When I came here in 1947, to cover of Mississippi, uh, uh, the Time Speaking Union, of course, sent me here.

Black resistance to, um, of the segregated system had not exploded in any way.

I mean, there was no, uh, demonstrations or anything of that nature taking place.

I was quick to sense that the, uh, underwriting, uh, factor that governed a lot, a great deal of Mississippi, thought had to do some way with the Civil War.

And too many people in the state were still living in the past.

You could say that they were Unreconstructed Confederates.

You could sense that.

You asked me what about Bill Meyer?

I would say he was an honest reporter.

He wrote it as he saw it.

Uh, people in general, uh, do not understand, uh, Bill's, uh, contribution or his foresight, uh, over 50 years ago in trying to bring, uh, the freedom of the press and other issues to the forefront.

I will say that Bill Minor took risk, uh, to tell the story of what was happening, uh, in Mississippi and other places.

He Was more involved in reporting the news in Mississippi than any other single reporter.

One of the proudest chapters in the history of the time, UNE, is what Bill Minor did for our newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi.

Every additional year that Bill Minor spent in Mississippi just added to his value as a source of Mississippi Public Affairs.

And that to the New York Times was very important.

Bill was on the ground and saw and appreciated the need to report adequately, uh, the hopes and aspirations of, of, of black people.

He could always lend context to his stories that some of us newbies didn't have, uh, which gave it a depth.

Uh, so that reading Bill was reading the history lesson many times.

Bill Minor has been the, our own interpreter of who we were as a state.

The black community essentially had no access, uh, through to the major press, except, uh, through Bill.

There were just some inspired writing that Bill would do, and he would do it on deadline.

I think the state of Mississippi is, uh, has been well served by having a writer of his ability, uh, his integrity, his perceptiveness, uh, and, uh, commitment to getting to getting the story right.

I never could quite understand why Bill wouldn't leave Mississippi, and he certainly had every opportunity to do so, but that's where he stayed, right there in Jackson, uh, right in the belly of the beast.

And, uh, we can look back now on his reporting and see, uh, and see how much, how much ahead of his time he really was, But he also did something else.

He gave us hope for a brighter future.

The remarkable history of, uh, my association with Bill Minor, uh, has, uh, almost seven decades now, going all the way back to the summer of 1947.

In fact, Bill and I are probably about the only ones remaining, uh, on this earth.

We were involved at that time.

In the first part of the 20th century, Uh,The Times-Picayune expanded as many newspapers in the South, uh, did and had little one person bureaus, um, scattered throughout Louisiana, but also, um, one of our most important posts was in Jackson, Mississippi.

And, uh, and Bill Minor, um, made that position and that job, um, one of great renowned, um, because, uh, really because of the temper of the times and what happened when, uh, civil rights battle, um, moved to places like Jackson.

The black man was then unfortunately, remains even today.

Uh, the issue that divides people in, in Mississippi.

We were not used to, uh, any racial cases, uh, of consequence.

And, uh, until there was a case down in Laurel of a black man who was, uh, accused of raping a white woman, there was some, the real doubt whether there was, uh, he had committed rape of this white woman.

The meantime, there were people who came down, uh, who were interested in making a demonstration for Willie McGee.

The Supreme Court was beginning to throw out these convictions of, uh, black people who, uh, convicted with no black on the grand jury or on the trial jury.

And so the McGee case had gone up maybe once or TI know at least once, maybe twice, and, and been kicked back.

Willie McGee was tried and convicted, and the case was thrown out by the Supreme Court because there were no blacks on the grand jury or on the, uh, jury that tried him.

So, uh, they bring the case back and, um, Jones County somehow finds one black to, to put on the grand jury the problem, of course, being that no blacks registered to vote.

And so consequently, they don't get on the jury list because they re indicted him.

And then he's retried.

Of course, it's a, it's a cut and dried issue that he's convicted, but he is sentenced to die.

