Brady held his listener spellbound with one of the
most brilliant and interesting speeches that it has been the
privilege of the members of the Chapter to hear. Judge
Braddy spoke on the recent Supreme Court decision affecting segregation
of the races. His masterful handling of this very important
subject and his well developed and expressed ideas for the
handling of a difficult situation greatly impressed his audience, and
(30:21):
according to the Greenwood Commonwealth, the local chapter of the
Sons of the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi, had an
active membership of eighty seven people in the summer of
nineteen fifty four, one of whom was Byron Dilla Beckwith.
I have a copy of the membership application he submitted
earlier that year, and the newspaper says he attended his
(30:42):
first meeting in March. By the following month he was
on the membership committee. He'd always been a Joiner, and
most sources say Byron Dilla Beckwi was one of the
earliest members of the Citizens Council in Mississippi. But there's
not a lot of connective tissue there. But if the
(31:05):
idea was born when Tom Braddy gave his Black Monday speech,
and Tom Brady gave that Black Monday speech to a
small room with Byron de la Bequit in it, it
sounds like he wasn't just one of the first members.
He was there when the idea was born.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
As for the.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Content of that speech, I'm not sure we can really know.
The newspaper's write up was pretty vague, but Braddy said
everyone loved it. They loved it so much they wanted
to read it in a pamphlet, so he allowed the
content of the speech to be reproduced in pamphlet form,
but the people, they just clamored for more Black Monday content.
(31:47):
So he locked himself away and he spent ten days
working NonStop to produce a ninety page version building on
the ideas of the speech. In the book's introduction, he
quite specifically says it took him ten days to write,
and then he finished on July twenty third, nineteen fifty four.
(32:09):
So that timeline leaves room for the possibility that he
decided to expand on the idea after the formation of
the Citizens Council on July eleventh, right, So it's sort
of symbiotic. The speech inspires the formation of the organization,
and the formation of the organization inspires him to go
back and fine tune the ideas from the speech. The
(32:32):
longer version of the Black Monday Speech was published as
a book in nineteen fifty five, and it became one
of the Council's foundational texts. Brady gave the organization the copyright,
and selling copies for a dollar was a reliable source
of funds for many years. Whether the text of the
pamphlet or the book matches the original speech as anybody's guests,
(32:56):
but they are surprisingly racist, even if you're coming into
it prepared, even if you are a connoisseur of racist texts.
I was a little surprised, honestly. It's ninety some pages
of just maniacal fear mongering about misgenation. That's the foundational fear. Right.
(33:20):
This is about desegregation of public schools, This is about
brown v Board of education.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
But the underlying fear here is sex.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
It's race mixing. It is racial purity. You know, there's
a heavy emphasis on the usual States rights rhetoric of
segregation logic, but at its core this is a frantic
rumination on the purity of white blood. Because if you
allow even the slightest crack in the dam of total segregation,
(33:56):
people are gonna start kissing.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
You cannot place little white and Negro children in classrooms
and not have integration. They will sing together, dance together,
eat together, and play together.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
They will grow up together.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
And the sensitivity of the white children will be dulled constantly.
The Negro will be endeavoring to usurp every writing privilege,
which will lead to intermarriage. I read the pamphlet version
first because that's easy to find, and the full book
was a little trickier. But I was surprised when I
(34:34):
got my hands on the book to see that by
page seven we're already getting all caps headings that say
things like mark of the Beast. The subsequent section about
the purity of Jewish blood explains that in his interpretation
of the Old Testament, the beast means black people, so
(34:56):
the mark of the beast is anyone with mixed blood.
It's a little dramatic. He says things like, whenever and
wherever the white man has drunk the cup of black hemlock,
Whenever and wherever his blood has been infused with the
blood of the Negro, the white man, his intellect, and
(35:17):
his culture have died.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
You get the idea.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
The Jews are using Marxism to force you to allow
your child to have black friends, and this is going
to wipe out Western civilization. Basically, it is all the
high points of the genre. Black people aren't smart enough
to do this on their own, They're just being controlled
by a more sinister force. That sinister force is obviously communism.
