September and October, 1955, 1955

In late September, a mob in Holmes County, Mississippi, called together by the local White Citizens Council, ordered NAWU Secretary-Treasurer A. E. Cox and Dr. David Minter of the Providence Cooperative Farm to leave the state. Mitchell and the NSF immediately began efforts to investigate the situation and to secure FBI protection for Cox and Minter. Correspondence relating to their efforts begins on September 29 and continues throughout October; see especially the reports by Mitchell (Oct 4) and by Rev Charles Jones of Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Oct 14). On the current status of the dispute with UPWA over Louisiana sugar workers, see Mitchell to Rev. Louis J. Twomey of Loyola University (Sept 6); on the union's organizing drive among rice workers, see the exchange between Joe Guidry and Mitchell (Sept. 18, 21). There is also a long letter from Mitchell to A. Philip Randolph on the importation of Jamaican farm labor into the United States (Oct. 10)