President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas 50 years ago today brings back a flood of memories of Leflore County residents who recall Kennedy and his legacy in everything from civil rights to a potential nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union.
Mary Carol Miller, a Greenwood historian, was a 9-year-old student at Bankston Elementary School on the day Kennedy was shot.
Willie Esther McGee, a 19-year-old bride of one week, was doing household chores.
Emmett Chassaniol was working with his uncle in the family’s cotton business in Greenwood when word of the shooting came over the radio.
A gathering storm
Miller, 59, was a student in sixth-grade teacher Shan Simpson’s class. She recalls the weather that Friday was overcast and ominous. A storm front was approaching.
“I remember how dark the sky was. The sky got darker and darker,” she said.
Shortly after 1 p.m., the mother of a classmate, Gary Shute, came in and whispered something in Simpson’s ear. Miller said Simpson’s expression changed instantly.
“It was frightening. It was horror. You knew something was happening,” she said.
Simpson’s job, informing the students of Kennedy’s being shot and killed, could not have been any harder, Miller said: “How do you tell a classroom of 9-year-olds that the president is dead?”
When the word of Kennedy’s death reached the students, it had a profound impact, Miller said.
“When you’re 9 years old and the president’s dead, you just assume that the world is ending,” she said.
Miller said the students were kept in school for the remainder of the school day. When Miller, the daughter of Sara and Russell Criss, went home in the afternoon, she found her parents glued to the family’s television.
Sara Criss, a stringer who provided local coverage at that time for the Commercial Appeal, was an avid fan of the soap opera “As the World Turns,” and the broadcast had been interrupted by live coverage of the assassination’s aftermath.
Miller said her parents were “horrified” at the unfolding news story, and the day’s events had her reeling, too.
“I was stunned and scared,” she said. “I just remember saturation news.”
Once officials found the rifle and sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested.
On Nov. 24, while police were transporting Oswald from the Dallas City Jail to the Dallas County Jail, he was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Miller said her sister, Cathy, saw it as it happened on live TV.
“We heard a scream, and we all ran down to see. There was complete chaos on TV,” Miller said.
A champion of civil rights
Willie Esther McGee said she was ironing when she heard about the shooting.
Kennedy was shot around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time and was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital at 1 p.m.
McGee, 69, who was heavily involved at the time with the struggle for civil rights in Leflore County, felt Kennedy’s death might halt that movement.
“There was a feeling that all was lost,” she said. “I was upset, and at the same time, it seemed like I didn’t want to feel anything.”
In September 1962, when U.S. Air Force veteran James Meredith attempted to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, deadly rioting broke out in Oxford. Kennedy dispatched federal marshals and federalized units of the Mississippi Army National Guard to help keep the peace.
McGee said that kind of gutsy leadership was just what the country needed as it grappled with racial discrimination, particularly in the South.
“I thought he was one person that understood what the problem was and that he would do what he said he would do to bring the races together,” she said.
McGee said although there was a sense of loss with Kennedy’s death, the civil rights movement soon recovered and gained strength in a kind of tribute to his leadership and legacy.
“We would be letting him down if we didn’t strive to make sure that everybody had an equal opportunity,” she said.
Kennedy’s repeated emphasis on the value of education spurred many blacks to go to college when they might not have otherwise. When Kennedy died and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson became president, the issue of civil rights was once again being advanced in Washington.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by Johnson, ended racial segregation in public schools and outlawed major forms of racial discrimination and unequal voter registration requirements.
That was soon followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits discrimination in voting and placed federal oversight on the Southern states regarding redistricting to prevent the dilution of black voting strength.
Johnson, himself a Southerner from Texas, proved to be worthy recipient of Kennedy’s civil rights “torch,” McGee said.
“It seemed that he supported everything that President Kennedy had promised to support,” she said.
The missiles of October
Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, started out as a busy day for Emmett Chassaniol, who was working with his uncle, Pershing Chassaniol, in the cotton business. That year was a bumper crop for cotton in the Delta, and they were hard at work, he said.
Chassaniol had just returned from lunch around 12:30 p.m. when reports came over the radio that Kennedy had been shot. Wanting more information, Chassaniol went to the nearby Greenwood Cotton Exchange, which had a TV.
The mood following Kennedy’s shooting and subsequent word of his death pretty much stopped what had been a busy day.
“We really didn’t do a whole lot of work after that,” Chassaniol said.
Chassaniol, a student at Ole Miss in 1962, was also a member of the Mississippi Army National Guard. He was in one of the units federalized by Kennedy during the height of the James Meredith crisis in Oxford in September 1962.
“It was close to midnight on Sept. 29,” he said. “Ole Miss had just beaten Kentucky, and I got a call. They said, ‘Private Chassaniol, report for duty.’ I said, ‘Are you joking?’ They weren’t joking.”
In fact, Chassaniol said, he served 17 days on active duty with the National Guard in Oxford. He returned to Ole Miss in 1966 and graduated from the school in 1967.
Kennedy’s steely resolve in facing the Soviets over the placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba impressed Chassaniol. He said Kennedy’s strong and decisive leadership during that crisis was his crowning achievement as president.
“I admired him, and I thought he was doing a good job,” Chassaniol said.
Chassaniol said during the state funeral on Nov. 25, businesses stayed open for just a few hours so people could go home and watch the ceremony on TV.
In early 1964, the Associated Press printed a hardback book, “The Torch is Passed: The Associated Press Story of the Death of a President,” which was sold by AP newspapers, including the Commonwealth.
In text and photographs, the book depicts the actions that took place both in Dallas and at Kennedy’s state funeral in Washington.
Miller and Chassaniol both have copies of the book today.
“It had a great impact on me. It was the first book I had other than children’s books,” Miller said.
• Contact Bob Darden at 581-7239 or bdarden@gwcommonwealth.com.
