When Charles Diggs, a black congressman from Detroit, showed up to witness the trial, Strider was furious. His deputies refused to believe that Diggs was actually a congressman. Jim Hicks, a black reporter, took Diggs’s congressional ID card to show one of his deputies in order to get Diggs a seat. “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a congressman,” one deputy said to another. “A nigger congressman?” the other deputy asked. “That’s what this nigger said,” the first deputy added. In the face of such behavior, the national press corps was prepared to judge Mississippi by the
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