Communism which is inherently Jewish and segregation is key to
(35:46):
winning the Cold War, because this is obviously a Soviet
plot to weaken America. It's just white genocide anxiety shot
up with Cold War paranoia. It's bizarrow anti Semitic biblical interpretation.
It's old school Southern racism, comparing black people to chimpanzees
and using the language of scientific racism to explain the
(36:07):
various ways in which they are believed to be biologically inferior.
I mean, it's got everything, it's got a little bit
of every flavor. And ultimately he proposes some solutions. Some
are a little far fetched, like forming a new state
and shipping all the black people off to a place
he imagines will be something like Haiti, and other suggestions
(36:32):
are pretty well in line with what segregations are about
to actually do, like closing public schools rather than complying
with court orders to integrate. And others are things the Citizens'
Council would go on to excel at, like producing mountains
of racist propaganda and applying economic pressure to force black
(36:53):
people to abandon civil rights demands.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
So that's the speech.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
That Byron Dela beck With heard in the dining room
at the Greenwood Lafloor Hotel in July of nineteen fifty four.
That's Black Monday, and he loved it. According to one
of his relatives, Batty's speech changed him, saying quote that
speech changed dayla overnight, he became rabbit on the race question.
(37:25):
It sounds like he was a man who got saved
at a tent revival.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
He came away from the experience completely transformed and determined
to convert as many people as he could to this
new gospel. But before we rejoined Byron Dela beck With
in the summer of nineteen fifty four, let's catch up
to this point in our timeline for both of these
sons of Mississippi. We've been following Beckwith and the Man
(37:54):
He's going to Murder in nineteen sixty three and DOAACP
Field Secretary Medgerevers.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Last week. We left them.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
In nineteen forty six, both men were freshly home in
Mississippi after serving in World War II. Beckworth was shipped
home with a bullet wound and he met his first wife,
Mary Louise Williams called Willie, while he was working at
a base in Tennessee.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
In nineteen forty six.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
The couple had moved back to Greenwood, and they were
living in Beckwith's crumbling old family home. Shortly after the
birth of their son, Beckwith bought a home of his
own for his young family and not far from Greenwood
in Decatur, Mississippi. Medgar and Charles Evers returned home from
the war with a new sense of clarity about the
injustices of daily life as black men in Mississippi. They'd
(38:42):
fought for a country that saw fit to put them
in uniforms and send them off to war.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
But wouldn't let them vote.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
The brothers registered to vote in nineteen forty six, but
didn't end up casting their ballots after a standoff with
an armed white mob at the courthouse. Medgar Evers had
left high school in the eleventh grade to volunteer for
the army, so in nineteen forty six he went back
to school and finished his high school education, and after
(39:10):
that he used his GI benefits to enroll at Alkhorn
A and M College. He played football, ran track, was
on a debate team, edited the yearbook, and he met
his future wife, Merley. He graduated in nineteen fifty two
with a degree in business administration. He got a job
as a traveling salesman for a black owned insurance company,
(39:32):
and he worked at the local level as a voting
rights organizer with the Regional Council of Negro Leadership.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
In nineteen fifty.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Four, Medgar Evers applied to law school. He dreamed of
becoming a lawyer since he was a little boy, but
he didn't choose Olemiss by accident. His application to the
all white State School was submitted with the help of
the NAACP. In the first few months of nineteen fifty four,
they were still waiting on an uncertain outcome in the
(40:02):
Brown v. Board of Education case, so Thirdgod Marshall was
waiting in the wings to take on this case if
they needed to go back to court on the issue.
But in the spring of nineteen fifty four, while Medgar
Evers was still waiting on a decision from ole Miss,
his father died. The hospital where Jim Evers died was
(40:23):
segregated and the Negro ward was in the basement. Recounting
that night to journalist been BAGDICKI and eight years later
Ever said, my daddy was dying slowly in the basement
of a hospital, and at one point I just had
to walk outside so I wouldn't burst. And when he
walked outside to get a breath of fresh air that night,
(40:46):
he accidentally stumbled into the middle of an armed white
mob in the hospital parking lot somewhere in Union, Mississippi.
