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WITH DETERMINATION AND FORTITUDE 195 With Determination and Fortitude We Come to Vote: Black Organization and Resistance to Voter Suppression in Mississippi by Michael Vinson Williams On July 2, 1946, brothers Medgar and Charles Evers, along with four friends, decided they would vote in their hometown of Decatur, Missis- sippi. Both brothers had registered without incident but when the men returned to cast their ballots they were met by a mob of armed whites. The confrontation grew in intensity with each step toward the polling place. After a few nerve-racking moments of yelling and shoving, the Evers group retreated, but the harassment did not end. Medgar Evers recalled that while they were walking away some of the whites followed them and that one man in a 1941 Ford “leaned out with a shotgun, keep- ing a bead on us all the time and we just had to walk slowly and wait for him to kill us …. They didn’t kill us but they didn’t end it, either.” The African American men went home, retrieved guns of their own, and returned to the polling station but decided to leave the weapons in the car. The white mob again prevented them from entering the voting precinct, and the would-be voters gave up.1 1 This article makes use of the many newspaper clippings catalogued in the Allen Eugene Cox Papers housed at the Mitchell Memorial Library Special Collections Department at Mississippi State University (Starkville) and the Trumpauer (Joan Harris) Civil Rights Scrapbooks Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, Mississippi. Cox, a white administrator and program director working in Mississippi during the late 1930s, 1940s, and mid 1950s, and Trumpauer (later Mulholland) one of the few white students at Tougaloo Southern Christian College in the early 1960s, were both active with civil rights organizations and supported African Americans’ fight for civil equality. As a means of highlighting the racial problems in Mississippi both collected and catalogued materials regarding these issues and much of that material consisted of newspaper clippings. Although assembling an immense and detailed collection, Trumpauer MICHAEL VINSON WILLIAMS is dean of the Division of Social Sciences at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr. 195 196 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY The action the Evers brothers took that day was not unique. All over the south such events were taking place with startling results for socially and politically conservative whites. In 1946 and 1947 alone, historian Glenda Gilmore notes, “black World War II veterans formed impromptu regiments to assault the polls of southern cities.”2 In 1958 Medgar Evers, whom the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in November of 1954 had tapped as its full-time Mississippi field secretary, painfully admitted, “I was born in Decatur, was raised there but I never in my life was permitted to vote there.”3 This sense of personal humiliation, heightened by the many constant social reminders of Negroes’ second-class status, pushed individuals to resist Jim Crow and to intensify challenges to political repression. Returning black vet- erans often stood within the eye of the growing political storm as angry community residents looked to them for leadership and support.4 As a means of protecting their political privilege, white Mississippi- ans, and many of their southern supporters, suppressed black political growth through intimidation and violence; when this failed, they relied upon supremacist organizations and state legislatures for support of white supremacy. African Americans vehemently resisted whites’ social and political encroachment upon their rights, which brought both groups into direct political and physical conflict. It is my contention that by the 1950s and 1960s the actions that white political leaders undertook to prevent a strong black political presence had increased exponentially since 1870, as had African Americans’ efforts to overcome voter sup- sometimes failed to provide attribution and, at times, dates for some of her catalogued newspaper items. When necessary, I have attempted to provide acknowledgment and dates for sources where there were none. Where I could not discern attribution I have listed the cooperative news agencies supplying news groups with their featured story. Jack Mendelsohn, The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966), 66 (quotation); Charles Evers, interview with the author, February 4, 2005, cassette recording, Jackson, Mississippi, taped recording in possession of author; and Medgar Evers, “Why I Live in Mississippi,” Ebony magazine, November 1958, p. 66. See also, Charles Evers and Andrew Szanton, Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), 61. 2 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 414 (quotation). 3 Mendelsohn, The Martyrs, 66 (quotation). For a detailed examination of the life and work of Medgar Wiley Evers, see Michael Vinson Williams, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011). 4 Throughout this article, I use the term “Negro” without quotations when period- appropriate. WITH DETERMINATION AND FORTITUDE 197 pression and claim their rightful political place. This article addresses issues of political suppression and the tactics used to maintain it; African Americans’ resistance to white political hegemony, particularly during the 1950s and early 1960s; and white Mississippians’ often-debilitating fear of the black vote. As a consequence, it is the human element behind the struggle for the ballot in Mississippi that takes center stage. In 1946 there were nearly 350,000 black Mississippians of vot- ing age.5 White politicians could not help but consider the political ramifications such statistics represented, as well as the potential for a deluge of black political challenges to voter denial that the Herndon and Allwright Supreme Court rulings would now bolster. As an addi- tional area of political concern, the Mississippi Legislature—perhaps without fully accounting for the potential ramifications—passed a law exempting returning soldiers from having to pay their poll taxes for the previous two years. This revision in the law provided more than 80,000 returning African American servicemen, such as Medgar and Charles Evers, with the economic and political incentive to challenge America’s democratic hypocrisy.6 During the 1940s blacks ramped up challenges to age-old notions of political naiveté that many whites harbored. African Americans orga- nized demonstrations and descended upon local polling stations intent on exercising their right to vote. In the process they ran afoul of Missis- sippi Senator Theodore Bilbo. By publicly opposing Bilbo’s bid in 1946 to claim his senate seat after his reelection, black servicemen further demonstrated their political tenacity. Over a three-day period of public hearings in Jackson, Mississippi, black veterans and other community residents testified to the violent and rabble-rousing rhetoric Bilbo used to incite white violence against potential Negro voters and registrants. Bilbo had openly called “on every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and integrity of the white race to get out and see that no nigger votes. And,” Bilbo continued, “the best time to do it is the night before.” He also understood the barrier to voting that the state constitu- 5 John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 3. 6 Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 103; Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable, The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005), 6; and Dittmer, Local People, 2-9. 198 THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY tion provided. Speaking to the purpose of section 244 of the Mississippi State Constitution, Bilbo explained that the “poll tax won’t keep ‘em from voting. What keeps ‘em from voting is section 244 of the constitution of 1890 that Senator [James Zachariah] George wrote. It says that a man to register must be able to read and explain the constitution or explain the constitution when read to him. And then Senator George wrote a constitution that damn few white men and no niggers at all can explain.”7 During the hearings African Americans provided additional testi- monies they believed effectively demonstrated reasons why Bilbo was politically unfit to retain his senatorial position. The United States Senate would convene to decide Bilbo’s fate but in lieu of his current bout with cancer, senate members agreed to table the matter until he recovered and returned from surgery.8 Before the matter could be resolved, Bilbo died on August 21, 1947, from complications related to oral cancer. Yet despite the number of legal obstacles the state threw up between blacks and the ballot box, and in spite of the intimidation tactics that individuals such as Bilbo advocated, the number of black registered voters in Mississippi increased from an estimated 2,000 in 1940 to 5,000 in 1947.9 This expansion of the electorate resulted from organized resistance across the state initiated in many instances by black veterans and community organizations. Yet, those fighting for Negroes’ right to vote were up against a long history of state-sanctioned denial 7 Senator Theodore Bilbo quotes presented in “The Seating of Senator Bilbo,” Congressional Record Proceedings and Debates of the 80th Congress, First Session Vol. 93, January 3, 1947, No. 1, p. 8 (all quotations), Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Archives & Library Division, Special Collections, Jackson, Mississippi. See also, Dittmer, Local People, 2-9; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 24-25; Timothy B.

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