Affidavits; circa July 1964

              Affidavits
Transcript

The following affidavits were selected to give eyewitness and first person accounts of specific incidents in more formal detail. In several cases the affidavits are excerpted due to length or because more than one affidavit has been used to describe a situation in a given location.

All affidavits included here refer to occurrences this past summer. They are not the most atrocious statements that could have been gathered from experiences of Mississippi Negroes in everyday life or in connection with the movement during the past few years. It is apparent from the Tallahatchie County and Philadelphia-Neshoba County statements that these conditions did not begin this summer.

In most cases affidavits have been selected because they are the best official statements describing a situation or pattern existing across the state.

Highly publicized events such as the beating of Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld and two volunteers in Hattiesburg, or the "reign of terror" created in Jackson by two men one night when two separate shootings and a beating took place, have been omitted. Statements from Silas McGhee have not been included since the - admittedly historic - FBI arrests of three of his attackers broke that story into the nation's press.

Affidavits from Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, Jimmy Travis or the widow of Louis Allen, for example, have not been included, as it is assumed that most persons who worked in Mississippi this past summer would be familiar with their stories. And since this set of statements is restricted to the summer of 1964 we have not attempted to insert such affidavits as SNCC worker MacArthur Cotton's describing Parchman Penitentiary last year where he was hung by his hands for three hours, or SNCC worker George Greene's statements from Natchez.

It should be kept in mind that affidavits are not available for the bulk of incidents this past summer or, more importantly, from before.

(The following analysis of violence in Mississippi is excerpted from an analysis of affidavits submitted by plaintiffs in COFO v. Rainey, an omnibus suit filed in the U.S. District Court at Meridian this past summer.)

The use of violence by white men to keep Negroes "in their place" in Mississippi did not begin, as is sometimes asserted, with the coming of the civil rights movement to that state. Violence was basic to the system of slavery, and it has never been abandoned as a means of "controlling" the Negro population. Only the forms have changed.

But there has been an amazing consistency in the forms of organization used by the white man to meet the challenge of civil rights since the freeing of the slaves. The authors of Reconstruction Legislation realized that they must meet two closely related forms of resistance: (1) One was open violence, the use of brute and indiscriminate force by private white citizens and clandestine organ-