Justice and Protection

Abstract

The problem of law enforcement in the South, or in a current and not inaccurate phrase, "Jim Crow justice," has come to be symbolized by a number of well-publicized killings in recent years. Medgar Evers, head of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, was shot from ambush in the spring of 1963. Lemuel A. Penn, a Washington, D.C., Negro, was killed while driving through Madison County, Georgia, in July 1964. That same summer saw the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white Northerners, and James Earl Chaney, a local Negro, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the spring of 1965, Mrs. Viola G. Liuzzo of Detroit was shot to death in Lowndes County, Alabama, on the highway between Selma and Montgomery. Some months later in Hayneville, the seat of Lowndes County, Jonathan M. Daniels was killed, and his companion, a Catholic priest, badly wounded, by a shotgun blast fired in the street, in daylight, before witnesses.