This crowd has gathered on the courthouse, uh, lawn.

Kids like 12, 14-year-old kids in the audience.

Now, by you this midnight, I'm sure that you have heard over both radio stations, WFOR and WAML, that all channels open to Willie McGee to save his life, have now been exhausted, and the execution is to take place here this evening.

Someone was selling cold drinks, and it was like a, like, like a, a festive occasion, like you would go into a football game.

But now this is show you how primitive things were done back then.

We had the electric chair that was, it was called the portable electric Chair.

It would be set up in the courtroom where a person was convicted.

And in this case, it was set up in the, in the courtroom in Laurel, right in front of the, of the judge's bench.

The courtroom was, was packed with, with people.

And, uh, I would, I would sort of scout around the edge of the crowd, and I would get as close as I could.

The executioner is the guy who had been doing this now for years.

So he was, and he was always bringing an assistant with him who would sort of do the heavy lifting, because the executioner would, would get skunking drunk every time he had, uh, the execution to do, at least he got a few slugs under the belt.

So he would have the assistant to be the one to actually throw the switch.

The time comes for the execution.

Then they bring him in sitting down, and he's not blindfolded, he's, but they, they, to put a hood down his, uh, head and, uh, put all the straps on.

They have a black minister to come and talk to him.

And, uh, so they throw the switch, the lights all dim, and, uh, you can see the reaction in the, in, in Willie McGee.

And, and they throw the switch once, and then few moments later, they throw the switch again.

Ladies and gentlemen, no doubt that you were listening to those powerful generators in that truck.

You did notice the difference of the two surges of power as the juice was turned on the electric chair.

And of course, we have no way of knowing, but we just assumed that that last surge was the final few thousand volts of electricity that meant the end of the life of Willie McGee.

I'll never forget when they threw the switch, all the lights in the, in the courthouse dim.

So it gives you this eerie feeling that, that, uh, you could never, never forget.

This was the beginning of something that we had no idea then how far he would go.

And we didn't, you wouldn't say that the Willie McGee case could be put in as part of the, uh, civil rights movement.

I guess in some fashion, you could, though.

This was the beginning of a change where, what happened in Mississippi, a biracial crime was news, and the rest of the country wanted to see how the racial justice was administered in Mississippi.

What it did, from my own standpoint, to make it, uh, uh, make me realize that Mississippi was, was, was a national story, and that it could become a national story that would attract reporters from all over the country.

When I first came to the South, there were no civil rights, uh, events, uh, movements to cover in Mississippi itself.

Uh, I did cover the 1958, uh, lynching of Mike Charles Parker down in Poplarville, Mississippi.

But other than that, there was a little civil rights activity.

All of the cases back in that time, uh, the reaction of, uh, white Mississippians was, why us?

Why are these national, uh, reporters in national press, why did they, well, they let us alone, let us mind our own business.

I remember after the Emmett Till case, a bumper sticker appeared on, on automobiles, uh, which said, Mississippi is the most lied about state in the, in the Union.

So, I mean, you could, you can see how that's the same theory of the don't tread on US theory that's handed down from the Civil War.

And looking back, I can see how it played into the hands of those people in politics who were, were basically demagogues, who, uh, could arouse the troops by using certain phrases and certain words, and, uh, get people's minds off, off of their basic problem, uh, which would, of course, economic and always has been the case in Mississippi.

When I came here, I noticed the, uh, newspapers in Capital City Newspaper were letting the people think that they were gonna be able to keep segregation forever.

And then along came the, the, the Brown decision in May of 1954, and that's when the lines really came down.

We recognized that there is a terrific problem, and we believe that the people I represent have been very considerate about this.

They've, they've taken it for 70 or 80 years, and we believe that now is a time to get around to having our constitution apply to all sections of the country equally, and to the same effect in a more or less uniform fashion.

It was inevitable that the system of, uh, white supremacy and segregation was doomed.

In particular, after this, the Brown versus Board of Education decision.