That evening, a black man had been shot in the
leg after arguing with a white man. The police had
brought the victim here to the negro ward in the
basement of the hospital, and the armed white mob that
(41:07):
had followed him there was waiting outside.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
I just stood there. Everything was too much for me.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
My daddy was dying in the basement. A white mob
was yelling to get out a wounded Negro, and it
seemed that this would never change. It was that way
for my daddy, it was that way for me, and
it looked as though it would be that way for
my children.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
I was so mad. I just stood there, trembling. Tears
rolled down my cheeks. The white mob just.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Stared at me, he said, And that's when he quit
the insurance business and went to work for the NAACP
full time as the organization's first field secretary in Mississippi.
His law school application was rejected that fall. They knew
it would be it was clearly because of his race,
(41:58):
but the NAACP didn't end up bringing a legal challenge.
Segregation had already been ruled on it was unconstitutional. Nothing
looked any different yet, but the ruling was in and
the game had changed. In March of nineteen fifty five,
(42:31):
just a few months into his new job at the NAACP,
Medgar Evers went to bell Zona. Bell Zona is a
tiny little town the county seat of Humphreys County. In
nineteen fifty three, two black residents of bell Zona had
formed a local chapter of the NAACP. Gus Courts, a grocer,
and George Lee, a reverend. Together the pair had registered
(42:55):
nearly one hundred black voters in Humphreys County, and that
fact is didn't sit right with the local citizens Council.
In late nineteen fifty four, in the middle of their
voter registration drive, Gus Courts was taken for a ride.
That's the phrase he uses. The newspaper reporting on the
(43:16):
incident is very vague. A group of white men snatched
Courts up and drove him around for a while. And
on this involuntary car trip, these white men heavily implied
that it would be very good if he resigned from
his role as the local NAACP president. So he did,
(43:39):
and for a few months Gus Courts lived in peace,
and then in early nineteen fifty five, those white men
showed up again, and this time they were advising him
that it would be very good if he took his
name off the voter rolls and stopped helping other people
put theirs on.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
But he refused, and.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Then suddenly he received a notice to vacate the premises
on the property where he operated his grocery store. So
in the spring of nineteen fifty five, MegaR Evers is
in Bellzona to offer the NAACP support, but there's not
a lot they can do. In public statements, Medgar Evers
specifically called out the Citizens Council already well established tactic
(44:25):
of using economic pressure to force black residents to comply
to just voluntarily stop pursuing civil rights. The threat of
violence is there under the surface. But really they hadn't
hurt Gus Courts right. All they did was raise his
(44:48):
rent so high that he couldn't possibly pay it. Then
a victim, he found it another location, opened the store
back up, and he didn't take his name off the
voter rolls. Six weeks later, Reverend George Lee was murdered.
Lee was the bell Zona andacp's other co founder. It
(45:12):
was after eleven PM when he ran out for a
quick errand he'd been busy all day at his printing press,
printing church programs and making flyers from upcoming INUAACP rally
to help black voters figure out how to pay their
poll tax and get registered, and he'd nearly forgotten he
needed to go to the dry cleaners. It was the
day before Mother's Day and he wanted to look his
(45:35):
best for the congregation in the morning. It didn't matter
that it was almost midnight. The dry cleaner was owned
by a friend of his who lived in the back.
He knew they'd open up. He needed his suit. As
he was making the short drive to the cleaners, a
car pulled up alongside him and fired two shotgun blasts
without stopping. Lee was hit in the face, and he
(45:58):
crashed his car into the home of the lower midwife.
She was thankfully unhurt and he survived for nearly an hour,
but the shotgun had blown most of his jaw off,
and he couldn't speak to identify his attackers.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
The local sheriff initially.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Declared that Reverend Lee's death had been from a car accident.
He just crashed into that house and hid his head.
That's what happened to his face, just crashed and died.
