Free The Ghosts of Mississippi by Maryanne Vollers

this dirt-poor state segregation had a high price tag. It would get higher.
    In Mound Bayou that night Medgar and Myrlie Evers twisted the dial on the radio, tuning in every crackling news report on the decision. Medgar was hopeful but guarded. It was obvious that the whites of Mississippi wouldn’t give up without a fight.
    By the end of the day the South was already sending up howls of protest. Georgia governor Herman Talmadge dismissed the decision as “a mere scrap of paper.” Integration of schools, he said, would lead to “mongrelization.” Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina raved that the decision would end “civilization in the South as we have known it.” On May 27, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, the blustering cornpone plutocrat from Sunflower County, delivered his assessment on the floor of the Senate. It was the essence of white supremacist delusion: “Segregation is not discrimination,” he purred. “Segregation promotes racial harmony. . . . There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race.”
    The Supreme Court decision blindsided most southern states, but not Mississippi. While the governors and senators sputtered and strained, Mississippi’s segregationists were getting organized.
    Within a few weeks the ideologues of legal racism had prepared their arguments. Among their heroes was a dapper, bespectacled judge from Brookhaven named Thomas P. Brady. The judge was no backwoods demagogue. He had attended the tony Lawrenceville prep school in New Jersey; he graduated from Yale and studied law at Ole Miss. The classical education had not made much of a humanist of him; Brady used his broad knowledge to lash together a pseudoscientific justification for white supremacy.
    One night in June 1954 Judge Brady became the prophet and voice of Mississippi’s white resistance when he spoke at the Sons of the American Revolution Hall in Greenwood, Mississippi.
    A rapt Byron De La Beckwith sat in the audience, soaking in every word. Some say he was never the same again.
    Brady’s speech was such a hit that he felt compelled to expand on it and publish it few weeks later. The booklet’s title was Black Monday, which is what segregationists call May 17, 1954, the day, Brady wrote, when “the declaration of socialist doctrine was officially proclaimed throughout this nation.”
    These were the times of Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts and the great Red Scare. These were the years of the Rosenbergs and the Russian bomb and the cold war. Superpatriotic, elaborately Christian white men and women were banding together to stave off the frightening postwar social upheaval. They were convinced that godless communists lurked behind every social movement, from unionism to ecumenicism. Every group that made them uncomfortable was conveniently identified as a “communist front,” and the NAACP was near the top of that list. To the radical right in the fifties integration was just another form of communism forced on the American people. Any concessions would signal a victory to the forces of atheism and collectivism and would lead not only to the destruction of the white race but also to the imminent invasion of the American homeland. As judge Brady put it, “The great threat to this nation is that of creeping Socialism and Communism. The interracial angle is but a tool, a means to an end, in the overall effort to socialize and communize our government.”
    In most states the radical rightists stood on the sidelines and heckled the government for not doing enough to combat the communist threat. In Mississippi they were the government.
    This was the climate in which the Supreme Court offered its mandate to end segregation in schools “with all due speed,” and in this atmosphere Judge Brady delivered his humdinger of a speech.
    He began with a treatise on the origins of man: At the dawn of history there were three “species of man”: “Homo Caucasius” — the