The Clarion-Ledger never told its readers what was coming.

Uh, even though, uh, the US United States Supreme Court had ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional.

They fed into this belief that, uh, that Mississippi would not change, and that everything to be, uh, the same as it was, we would keep our institution of segregation.

And so the people were not ready for the change when it, when it suddenly, when it took place.

At least for 10 years, uh, the, the battle in the legislature was on almost every issue was whether or not it would, it would, uh, continue to serve the maintenance of segregation.

We are simply exercising the same legal right, and I want you to hear this, we are exercising the same legal right to resist this most unfortunate decision that the NAACP exercised.

Coinciding with the Supreme Court decision was the emergence of the White Citizens' Council.

This is the Citizens' Council Forum Forum, the American viewpoint, with a southern accent.

They just clamped down on, on any attempt to comply with the desegregation.

Whereas there were a lot of people still living in this never, never world out there that said that there's no way that the schools of Mississippi are ever going to be integrated.

Bill Minor was writing, uh, how unlikely it was that Mississippi could, could win a battle against the United States government.

So Bill was, uh, perhaps the only regular reporter of the Mississippi legislature who covered the issue as intensely and as, uh, uh, as realistically as could be, as could be covered.

A majority of the members of the legislature were also members of the White Citizens Council, and there were some who would even put that in the, uh, biographical booklet that was printed back then.

Council Secretary Bill Simmons then presented Lieutenant Governor Carol Gardener, attorney General Joe Patterson, and many other public officials.

Bill Simmons, who was the chief mogul of the, uh, citizens Council sometimes would introduce us, the members of the press who was there coming, and Goll Lee, that, that always embarrassed the heck out of me to be introduced by Bill Simmons at the, at a, uh, uh, citizens Council rally.

But again, I'm, they have to realize that you had to protect your flank, or you would not be able to know what's going on on that site.

I mean, it was not too long afterwards that they realized I was not in sympathy with, with the, with them.

Ladies and gentlemen, I thank God that I'm an American, a Southerner, a Mississippian, and a charter member of the Citizen's Counsel.

Ross Barnett could create this turmoil in only four years in office.

I mean, there was no good, good material succession back then.

So it was all done within the space of four years.

And, and actually the first two years of his, uh, tenure as governor, I mean, he'd really done nothing in his popularity.

It was just weighed down.

But then finally, I mean, when Meredith applies to enter Ole Miss and he becomes the new target, well, that's what Ross Barnett, uh, becomes the, the hero.

The onset of Ross Barnett killed off the emergence of, uh, of any moderate or, uh, progressive leadership, uh.

At Oxford integration that the University of Mississippi becomes a one man crusade.

When Air Force veteran James Meredith tries to register, the police lines are drawn.

US Marshals blocked.

When university officials are cited for contempt of federal court, Governor Ross Barnett personally bars the Negro applicant.

Meredith goes away, and the federal government ponders its next move.

Never forget that one of the times he turned away Meredith in the Wolfville State office building, uh, just huge crowd gathers around Ross s Barnett comes marching from the capitol with his legislative legion behind him, and march up to the 10th floor where the State College board was located, the two white guys, a flaky Meredith, when they arrived at Alex Stepson, Ross Barnett, as usual, his first word was, and, and he looks at three, and he said, which one of you is James Meredith?

And there was so much tenseness that day that it didn't really hit me until several hours later that when I thought, what did that man say?

Governor Barnett found himself, uh, willingly or not a pawn of these groups.

I detected that Bill Minor saw this as a serious, uh, intrusion into the affairs of government, Uh, Ross Barnett and his being able to be, uh, more than the government.

I mean, he was like, uh, he was adored by the crowd that they seemed at some public function, and this was at the height of the Ole Miss Meredith, uh, case.

And these adoring crowds was like they would want to kiss edge of his coattail, uh, cheer him on the, I love Mississippi.

I love our people, our history, respect our heritage.

