Mississippi's Voice

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?"

Any Mississippi redneck could guess what James Myron 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."

Editor Ward stands aggressive guard against any threatened breach in the color line. And his paper is one of the prime reasons why Mississippi remains the South's most stubborn center of segregation. After the Interstate Commerce Commission laid down rules for integration of interstate bus lines. Ward described the move as the result of "an organized attempt of swarms of wild-eyed, fanatical crackpots to seize control of the courts and police powers of Mississippi." He cheered when Jackson police used dogs to break up a Negro demonstration: "When savages don't know how to behave themselves, it is necessary to resort to some effective method of maintaining order." He once described the South's race problem as "an ovenful of rattlesnakes just about to thaw. Either somebody with wisdom had better cut off the heat or there are deadly hatching days ahead."

The Jackson News has published such unabashed prejudice for years. Former Editor Fred Sullens was a sulphurous segregationist who predicted that even Negroes would come to "curse" the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 school integration decision. YOU ARE FOR US OR AGAINST US, thundered a 1956 Sullens editorial charging that anyone who was "not worried over the imminence of miscegenation, mixed marriages and mongrelization" had "no more backbone than a skinned banana." When Sullens died four years ago, the editor's chair passed to onetime News Carrier Boy Jimmy Ward, and the News's racist drum missed not a beat.

Against its steady tattoo, the voice of moderation in Mississippi can scarcely be heard. Even if it were more audible, it is not likely that many would listen. In Mississippi the rednecks like what Jimmy Ward says. And he and the News will go right on saying it.

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