Word: mccomb
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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...McComb, Miss., police had just finished escorting five battered Freedom Riders into a Greyhound bus (TIME, Dec. 8) when an onlooker turned in disgust to a group of newsmen. "Is anybody here from Jimmy Ward's paper?" he asked. "I want him to look at them niggers sitting in the front. What do you think Jimmy would have to say about that...
...Ward, 42, of the Jackson Daily News (circ. 42,593) would say about the "Friction Riders"-as the News calls them. Jimmy did not let them down: "The Congress of Riot Encouragement [Ward's phrase for the Congress of Racial Equality] and concerned officials in Washington rejoice that McComb fell and the Greyhound bus terminal rest room has been integrated. While these dear hearts are jubilant over victory day, people down this way mark last Friday as VD day in Mississippi...
...budget of $131,000, about half provided by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. For the rest, says President Robert M. Stevens, "we just have to do a lot of hustlin'." Now gifts are vanishing. Campbell is solidly behind civil rights agitation in the nearby town of McComb. Says Stevens wryly: "I could raise half a million in no time if we suddenly began promoting the idea of segregation...
Even such small success came hard. Last September the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered an end to all bus depot segregation, but in McComb, no sooner were "white" and "colored" signs removed from the depot than local police set them up on the sidewalk outside. A federal court ordered the new signs removed. Early last week three Negro men and two girls were dispatched by the activist Congress of Racial Equality to test McComb's obedience to federal authority. In the depot they were set upon, beaten, and driven into the street by young white toughs...
That brought the threat of drastic federal action, and a detachment of U.S. deputy marshals began assembling in New Orleans. But Attorney General Robert Kennedy called McComb from Washington, got Mayor Charles H. Douglas' promise to keep order. Thus, when the second group of CORE riders arrived in McComb, 15 cops, the sheriff and nine Pike County deputies were at the depot. They picked up four troublemakers who attacked visiting newsmen (including TIME's Atlanta Bureau Chief Simmons Fentress), protected the CORE riders until an afternoon bus took them back to New Orleans...