Now, there were those in the press, uh, particularly representing the local papers who wrote, uh, much, uh, much more favorably, uh, of this process, and who supported the Citizens Council and who supported the work of the Sovereign Commission and made it, uh, made it a confrontational political battle every day that, uh, put Mississippi in an almost indefensible position from a national standpoint.

The prior ownership of The Clarion-Ledger, the Hederman family, part of their whole purpose was to propagate the, uh, racial segregation.

And so this was the total of their newspaper back then.

The people were fed this in the newspaper every day, and back then, it, it showed that if you keep repeating the same thing, even though it's false, that you could make a lot of people believe that it, so that, uh, that's what used to upset me, was people who were you, you thought were, uh, you know, smart enough to be able to realize that this is, this is not the way it really is, that this is not really true.

The one, uh, event I think that, uh, broke it all open was the Meredith, uh, ride at Ole Miss.

Just after dark Meredith is flown into Oxford, President Kennedy appealed to the students and to the people of the state to comply peacefully with the law and bring the crisis to an end.

No man, however, prominent or powerful, and no mob, however, unruly or boisterous is entitled to defy a court of law.

It is not enough to avert a night of rioting leaving two dead and the campus the shambles of a battlefield.

There was no question that rossmore that would, was not gonna prevail The morning after the Akron sting of tear gas hangs over Ole Miss.

He, he, he couldn't perform when the, when the chips were down, because, uh, they found out that the federal power was, was the stronger than the state power.

To prevent further violence, the federal government pours in the first line might of the armed forces crack outfits of the troubleshooting 82nd and 101st airborne divisions.

State guardsmen are federalized, And it's, it's a terrible disgrace on the, on the name of Mississippi.

When I arrived and I sat on the, in Oxford, and it was just at, uh, at daybreak, at the campuses, just looked like a, a battle zone.

I mean, it looked like, uh, the spent, uh, cartridges and burning automobiles and the smell of cordite in the air and still the, uh, scent of, uh, tear gas.

The showdown was like a mini civil war.

Hundreds of, of non-students came pouring in from the outside who had been, uh, organized and motivated by, uh, by racist groups before it's over with as many as 25,000 troops were occupying, uh, the campus of Ole Miss in the, in, in the city of Oxford.

I even remember seeing students from other universities who had come, and their people that I know in Jackson who were business people who put guns in their car and drove up there at the Ole Miss to, uh, try to take part in, in the riot.

I mean, this, this is like an insurrection.

Now, mind you, the the riot at, at Ole Miss be doom to the White Citizens Council, which had big had become so powerful in Mississippi.

But the, uh, the people saw finally how Ross Barnett had been led by the Citizens Council into this mass defiance of the federal government.

And, and the, we would, again, lose that confrontation just as we lost the Civil War.

Mississippi was slow to, uh, to really get involved in the Civil Rights movement.

I mean, it was, it had broken out in, uh, other parts of the South, and there were no, uh, civil rights leaders in Mississippi other than Medgar Evers.

Medgar, uh, great, uh, great, great leader traveling through that state every day, knowing that he could be killed when he got out of his car.

The N-A-A-C-P had been a very, uh, dormant group until Medgar came along, and he injected more energy and, and, uh, determination.

I met Edgar Evers in the, uh, late, uh, 1950s.

And, uh, I began to know him back then, and actually, we became friends.

Uh, I don't recall ever asking Medgar, when is something going to happen here?

I mean, particularly after Little Rock, uh, the, uh, Central High School episode in Little Rock.

And, uh, uh, that's when I, um, I began to realize that something eventually was gonna happen.

The first real, um, attack on the segregation system took place in the library in Jackson, Mississippi.

I mean, it was famously labeled in a read-in for just going into a library and asking to, um, look, uh, into the card index in the, uh, in the library when they, the students went into the library.

Medgar Evers had tipped us off that they were coming, but the tip also had reached the police, and they were, they were there waiting for it.

