Publisher's Synopsis
(When Bo Tice took the train to Mississippi, in the summer of 1955, he entered the heart of Jim Crow country. Although he had experienced segregation and racism in Chicago, he had little concept of how hostile White Southerners could be toward Negroes. In the previous 75 years, over 500 Negroes had been hanged, shot, burned or otherwise killed in Mississippi alone. Slightly more than a year earlier, The U.S. Supreme Court had shot down the 1876 Plessy V Ferguson ruling of "Separate but Equal" in favor of Brown V Board of Education and mandated the integration of Public Schools. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi asserted that the decision had destroyed the Constitution and Mississippi was not obliged to obey it. Mississippi State Senator Walter Givhan claimed that the purpose of the NAACP's campaign to end school segregation was to open the bedrooms of our White women to Negro men. When Bo Tice arrived in Mississippi, it was a racial powder keg ready to explode. Just months before, 2 colored activists had been murdered. An NAACP worker, the Reverend George Lee was killed after trying to vote. A few weeks earlier, Lamar Smith was shot, at close range with a shotgun, and killed in front of a Court House in broad daylight, in front of witnesses. Local law enforcement said that he was killed in a traffic accident. No one was ever arrested for any of these crimes. Our nation owes a great debt to that 14 year-old, young man (the sacrificial lamb). The fervor over his terrible death sparked the torch of the fledgling civil rights movement. Rosa Parks said that the boy was on her mind, just 3 months later, when she made her mark on history. She and hundreds of others who gave their freedom and in some cases their lives, many of whom will forever remain nameless, fanned that spark into a flame. That struggle, which so many have fought for, is to obtain something which was promised to all of us by the U.S. Constitution: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That torch has, once lighted, albeit painfully slow, finally burned brightly. Just now, after three hundred years of strife, that quest has come full circle. A man of African-American heritage has been elected President of these United States. Dr. King had a dream, that one day a man would be judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. Thank God Almighty, thank God Almighty we are free at last.
