In the Heat of the Night

For our third movie, we watched In the Heat of the Night, and it was a great watch! This was the first movie that we've watched as a class that felt like it was made with modern standards or film, or at least it was made at a time when these standards began to emerge.

Actor Sidney Poitier makes a return in our class as Virgil Tibbs, a talented homicide detective from Pennsylvania. The film takes place in the southern Town of Sparta, Mississippi, where Tibbs works to solve a murder case with the local police department. This setting is the centerpiece of the film's anti-racist message.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Tibbs is not welcome in the town of Sparta. He only ends up working with the secondary protagonist, police chief Gillespie, after one of his officers racially profiles him and arrests him.

The film's message and content reflect both the sense of triumph and further efforts needed after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were passed. Gillespie, an older white man raised in America's time of government segregation, is shown up by the young black detective. Without Tibbs' efforts, the case wouldn't have been solved.

One of the film's most iconic moments is when Tibbs, along with Gillespie, goes to Mr. Endicott's home to interrogate him about the murder. Endicott owns a plantation-style home and owns a large cotton farm mainly staffed by African Americans. He also has a black butler, and makes racially charged comments disguised as friendliness to Tibbs before he is interrogated. 

Eventually, Endicott realizes he is being interrogated and slaps Tibbs across the face. Tibbs responds with a slap of his own without any hesitation. The significance of a black man slapping a white man in a major release film cannot be understated. After the release of the film, Poitier and Rod Steiger (Gillespie's actor) played a game (page 336) where they would go to theaters and try and count the amount of white and black viewers by listening to their reactions to the scene: either shocked gasps, or cheers for Mr. Tibbs.

Endicott after being slapped by Tibbs

In the Heat of the Night is not only a great film, but a historically significant one as well. It is a reflection of the attitudes of many Americans shortly after great strides in the civil rights movements were made.

Medgar Evers Blog

Medgar Evers

For our class' fourth EOTO and trial, my EOTO presentation was about the assassination of Medgar Evers. Writing about Medgar Evers was a treat compared to my last major blog post. There was a plentiful amount of information to work with, and he has been one of the few things I was entirely unfamiliar with in this course.

Medgar Evers was born on July 2nd, 1925, in the small town of Decatur, Mississippi. His family owned a small farm, and his father also worked at a sawmill. From 1943 to 1945, Evers fought in the European Theatre of WWII in the United States Army; impressively, he fought at the Battle of Normandy (commonly known as D-Day).

Evers in uniform

While in France, Evers and other black soldiers were faced with a tough decision: return to the United States, or desert and start a new life in France. French society had already begun to treat minorities as equals unlike the United States, so many black soldiers decided to stay.

Evers is quoted as saying to his brother, "When we get out of the Army, we’re going to straighten this thing out!" After the war, Evers returned to Mississippi, graduated from college, and started a family in 1951. In 1952, Evers would join the NAACP.

Evers' natural abilities of organization and leadership were invaluable to the NAACP. Between 1952 and 1954, he organized multiple NAACP chapters while on work trips throughout the state. His skills and contributions, along with participating in a test case against segregation practice at the University of Mississippi law school after the Brown v. Board ruling, lead to him becoming the first NAACP Field Secretary of Mississippi.

As the Field Secretary, Evers functioned as the NAACP "governor" of Mississippi, overseeing operations throughout the whole state. Early on, Evers' primary focus was running boycotts against segregated services, specifically gas stations. Evers organized and lead multiple boycotts against segregated gas stations with varying degrees of success.

Any area where Evers succeeded especially was garnering press coverage of the NAACP's efforts. A prime example of this was when protests against segregation broke out in Jackson, Mississippi in early 1963. The mayor issued a statement calling for the cessation of the protests over the local TV station, and Evers took his chance to strike.

Evers successfully appealed to the FCC under the "equal time" provision and was granted 17 minutes to speak freely over the station in support of the civil rights movement. This was the first time ever that someone had been able to speak of the subject on Mississippi television. The broadcast was seen by thousands of Mississippians, both black and white, inspiring or angering many.

Evers' historic broadcast

Along with helping assemble the legal team to gain James Meredith's admittance to the University of the Mississippi, Evers' success lead to him becoming a target for white supremacists. A few weeks before he was assassinated, his house's garage was firebombed. Then, on June 12th, 1963, Evers was shot in the back on the steps of his own home, less than 24 hours after President Kennedy called white resistance to civil rights a "moral crisis" in a national address.

Byron de la Beckwith

The murderer, Byron de la Beckwith, was found quickly. However, despite overwhelming evidence, the jury was split twice in a row. Both juries were made up of only white males. It wouldn't be until 1994 that Beckwith would be tried for the 3rd time, and thanks to a jury that wasn't dominated by whites, Beckwith was finally sentenced to life in prison for his crimes.