And think how, uh, in the Oculus that would be just to, for some black students to, to walk into the main metropolitan Library, and they, uh, pounced upon by police for, uh, for disturbing the peace.

It took a little while to, uh, for me to realize that, I mean, he was the one, I mean, he had, he represented the figure that the black first black figures do ever really emerged as a leader.

And it took me a little while to see that, but I could tell he was so, uh, fearless and energetic.

Now, he was not a rabble rally.

Now, this is something that people can't understand.

He spoke in very reasonable terms and, uh, and, and never advocated any violence.

I mean, this was always a nonviolent approach.

To show you how, how the, uh, the white power structure just ran rough shot over the blacks Highway patrolmen would come in and set up, uh, recording device at, at the rally.

In other words, they would just openly tape the whole rally and what was said on their recording device, and then afterwards come back and pick it up.

No one did question it, even Medgar.

I mean, they, he would be up there on the stage speaking, and this machine was just going liquidy, split there below him At the height of, uh, the Civil Rights Movement, uh, in Mississippi, we lived behind what we call the Cotton Curtain, uh, Bill Minor and a few others.

But Bill, and particularly in the media, I'd like to say, helped to part that cotton curtain so that the public could, uh, see what was actually going on.

And, uh, I think he, um, pinpointed for so many of us, the actions that were taking place at the public meetings and at the meetings that were supposed to have been secret when the police would come in and, uh, set up, uh, tape recorders to record everything that was being said and done, First real demonstration to protest for voting rights took place in May of, uh, 1963.

Well, I think it's necessary for all people to vote, and Negroes are especially, uh, with, uh, the conditions as they are here.

For example, in Mississippi, uh, we have police brutality galore.

Uh, we have, uh, bad roars.

We have a number of things that, uh, we don't get, uh, simply because Negroes do not vote.

There were several hundred, uh, the young people in, I would say the ages of 14 to 18, who, uh, would lined up to March and, uh, some, some even younger than that, I might add.

And they all were carrying little American flags, because that's symbolic of what took place.

They were met by a barrage of, uh, Jackson police officers, and even some, uh, some highway patrolmen backing them up.

The police began pulling the flags out of the hands of the, these little black guys who was pulling onto for dear life, and they would come up off the ground when they would pull the flag out of their hands.

Now we're talking about four or 500, uh, young people lined up.

John Salter was sort of at the front of the group, so they chased him, uh, uh, up on the porch of a little, a little house on Rose Street.

But as they went up the, the stairs, one of the, uh, policemen with a Billy club at the size of a baseball bat, uh, it just absolutely honked him on the head.

And I remember it was so loud that it sounded like Joe Diaggio knocking a home run out of the, the Yankee Stadium.

And these young people who were arrested, now we're talking about several hundred of them now, the only way to carry them away was to put them on trash trucks, uh, garbage trucks.

You could take your, pick one of the two to take them to the, uh, fairgrounds at the, the fairgrounds where this is where they were gonna be incarcerated.

And, but the whole scene was so depressing, and it affected me personally.

Before I could sit down and start writing the story, I had to do something for my conscience.

So I, being a Catholic, I, uh, decided to go into the Catholic church, and I just went in and just sat for an hour just to meditate, thinking about, this is what has come with people who will not accept a different race, and, uh, forcibly are trying to prevent them, even with bloodshed from exercising their rights.

What I'd seen on Rose Street was, I would say, a cathartic, uh, experience in my life.

Bill was sort of the first alarm in Mississippi when, uh, something, uh, got out of hand, and he would either call the New York Times National Desk, or he would call me.

He was calling as a, as a newspaper reporter, who thought it was an important story that the New York Times might be interested in.

Sometimes I would have material that was a national story, and I was probably the only person who had the, had the material, had the story.

That's why I would choose, uh, say the New York Times or Newsweek to give a story that I had.

That, of course, was a Mississippi story.

