Let's see. Anyway, they got up a grave uproar, but I went to Washington,
and I sat in the Supreme Court of the United States. I was a member of
the bar of the Supreme Court. I heard all those arguments, the ones they
had while Vinson was still the chief. You know about his being found
dead on the floor, and then Warren was appointed and so forth. Then they
re-argued them and I went back and heard those. However, all the
southern states, most of them, they joined in an amicus curae brief
supporting South Carolina and Virginia. I refused to sign it. I refused
to participate in it. My position was that the problem had not yet
arisen in Mississippi, and there wasn't anything to be gained by rushing
forward to become embroiled in a problem that might be many years away.
At least we'd have more time to think and to plan
and to provide. Well, I well remember the day, May 17th, '54, when the
decision came down. When people have been told by the Supreme Court of
the United States, that's it all right as long as you treat them
equally, as they had back there in Plessy against Ferguson, later on in
Gum Long against Rice. That was a Mississippi case. With men like Holmes
and Brandeis and all those supposed liberals sitting on the court at the
time, unanimous decisions. They held that Mississippi could exclude a
Chinaman from going to school with white students. That was in '28 or
close to it. So then to have it just turned abruptly and absolutely
around, and naturally that was going to foment a lot of trouble. What a
lot of people overlook is that, of course, the federal courts in that
situation were sitting as a court of equity to redress and remedy
constitutional deprivation. Even the Supreme Court itself, to start off
with, deferred any implementation [of Brown] for a year. Came back and
had arguments on that a year later. I heard those as well. There wasn't
a suit filed against Mississippi until after I left office as governor.
Of course, we then got us a governor named Ross Barnett who kept
throwing a match to every gasoline barrel he could find until we had a
magnificent explosion. I found, at that time—and I would go around and
make speeches to the black school events and things like that—I found
that, course, the black people ordinarily are very gentle, easy to get
along with, and non-violent people. 'Course, all the violent ones, they
get the publicity, and they sound like they've got the whole thing
engulfed but that's not really the facts. Too many of us, like myself, 'course that's a long gone breed that worked
in the fields along side the black people, and had them come in and help
look after us when we were sick, and we'd do the same thing for them,
and all like that. There was a real reservoir of good feeling, let me
put it that way. An old lady that worked for us for years and years,
named Lil, she was just as much a lady as anybody you ever saw, and when
we died, my mother cried like it was a member of the family. 'Course,
those feelings somewhat got stamped out in the later agitation and so
forth and so on.
But I think that the real whirlwind began in 1948 when the southern
states walked out of the Democratic Convention. That was what poured the
gasoline on the fire. It'd been a rumble off in the distance. It was a
kind of a monster that was hiding around the bend. I'm talking about
from the standpoint of upsetting everything and tearing everything up,
even getting ready to abolish the public schools and all that kind of
stuff. Well, I'm a product of the public school system, and in these
latter days I've got five grandchildren and they've all gone to the
public schools, and they educated me and they've educated my
grandchildren as well. But I would say that the real high water mark was
when they walked out in '48. I'd been a delegate to the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago in 1940, and I was a presidential elector
for Roosevelt and Truman in '44, the last time Mississippi went
Democratic victoriously until Jimmy Carter in 1976, thirty-two years
later. Of course, Mississippi went democratic in '52 and '56 because
John Stennis and Jim Eastland and myself got out and campaigned for the
ticket. Which reminds me, I'm going to tell you
this, show you about the ups and downs and why there's always a tomorrow
in politics. Most politicians forget that. There is always a tomorrow,
and a lot of what happens tomorrow is governed by what already happened
today, naturally. But in 1928 in the big bolt on account of the liquor
question and the Catholicism question, there weren't but three people in
Mississippi of any stature that dared speak up for the democratic
ticket—Pat Harrison, BilBo, and old man Paul Johnson, later governor. In
the meantime, as I pointed out while ago, men like Heflin and Simmons,
after a long career, they got ushered out of office because they had
bolted the ticket. But in 1948, you remember, they carried a bunch of
places. They carried Mississippi, carried South Carolina