Numerous incidents of beatings, abuse, and humiliation of Black servicemen during this period were duly chronicled by the nation’s vibrant African American press. But the stories that dominated the front pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, the Baltimore Afro-American, and others were generally ignored by a white press that was indifferent to the mistreatment of Black veterans. Many white editors seemed to consider such occurrences either too routine to be newsworthy—or too shameful to publicize. Newspapers in the South, particularly in smaller communities, shared an attitude that the returning Black GIs needed to be reminded of their proper place.
The Columbia story was page-one news in the Nashville papers. The Nashville Banner declared: “Highway Patrolmen and Guardsmen Bring Rioting Negroes Under Control.” In an editorial, the local Columbia Daily Herald warned that “the white people of the South” would not tolerate this sort of effrontery from Blacks: “The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realize this, the better off the race will be.”
Over the course of the next several days, testimony was coerced from the Mink Slide prisoners by means of threats and beatings. Two were shot dead in the sheriff’s office for allegedly trying to escape. Bomar later explained how he subdued a third prisoner during the fatal scuffle in the sheriff’s office: “I pulled out my pistol and put my foot on his neck and told him to lay there and not give us any more trouble.” No one was ever charged in the killing of the two prisoners, but twenty-five Black men, seemingly selected at random, were charged with the attempted murder of the four lightly injured Columbia policemen. Of those twenty-five, at least nine were veterans.
The NAACP’s Walter White knew that he had to change the narrative. His organization had experienced a period of exponential growth during the war years, its membership rolls ballooning from about 50,000 in 1940 to 400,000 by 1946. White was a savvy political operator with many friends in high places. He understood the moment and also the need to rally public opinion to his cause. Soon after the violence in Tennessee, White formed the National Committee for Justice in Columbia and recruited former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt as co-chair. Albert Einstein, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Luce, Helen Hayes, Langston Hughes, and Joe Louis were among the notables who lent their name to the cause. White also orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to the White House and to Attorney General (and future Supreme Court justice) Tom Clark, a Texan who was sympathetic to civil rights. But White was still having trouble getting the national press to pay attention to the emerging civil rights struggle, which he knew would be critical in swaying public opinion and building momentum for legislative change.