This was part of my role I felt, and looking back, um, giving voice to, uh, blacks where they, where they ordinarily would not have it.

I mean, it, someone has to get these stories out, otherwise, people will never know the what's going on, what's happening, uh, how difficult it was for blacks to, uh, just to achieve some of these basic rights.

I was close to Aaron Henry and, uh, and, uh, uh, Medgar Evers, and they, many times would develop news stories or write news stories and, uh, get them to bill, uh, so that he could get 'em to the a PY.

Obviously, they did that because, uh, they had no access to, uh, to the editor or, or to, uh, Jackson Daily News of Clarion-Ledger at that point.

Uh, in fact, uh, many times those people were using, uh, disfiguring words, uh, to describe, uh, blacks, if it was anything negative.

Uh, many times, uh, people who came into town was considered communist agitators, uh, uh, and anti-American.

You know, when Bill was put in Mississippi by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, he was sort of set loose.

It was a one person operation.

He could pretty much pick and choose what he wanted to cover.

He, and he was very entrepreneurial with that.

Um, and, uh, you know, they weren't dictating too often what he had to cover.

He sort of picked and chose on his own, And, and Bill was an outpost, not only for us, but it turns out for many national publications as well.

Um, his, his dispatches did not appear under his byline.

Um, we learned in retrospect, and, um, and I think that's a good thing.

Um, I mean, there needed to be on the ground, um, shoe leather reporting.

And Bill did that, not just for the Times-Picayune, but apparently also for national publications like Newsweek and the New York Times.

The most valuable material that he filed was for Newsweek and the New York Times.

He was a stringer for both publications.

I guess the reason why that I could get away with the, the time speaking and never questioning, uh, some of these things that would appear in the New York Times or Newsweek, because they never would put bylines on it, and so they would never see my, uh, my name on it.

Medgar did not trust too many people, but Bill Minor happened to have been one that he did.

And when Bill Minor parked his car on a side street and walked into the doorway and Medgar greeted him, I knew with my suspicious nature that Bill Minor was not only an absolutely fantastic professional, uh, writer storyteller, but he was a man who believed that all of us are created equal.

Medgar, uh, I looked, looked upon, uh, duty as sort of soldier.

God.

He had been in, as a matter of fact, he had been in the military.

I've had a number of threatening calls, people calling me, saying that they were gonna kill me, uh, saying they were gonna blow my home up.

And, uh, saying that I only had, uh, a few hours to live.

I, I never did really, uh, talk to Medgar about, uh, that he was a candidate for assassination.

I, I could see that he was certainly a, uh, was, was a logical candidate that, well, We get such pranks, uh, pretty frequently, but, uh, that does not deter us from our goal of first class citizenship and getting more people registered to vote and doing the things here that, uh, a democracy, uh, certainly, uh, is supposed to espouse and provide for, uh, its citizenry.

It, he didn't go around with bodyguards in the, uh, uh, which of course, I think it would've been very wise if he had some bodyguards, but, uh, he didn't do that.

Correspondence.

Douglas Edwards, Medgar Evers had dedicated nine years of his life to the war against racism.

Now, he is dead in battle, killed from ambush on Wednesday, June 12th, 1963.

And Bill called me and told me that Evers had been shot and told me what me, uh, uh, Medgar's last words were right before he died.

And he said that Medgar had said, turn me loose, set me free.

Medgar Evers was killed, uh, in '63.

And, uh, since I considered myself as friend, I went to his funeral.

And after the funeral, the, the people there in the church wanted to have a march, and they really wanted to go down to the downtown section of Jackson, and the police said they couldn't.

There was, when the, there was a line of policemen cording off the street so that the blacks could not march on the main street, and it was beginning to build up into a confrontation.

I remember hearing one of these deputies from the country, these, we may as well open fire, but if we don't do it today, we'll have to do it tomorrow.

So, in other words, they, with, they fingered the triggers and the, uh, on their guns.