The county's only black undertaker was the one who carefully
removed the shotgun pellets from the reverend's face, and that
(46:38):
evidence would later be sent to an FBI crime lab
to prove that Lee had indeed been shot. Medgar Evers
was in Bellzona by morning, accompanied by Ruby Hurley, the
NAACP's regional director.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
There were witnesses.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
People saw what happened to George Lee, but they were
too scared to talk. The NAACP asked for state intervention
in the case, but Governor Hugh White told reporters that
he never answers requests from the NAACP. The threat of
federal involvement prompted an actual coroner's inquest, but the results
(47:17):
really weren't much better. The coroner ruled that Lee's death
had been due to quote hemorrhage and possibly asphyxiation from
a wound, the cause of which is not clear. The
sheriff called it a puzzling case, saying if Lee was shot,
it was probably by some jealous n word, and he
(47:39):
added that Lee was quite a ladies man. Again, this
is such a common trope, right, He's saying, well, it's
black on black violence. You know, he's a womanizer, he's
a sexual aggressor, these racist tropes that we still see
applied to black victims. And before Lee even be buried,
(48:01):
the local Citizens Council had put the black undertaker who'd
examined Lee's body on their boycott list. Now that's a
little puzzling. Maybe white members of the Citizens Council are
not going to a black undertaker in the first place.
They're not patronizing that business, So what do you mean
they're boycotting it. They weren't saying they were going to
(48:22):
boycott this business. They're publicly declaring that you better, you
better stay away from this business. If you know what's
good for you, something bad might happen to you.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
For him, it.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Was a strategy they employed thousands of times all over
the state for years, often with devastating efficacy. People were scared,
and the buckshot in the reverend's face proved they were
right to be. In their plea for federal protection. On
the day of Lee's funeral, the NAACP wrote in a
(48:59):
telegram the Attorney General quote, in some sections of the state,
the pretense of law enforcement officers to protect Negro citizens
has collapsed since the advent of the White Citizens Council.
This was ten months after the formation of the Citizens Council,
not even a year, and Medgar Evers twenty nine years
(49:20):
old and brand new at this job of statewide civil
rights organizing. He's begging the federal government to step in
because cops in Mississippi were never a great friend of
the black man, but it's worse now. They are letting
the Citizens Council get away with murder. No one was
(49:41):
ever charged with George Lee's murder, despite the months Medgar
Evers spent trying to force an investigation. The local sheriff
didn't care, and the witnesses were too afraid to talk
even to Evers. But Gus Courts still refused to take
his name off the voter rule. That's why lead been shot.
(50:03):
They came to these men and they said, take your
name off the voter rules, and they didn't, and he
still wouldn't. A few months after Lee's murder, someone walked
into Gus Qurt's grocery store and shot him twice. He survived,
but he never went back to bell Zona. He spent
several weeks in the hospital, and the sheriff didn't even pretend.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
To come visit him.
Speaker 2 (50:25):
When he got out of the hospital, he moved straight
to Chicago, and he never looked back. The FBI opened
a file but never followed up. And in August of
nineteen fifty five, a few months after George Lee's murder
in May and a few months before Gus Qurtz was
shot in November, there were two other unsolved murders of
(50:47):
black men in Mississippi. The lynching of em At Till
is a story you've probably heard, but two weeks before that,
on August thirteenth, nineteen fifty five, Lamar Smith walked up
the steps of the Lincoln County Courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
He was carrying a stack of absentee ballots. He'd been
(51:08):
working to get black voters in Lincoln County registered, and
he was helping them cast absentee ballots. It was safer
for them that way. Before he made it to the
door of the courthouse, a group of white men blocked
his path and wouldn't let him enter. The men argued,
and then Noah Smith shot him in the chest. It
(51:31):
was Noah Smith. He was never convicted, but he's dead.
