On Behalf of Lynch Law

"You are now engaged in a battle for our laws and courts, for the preservation of our freedom and way of life . . . We should have the backbone to stand against any tyranny, whether of some individual willing to sell our birthright for a mess of political pottage on the national level, or the reformers that would make us over according to the mess they have made for themselves, including the board of sociology garbed in judicial robes and dishing out the precedents of Gunnar Myrdal."

With that specifically aimed blow at the U.S. Supreme Court and its 1954 school desegregation decision,* Circuit Judge Sebe Dale, 62, last week empaneled the Pearl River County grand jury, charged the jurors to "go into the jury room like men, do your duty, come out like men and keep your mouths shut." With 23 cases to consider, the khaki-clad farmers and paper-mill workers returned 17 indictments. Notably missing: indictment of lynch-law executioners of Mack Charles Parker, Negro rape suspect dragged from the unguarded Poplarville jail last April and shot to death.

Accused of raping a pregnant white woman, Parker was abducted by 15 to 20 masked men only 48 hours before his trial in Judge Dale's court. At least ten members of the lynch mob were named by the FBI in a report to Governor James P. Coleman, who had called the G-men into the case. But the 378-page dossier, said Pearl River District Attorney Vernon Broom last week, was mostly "hearsay." The grand jury did not even get to see the FBI findings. Leaving the case "unsolved," the grand jury thanked Judge Dale for his "inspired charge," declared that "from the standpoint of citizenship and law enforcement, our county compares favorably with any in the world."

Dissenting, the U.S. Justice Department re-entered the case; it had pulled out last May when the FBI probe established that the federal kidnaping law had not been violated. Determined to defer no more to Mississippi's judicial machinery, the U.S. fell back on the only remaining federal weapon, two seldom used sections (241 and 242) of Title 18, U.S. Code, indicated that it would ask a federal grand jury in Biloxi for indictments charging the mob with violation of Parker's civil rights and conspiracy to deny his legal rights. The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times called Mississippi-born Judge Dale's bluff better than the fulminating Northern papers: "Nothing could have occurred that would go further to establish the point that a federal anti-lynching law is necessary and that the state is incapable or unwilling to accept the responsibility of prosecuting lynchers . . . Every citizen who expects protection of himself and for his family should fear for his safety if this is the true climate of opinion in Mississippi."

*In which the Supreme Court footnoted An American Dilemma, a study of the American Negro by Swedish Social Economist Myrdal.

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