So I don't know exactly what possessed me, but I've walked into, through the police line and, and persuaded the, the black kids to this was not a good thing to do, and everything stopped.

There was so much tension that, uh, I often thought that if, uh, law enforcement, um, army had opened fire, I mean, it would've been just a shooting gallery.

I mean, there would've been hundreds of blacks laid dead there on, on Farrish Street.

And due to John Doer's courage, th this didn't happen.

By that time, I went straight from there over to the press room at, at the, at the Capitol, just sat down and, and wrote my story as I best I could.

I tried to capture the tension that existed, uh, there that day, but it was one of those memorable stories that I saw happen right before my eyes.

I was tipped off by this, by this deputy sheriff when Beckwith was gonna be brought in.

And so I started asking him questions, and he was, he was not very responsive at all, but the answers he gave gave me the feeling that, uh, this man was, was just like another Lee Harvey Oswald is, was the feeling I got that assassination of, uh, Edgar Evans was his idea of his 15 minutes of fame, because he, in his old mind, picturing himself as a hero doing what, what Mississippi Whites wanted done to remove Medgar Evers from the scene.

August passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and you would think that would overnight would change things a lot.

Instead, all it did was antagonize the, uh, white segregationists who in most cases had something to do with the Klan, or they didn't necessarily have to be klansmen.

I mean, they would sometimes just be a bunch of hoods and thugs who would, uh, who would get together.

And, uh, whites would come in and just beat up black people.

Uh, coming out of the church after a rioting that on the campus at Ole Miss, the Citizens' Council began to lose membership and lose support.

And so they were, they, they began to disappear.

Along comes this, the klan and the, the one klan that, uh, most violent klan of all are the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which are organized down in South Mississippi directly as a result of the news that had come out, that there were going to be these 1000 college students, most of them white, who were gonna come down into Mississippi and live with black families.

To them, it was like being invaded by a Yankee army.

And so, uh, the White Knights movement just spread like wildfire across most of the Piney woods, uh, areas.

So I realized it was didn't bode well for all these kids coming in, living in black homes and mixing with white black people.

It was not gonna end well.

And, uh, of course, there was some papers like the Jackson Daily News and the Clarion-Ledger that just played that story up all the time about the invasion.

Oh, there was not supposed to be any movement people based in, in Neshoba County.

It was historically a dangerous place for, uh, any, anybody to, to advocate civil rights.

So they knew that going in the change, uh, in plans was the burning of this church out in the outside of, of Philadelphia, and the Knight Riders coming in and, and beating the church elders, you know, the black churches were one of the few places where, where you could get black people together, together without being suspect.

And, uh, that's why the, the black churches became such a target, though, after I broke the story of the editor of the paper in Philadelphia was telling everybody in town, oh, that's just a, that's just a, a hoax, and don't, don't believe it.

Well, of course, it, it was not a hoax, but, um, uh, but I, I realized that I had in a way, been responsible for, for this three civil rights workers coming to the Neshoba County.

But swear, I saw that, uh, that story, that's what attracted 'cause he had, he had been in that church and held a rally in, in, in that same church.

I, I decided the New York Times would be the, the appropriate venue to get this out in.

And, um, and the story was of course, picked up by the Associated Press, and it, it went nationally.

And, uh, even the, uh, Jackson Clarion-Ledger was forced to, uh, carry it, uh, that I've thought many times that, uh, this is what brought Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney into Nashoba County.

So maybe if I had not broken the story, maybe there's a chance that nobody would've ever known about it.

This was the event that brought about the, what later became the, uh, the great story of Civil Rights in, in 1964, and the massive investigation for that over, uh, weeks, uh, to break the case.

And because no one would would talk in, in Neshoba County, and they couldn't find the bodies.

So, uh, uh, that was the key to it that, um, was first they had to find the bodies because no one in Mississippi would, uh, believe that, uh, the, the crime committed.

