Boycott in Byhalia

In the early morning hours of last June 29, Butler Young Jr., a 21-year-old black laborer, was arrested by two white police officers from the town of Byhalia, Miss. (pop. 750), for hit-and-run driving. With the Byhalia police was a black deputy sheriff from adjacent DeSoto County, where the alleged hit-and-run incident had taken place. The sheriff climbed into the back of the Byhalia officers' car along with Young, and the three policemen set off to take their prisoner to jail. Young never made it.

Within an hour, the arresting officers told the attending physician at a county hospital that Young had made his way out of the back of the patrol car (which had no door or window handles). In trying to escape, they said, Young had run into a fence and broken his neck. But Marshall County Coroner Osborne Bell found a bullet wound in Young's left armpit, and no evidence of a broken neck. When he confronted the police with his findings, they literally bolted from the hospital.

From that incident has grown one of the longest civil rights boycotts in Mississippi history. Organized by the United League of Marshall County, a local civil rights group that claims to have 4,000 members, the boycott has been nearly 100% effective for eight months. It has cut business in some Byhalia stores by as much as 75%. Six white merchants have already declared bankruptcy, and others may soon follow.

Three weeks after Young's death, an all-white county grand jury refused to return indictments against the police officers involved. Until indictments are forthcoming, the town's blacks insist they will continue to shop in other towns, including Memphis, Tenn., only 30 minutes from Byhalia by car.

Losing No Steam. White merchants have tried to stop the boycott in court. They brought a suit against the league, which they eventually lost in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Outside the courts, the league's leaders have been threatened and even shot at. The boycott's supporters think that Mississippi Senator James Eastland, powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has intervened in the Byhalia situation. They insist that Eastland has pressured the Justice Department to try to break up the boycott.

The Justice Department did send representatives, not of its Civil Rights Division, but of its less effective Community Relations Service, to Byhalia last August. Boycott leaders claim that CRS agents harassed participants in the boycott, tried to discredit black leaders and even urged blacks to resume shopping in white-owned Byhalia stores. The leaders also charge that CRS men frequently slipped money to black winos and steered them in the direction of white-owned package stores. CRS agents deny that they harassed anyone or bribed, winos. In any case, the boycott shows no signs of losing steam. The FBI has found sufficient evidence of police misconduct in the Young case to recommend prosecution, but the Civil Rights Division has so far failed to follow up by taking the evidence to a federal grand jury.

Though 250 black and white Byhalia residents met amicably last week and drew up a list of priorities for improving the town, none of their resolutions directly addressed the boycott--or the death of Young. "I think we're on the way to settling the problem," said Dudley Moore, Byhalia's white mayor. But many of Byhalia's blacks would hardly agree.

The failure of the biracial meeting to face up to the issue of Butler Young's death has made the boycott's organizers even more determined. That determination is perfectly evident at Carrington's Market in Byhalia. Before the boycott, sales ran $30,000 a month. Today they are less than $6,000 a month.

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