Originally, the Clarksdale black leaders were brought to trial in a justice of the peace court and found guilty of restraint of trade. When the county court upheld the conviction, it was appealed to the circuit court, which ruled the petition should be amended or Henry and others would be freed. But there was no amendment, and Henry and the others were neither acquitted nor found guilty, while the bond money was held. “We were out of jail but unsure of our legal status,” Henry wrote.

While Henry and others were being arrested, another group – all white –launched a boycott of their own. The Mississippi State Legislature passed a resolution “with scarcely no dissent” that no loyal Mississippian should shop in Memphis, Tennessee, just across the state line, and quite close to Clarksdale.

Angry because public accommodations and other facilities in Memphis were quietly desegregating, the Mississippi legislature had already “distinguished itself,” wrote Tougaloo professor John Salter, “by publicly investigating conditions at the University Hospital in Jackson, where white and black children were leaving their segregated wards and playing together in the corridors.”

The Clarksdale boycott continued for three years, eventually slowing. Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was found to be “a dramatic way of ending it.” Along the way, farm labor mechanization was heading to the Delta and as the need for black laborers lessened, the meanness of whites increased.

On June 12, 1963, as he was returning home, Medgar Evers was killed by an assassin’s bullet.

(Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," Susan Klopfer)