Medgar Evers is not someone who is often talked about in history. He was one of the many men who worked tirelessly towards the goal of equality in America. Similarly to Evers, these many men are often forgotten or overlooked, and it is important that we do not let their legacies be forgotten.

EOTO 3 Trial Blog

For our third EOTO activity, the other group spoke about the trial and presented the plaintiff's and the defense's sides. The trial they covered was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), in which 5 cases were consolidated into one, with hundreds of plaintiffs. Oliver Brown's name was chosen to represent the case.

Of course, one of the arguments was that segregated black schools were not equal to white schools. A student argued that they were unequal by saying that four out of ten white students graduated from high school, while only one in ten black students graduated from high school. They also had the image below passed around the class that showed the difference in quality.

The difference seen between these two schools was common throughout the entire country. Black schools were often overcrowded, in disrepair, understaffed, and lacked even a fraction of the resources afforded to whites-only schools. The prosecution argued that getting rid of these disadvantages would greatly improve education for African Americans. I did a little research of my own to see if the claims made in our trial were true, and as predicted, they were.

According to research by economist Rucker C. Johnson, the desegregation of schools had numerous positive effects for African Americans. To name a few, five years in desegregated schooling lead to a 30% increase in wages for the student on average, an 11% decrease in poverty incidents, and a 25% increase in family income on average. There is also a correlation between increased school spending and an increase in time spent in school on average for students, which compounds these effects.

These statistics serve as a buttress for another presented argument: desegregation in schools would be good for the economy. A student said that "unsegregated schools would be an investment for the future". As the world was reaching a new age in technology, the need for skilled, specialized workers increased, which could only be supplied by well-educated people. Cutting off a quality education from a large portion of the population would hamper the ability of America to compete in this new age.

Today, the problem of desegregation has a simple, concise, and correct slam-dunk answer: "It's an awful idea". However, times were different in the 1950s, and arguments (like these) that wouldn't be needed today had to be presented to break down segregation in America. Facts like these serve as a scientific way to try and get through to someone who lacks the moral character to understand that segregation is wrong from the start.

Plessy v. Ferguson Trial Religious Research (and the Troubles that Came with Researching the Subject)

Pictured is P.B.S. Pinchback,
not Homer Plessy. There are
no photos of Plessy, but
Pinchback's photos are widely
confused as Plessy's.

For our second class trial, we presented the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. My team was on the side of the plaintiff, Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man who sat in a whites-only train car in Louisiana and was arrested for refusing to leave. I was assigned to argue from a religious and moral point of view.

Surprisingly, there were very few resources about religious views against segregation. It seems logical to assume that there would be many religious texts that argue against segregation. However, finding them is extremely difficult as it appears they've been overshadowed by the massive amount of contemporary pieces that focus on religious support for segregation.

I can see why this has happened. It is much more interesting to write about how religious institutions supported systems of slavery and oppression rather than what they'd be expected to do. However, it's extremely annoying when you search "religious arguments against segregation" and every result is parallel to an article titled "Religious Ideas of the Segregationists".

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the few sources I did find to weave into my speech was a short article by Martin Luther King Jr. Obviously, the piece is not from anywhere close to the same time as the case (it was published in 1957), but I felt that the views that King presented were undoubtedly present in at least some amount (if not a large amount) of abolitionists at the time.

From the text, I directly quoted "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus", which is a bible verse (Galatians 3:28). Its message is clear: as a Christian, the belief in a supreme race is wrong. Since all people are "one in Christ", all people are equal before God, the ultimate authority.

Despite Dr. King's message being written in 1957, out of all the sources I found, this was the closest date I could find to 1896. I know for a fact that there are many pieces of Christian writing that speak against segregation written between 1957 and 1896, and surely there has to be something that directly commentates on the results of the trial in 1896. I know that the problem most likely lies with the way I am searching, but the fact that I tried so many different ways of searching leads me to believe that there is an extremely scant amount of available material on the subject.

Because of this, I ended up using only one other source to write my speech: a "Pastoral Letter on Racism" published by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1979. I did not take any specific quotes from the letter, but I used some of its talking points to frame my speech around the obligations of Catholic citizens as both Americans and faith members to oppose practices of segregation.

Here's an example. In its introduction, the letter mentions a "constitutional heritage" to recognize the "equality, dignity, and inalienable rights of all its citizens." The letter then goes on to say that Catholics (Christians) are also heirs to a religious teaching that proclaims that all people are brothers and sisters. This is where I got the phrase "It is not only a legal obligation to protect equality for all American citizens, but an obligation as men of God", which was the main point of my speech.

This speech was the hardest to write out of any other speech I've written for this class. While its subject seemed like a slam-dunk topic in which there'd be plenty of resources to use, it was the opposite. In retrospect, it made the assignment a lot more interesting. I had to attempt to synthesize what I believed abolitionist ideas from the 1890s to be like from ideas in the 3rd quarter of the 20th century. I wouldn't call the challenge enjoyable, but it was a great mental exercise.