It goes back to the, the Mississippi, uh, pension for denial.

Even today, when you write stories about some of these things that have happened back there, there a whole lot of people today, they don't want you to bring up all these things.

They want you to forget that those closed chapters, it's hard to imagine today when a reign of terror that existed in, in this, in this state, the FBI was our only, uh, protection.

Because the FBI was the one who, uh, finally broke the back of the, of the Ku Klux Klan.

They were found, uh, buried the Earthed Dam of a, a foreign pond dam, uh, outside of Philadelphia.

The story, of course, developed into the, in indictment of Ku Klux Klansmen.

The trial is held in Meridian, it is in federal court before Judge Harold Cox.

And this was a dramatic trial because the sheriff of, uh, Neshoba County, as well as his chief deputy had been, had been linked to it the first day of the trial that, uh, in, uh, in selection of the jury, most of us, uh, stayed in, uh, in what was the nearest, uh, best, uh, hotel.

So we are in there having dinner that night.

Um, and the jury has been selected.

The trial is going to begin the next day, judge Harold Cox was walking out and he comes past the, uh, my table table.

He says to me, he said, Bill, do you know any of these people on the jury?

And it just happened that I did know one guy, uh, a man named Langdon Anderson.

He was a prominent business leader from South Mississippi.

Someone I had known, having been appointed to the state, agricultural and Industrial Board.

He was a remarkable person for his generation.

Well, anyway, I tell, uh, Judge Cox that.

Next morning, the ju uh, the court opens and the, the, the jury files in, and the Judge Harold Cox, the names Langdon as the foreman of the, of the jury.

I mean, so it, it so happens that that turned out to be a very crucial part of this trial.

John Dora was the chief prosecutor.

He presented the case in a dramatic two week long trial.

Consider this.

Now, this was 1967, the chance of white men being convicted of killing a black man, were not good to begin with.

The jury goes out and stays out, and they stay and they stay and they stay for a couple of days.

The thinking was, this is just another hung jury.

Later they did come back with a verdict and they've convicted seven of the defendants.

A couple years later, I was going down through South Mississippi and I stopped in to see Langdon Anderson, and he told me about the inner workings of the, in the, uh, in the jury.

I was able to find out from Langdon that he was largely responsible for getting the convictions of, of, of the seven that they did get the convictions of.

And so I, so that made me feel very, very good that I had a little bit of a role in, in seeing to it, that he was, he was made the foreman of the jury.

The big surprise of the whole trial, was here Harold Cox, the guy we had known to be a real racist.

Harold Cox, sentences them to what was almost the maximum term that they could be sentenced.

It turned out to be a turning point in Mississippi's history.

Yeah, well, after the convictions at Meridian, John Doar had been known for while he was working the back roads in Mississippi, that he would never, never take a drink, would never be out in public and take a drink.

So he come, he and Joe Sullivan come back to this great old restaurant called Le Flore.

And then they called me, said, asked me if I would come on over and have dinner with him.

So I get, I came over and that it was John Doar, was slugging down martinis, and they were celebrating their role in changing history in Mississippi.

First time that white men convicted of, uh, slaying, uh, a black person and, and involving civil rights, because that's what these three young fellows were doing.

In 1960, the country faced an unsolvable problem.

The question was, what happened that caused something that was unsolvable in 1960 to the solution to being inevitable in 1966?

And it was the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the efforts of the, The Beat newspaper reporters in reporting what was going on day after day after day after day after day.

It was like, uh, uh, a drop of, of water on a stone.

It keeps you more and more water comes down.

And these, these were efforts by everybody over a, a four, four year period.

I don't want to pretend to say that I was a hero in that era of madness.

They, the local people were the ones who made it possible.

They are the heroes.

Bill Minor played a major role in helping people to understand Mississippi, of helping them to understand the evil of prejudice and racism.

It makes you feel like that the, you have been put here for a reason, and as long as I can do it, I'm going to keep doing it.