Kissing case

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The kissing case (the literal translation “kiss case” is unusual and is usually received without a name) is an incident that occurred in the USA in 1958 and led to protests in connection with the American civil rights movement . In 1958, in Monroe , North Carolina, two black boys, seven-year-old David "Fuzzy" Simpson and nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson were arrested after a white girl kissed their cheeks while playing a children's game. Both were convicted of sexual harassment and sent to a correctional facility, where they should have stayed until they were 21.

event

After the girl spoke to her mother, her father and his neighbors armed themselves with firearms and searched for the boys and their parents. That same evening, police arrested the children Thompson and Simpson on suspicion of sexual harassment. The children were held for six days without being allowed to speak to a lawyer or receive visits. They were handcuffed and beaten by the police in a cell in the basement. You were brought before a juvenile court and sentenced to an indefinite period in a youth home. The children were not represented by a lawyer during the trial either. The local Ku Klux Klan group from Monroe set up burning crosses in front of their parents 'homes and strangers shot at their parents' homes.

Civil rights activist Robert F. Williams , chairman of the local NAACP , started a protest movement against this judicial scandal. Eleanor Roosevelt , the widow of the US President, who ruled from 1933 to 1945, sought a conversation with the Governor of North Carolina . There was initially no response from North Carolina State or the administration. Williams called in Conrad Lynn , a New York attorney, to represent the children. Governor Luther H. Hodges and State Attorney General Malcolm Seawell declined to retrial.

The parents were not allowed to visit or speak to the children for weeks. Joyce Egginton , a journalist with the London Observer newspaper , was granted interview permission; she took one of the mothers away and smuggled a camera into the detention center. There she took photos of the mother hugging her child. These images were published in Europe and Asia. The United States Information Agency received 12,000 letters of protest expressing their disgust.

In Europe, an international committee was formed to defend Thompson and Simpson. Demonstrations took place in Paris, Rome, Vienna and Rotterdam against the judicial scandal and stones were thrown at the American embassies. For the US government, the scandal turned into a national disgrace. In Germany and in the Vatican in particular, the sympathy for the innocent "Negro children" was particularly high. In February, North Carolina government officials presented waivers for the mothers of the convicts to sign. If they sign, the children should be released. The declarations included the declaration not to make any claims for damages and an admission of guilt. The mothers refused to sign these statements.

Two days later, after the children had been in prison for three months, Thompson and Simpson were unconditionally pardoned by the governor. No explanation or apology was given. The events affected both the children and their families. In a 2011 interview, Brenda Lee Graham, Thompson's sister, said they never recovered from what had happened.

literature

  • Randall Kennedy: Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption . New York: Vintage, 2004. Pages 196-7
  • Timothy Tyson, Robert F. Williams, NAACP: Warrior and Rebel, The New Crisis, December 1997 / January 1998, Issue 104, Issue 3, p. 14
  • Timeline: Eleanor Roosevelt: 1953-1962 , Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George Washington University, 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b cf. Web link Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung
  2. ↑ a b 'The Kissing Case' And The Lives It Shattered , NPR, April 29, 2011, accessed November 17, 2013