When a Black disc jockey in Chicago named Al Benson wanted to protest racism in his home state of Mississippi in early 1956, he came up with an unorthodox way of getting his message out. He arranged to have 3,000 copies of the U.S. Constitution airdropped from planes flying over the state.[1]
Deeply alarmed at recent racist incidents in the state—especially the murder of Emmett Till—Benson wanted the tracts to remind the state’s residents that “they [were] living under a democracy.”[2]
Benson did not make the drop himself, as he never received a response from state officials to his requests to make the flight. Instead, he hired two white pilots to carry out his plan.[3]
Less than two weeks later, a white disc jockey from Mississippi, Allen English, made his own leaflet drop over Chicago. Flying his own plane, he dispersed over 20,000 leaflets, each sporting an image of the Confederate Battle Flag.
English insisted he meant no harm in dropping the symbol on Chicago. He told the International News Service (INS) “I don’t intend this gesture as an insult to anybody and I don’t want a quarrel. I am simply not qualified to discuss the deep implications of this racial controversy. Nobody down home got mad at Benson for his visit. I hope nobody up here gets mad at me.”[4]
However, English’s claim that Benson’s act went over smoothly in Mississippi was proven false by Black reporters on the ground. The Associated Negro Press (ANP), a wire service similar to the Associated Press that primarily served Black newspapers, reported from Mississippi that “many angry citizens ripped up the [Constitution] booklets as they hit the ground.”[5]
English’s own statement to the INS undermined his claim that the Confederate Battle Flag drop was carried out in a spirit of neutrality:
It’s as ridiculous for me to drop Confederate flags over Chicago as it was for Al to drop the Constitution over Mississippi. That was an insult to the South. We are as familiar with the Constitution down there as the people of Illinois are familiar with it.[6]
This contradicted English’s earlier claim that “nobody…got mad at Benson.”
English’s labeling of Benson’s protest as “ridiculous” reveals that Americans were often unwilling to confront the severe racism of the Civil Rights era time. Black journalists were keenly interested in unearthing the deeper story of how some white Southerners were reacting to challenges to segregation with violence and hostility. The ANP provided its member papers with twice-weekly news packets featuring reportage on people, institutions, and events related to the lives of Black Americans—even as non-Black news outlets were letting these stories slip through the cracks.[7]
Olivia Haynie
References
Associated Negro Press, “Miss. ‘Bombed’ With Copies Of U.S. Constitution,” Los Angeles Sentinel. March 1, 1956.
Associated Negro Press, “Rebel ‘Bomber’ Misses Chicago Loop With Flags,” Atlanta Daily World. March 7, 1956.
Hogan, Lawrence Daniel. “Associated Negro Press,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, accessed on June 13, 2023. Available at http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1734.html
Associated Negro Press, “Rebel “Bomber” Misses Chicago Loop With Flags,” Atlanta Daily World. ↩︎
Associated Negro Press, “Miss. ‘Bombed’ With Copies Of U.S. Constitution,” Los Angeles Sentinel. ↩︎
Associated Negro Press, “Miss. ‘Bombed’ With Copies Of U.S. Constitution,” Los Angeles Sentinel. ↩︎
International News Service, “Chicago “Bombed” By Rebel Garbed Dixie Pilot,” Atlanta Daily World. ↩︎
Associated Negro Press, “Miss. ‘Bombed’ With Copies Of U.S. Constitution,” Los Angeles Sentinel. ↩︎
American Negro Project, “Rebel “Bomber” Misses Chicago Loop With Flags,” Atlanta Daily World. ↩︎
Hogan, Lawrence Daniel. “Associated Negro Press,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, accessed on June 13, 2023. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1734.html ↩︎