Most of the white spectators jamming the small federal courtroom in Jackson, Miss, had a real good time laughing and winking. Sometimes they shouted: "Tell 'em, Bilbo!" "The Man" himself was in high humordespite the fact that he faced possible loss of his Senate seat.
Even the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee, which conducted the four-day hearing, had trouble keeping an inquisitorial face. Somehow, way down there in Mississippi, the investigation of ailing, aging Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo on charges of having coerced and intimidated Mississippi's Negroes not to vote seemed kind of silly.
An early witness, a Negro veteran, said that...
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