National Reports
RICHARDS, FOUST
National Reports Race Relations Gain in Deep South By Foust Richards New Orleans To most americans, the names Erath, Crowley and Belzoni probably mean nothing. They are just small Southern...
...There are no records to show that such a conviction has ever before been obtained in Louisiana...
...In the storekeeper's home town, meanwhile, the sheriff of Humphreys County announced that he would not investigate the shooting...
...Let them NAACP folks take care of the case," he drawled...
...Since the outlawing of segregation in churches of the diocese, Negroes have worshipped side by side with whites...
...Belzoni already had its claim to attention in racial violence by becoming the scene of the murder of a Negro minister who had been active in the NAACP ["Mississippi Murder Stirs Negroes," NL, July 4...
...In the capital at Jackson, however, Governor Hugh White took a different view...
...Not far from Erath is Crowley, the principal town of Acadia Parish, and scene of a colorful rice festival which is widely known in this area...
...His assailant has never been found and the authorities have shown little interest in solving the case...
...they're always meddling in everything else...
...most of them are of the Roman Catholic faith...
...As if to emphasize how it shuddered at such a prospect, the Belzoni Citizens' Council (one of a number of "white collar" Ku Klux Klan groups popping up in parts of the South) offered a $250 reward for any information that might lead to the conviction of the perpetrators of the crime...
...In the first place, the accused was a rice mill supervisor, married to an attractive young woman, and the father of three children-certainly an ideal candidate for "another chance...
...Moreover, the convicted man was given the maximum sentence allowed under the law, 10 years in the penitentiary...
...Furthermore, he was beaten off from his victim by her son-in-law, who is an ex-convict twice sentenced to prison, once for murder...
...Recently, the teacher of the class, a middle-aged woman who had taken over the task to help relieve the busy parish priest, was on her way to mass when she was overtaken by two women of the town and severely beaten...
...Erath, in Vermilion Parish, boasts scarcely more than 2,000 persons...
...Bishop Jules Jeanmard of Lafayette excommunicated the two and announced that the class would continue unseg-regated...
...The same lack of interest developed when a Negro storekeeper, a former NAACP president, was shot by several men who roared by his store in an automobile and peppered it with bullets...
...Retribution came swiftly...
...For within little more than a fortnight remarkable events have taken place in these tiny localities...
...His action undoubtedly will have a powerful effect on other Roman Catholics in the state who are resisting the Church's efforts to break down racial prejudice...
...Their children recently have also begun to attend the catechism class together, though the Negro children, the victims of long habit, generally have sat in the back of the room...
...Because Erath is small, it has only one church and children preparing for their first communion attend but one class...
...indeed there is some doubt that any white man has ever been charged with raping a Negro woman...
...The storekeeper was hospitalized in the nearby all-Negro community of Mound Bayou, where, at last report, he is recovering from serious wounds...
...A precedent dangerous to the idea of white supremacy has thus been set...
...Later, the bishop lifted the ban upon the public repentance of the women, but he did not disband the class...
...This was the first instance in Louisiana, as far as is known, in which the Church has used the weapon of excommunication to punish dissenters from its integration policies...
...Governor White is the first Mississippi public official to express openly the fears of many in his state that continued defiance of the law might bring about more unwelcome results than the dreaded integration...
...He ordered an all-out investigation of the incident and warned: "If we let the rest of the country think Mississippi law enforcement has broken down, the Federal Government is going to move in here and take over...
...But a more indulgent jury might have used the convenient loopholes presented by the facts of die case...
...In time, however, these towns may become symbols of the beginning of historic changes in the South's attitude toward the vexing "racial problem...
...It was here that an all-white, all-male jury convicted a young white man of attempted rape of a Negro woman...
...In view of the events in these three towns, it doesn't seem over-optimistic to predict that racial conditions will continue to improve, however slowly, in the South...
...They are just small Southern towns, the first two in south Louisiana, the last in Mississippi's cotton-rich delta...
...The body of Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy for whose murder two white men were tried and acquitted, was found in the Tallahatchie...
...The two later admitted they attacked the woman because they disapproved of the mixed class she taught...
...In this case, to be sure, the man's victim was aged and apparently respectable...
...It required a kind of courage for a white jury in a country town to convict a member of its own race of a crime against a member of a race always regarded as inferior...
...The third town in this series, Belzoni, is distant from the other two, but its location, on the Tallahatchie River not far from Sumner, Mississippi, the scene of the Emmett Till murder trial, has become familiar to the nation's newspaper readers...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 51