I don't think he can sue me for libel. And
more than fifty people saw it happen. The county sheriff
was one of dozens of people who watched Lamar Smith
tumble down the steps before collapsing on the courthouse lawn,
and one of those white men shouted at the crowd
(51:52):
warning them not to touch him, saying nobody carries that
end word to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
So they didn't. They just let him die.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
He just laid there on the grass until he died,
and then he kept laying there. They left his body
on the lawn at the courthouse for hours, and the
sheriff watch Noah Smith, covered in his victim's blood, just
walk away. Lamar Smith had attended George Lee's funeral in May,
(52:23):
and now three months later he's dead too. And there's
another Mississippi sheriff shrug in his shoulders, suggesting this was
some kind of impossible mystery. The Lincoln County District Attorney
miraculously was interested in trying the case. He tried desperately
to indict the man that everyone had seen commit this murder,
(52:44):
but when it came time for a grand jury, nobody
saw anything. I don't even know if I was there
that day, Gosh, I couldn't tell you.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
And when the DA.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
Asked the governor for state assistance in this investigation, Governor
Hugh White said, it's a local matter. He just doesn't
even have the authority to do anything here. The state
could only intervene. Oh, I don't know if there was
a request from the local sheriff or the local judge.
Sheriff Bob Case wasn't asking. He insisted he was doing
(53:16):
his best, but there just weren't any witnesses. And the
local judge in Lincoln County, Mississippi, well, he was too
busy to involve himself. The circuit court judge for Lincoln County, Mississippi,
in nineteen fifty five was Tom Braddy. A few days
after Smith's murder, a story about the shooting ran in
(53:37):
the newspaper, alongside an unrelated story. Judge Tom Braddy was
on the other side of the state, delivering his ninety
sixth consecutive speech on behalf of the Citizens Council. That's
about two speeches a week in the years since the
organization was founded. He's crisscrossing the states spreading the Gospel
(53:58):
of Black Monday. And when he got home after that speech,
he was in Brookhaven, That's his hometown. He worked in
that courthouse. He would have had to step over Lamarth
Smith's blood on the front steps of that courthouse to
get to work. So when he said in nineteen sixty
(54:21):
two that he was confident no council members ever did
any kind of violence, he knew. He knew exactly how
the council worked, and he had since day one. He's
just lying. When the Supreme Court's decision in the follow
up case to brownby Board was issued in the summer
of nineteen fifty five, NAACP chapters across Mississippi started filing
(54:43):
desegregation petitions at the county level. County by county, petitions
came in, and without fail, the local Citizens Council would
publish the list of signatories. They made implications. They said
it would be best if you took your name off
(55:04):
this list. Maybe you'd lose your job, maybe you'd get evicted.
Maybe the bank finds a problem with your loan, or
or you don't even really need to finish the sentence.
Speaker 1 (55:21):
In nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
With men like Tom Brady on the bench, with sheriffs
like Bob Kase and Ike Shelton, it just wasn't illegal
in Mississippi for a white man to kill a black man.
Nobody had ever been convicted for something like that, and
it wouldn't happen for the first time for another twelve years,
(55:44):
when the Citizens Council published the names of every black
resident who signed a petition or registered to vote, When
the Citizens Council advised black residents to stop shopping at
a store owned by a voting rights activist, when they
took people for those little rides, those tactics worked because
of the very real, very mutually understood threat of violence. Yeah,
(56:10):
it's just economic pressure, but it's economic pressure. And a
picture of the reverend from your church with buckshot in
his face. In his state report that year, Medgar Evers
dutifully listed out each incident. The pressure from the Citizens
Council was devastating to black activism in many Mississippi counties.
(56:34):
In nineteen fifty five, Medgar Evers was faced with the
reality that no one was coming to save Mississippi. Over
the next eight years, he'd get pistol whipped, followed home,
shot at, arrested, his home was firebombed. The Citizens Council
didn't just get a pass from state and local governments.
(56:57):
They were the government, and they were growing fast. And
Byron Dilla Beckwith knew all that too. He rose rapidly
through the ranks of his local council chapter, joining the
organization's state Board of Governors within a few years. He
was obsessed.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
It was all he talked about, and.
Speaker 2 (57:19):
Maybe he too understood that a council member could just
shoot a black man if there wasn't any other way
to control him. Weird Little Guys as a production of
(57:47):
Coolshone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me,
Molly hunger Harg. Executive producers are Sophie Lichtreman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Taker. You can
email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(58:08):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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