Kissing Case

The Kissing Case was a pivotal 1958 case in the racially segregated town of Monroe, North Carolina in the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68) in which local officials unlawfully detained two young children who were arrested in October 1958, separated from their parents for a week, beaten, threatened with castration, jailed for three months, charged by Juvenile Judge Hampton Price, convicted of molestation, and sentenced to reform school until the age of 21. Under pressure from members of the NAACP, Eleanor Roosevelt, President Eisenhower, organizations such as the New-York-based The Committee to Combat Racial Injustice CCRI, the international community, and the international press, the North Carolina Governor Luther H. Hodges was forced to grant clemency to the boys and they were released in early 1959. A seven-year-old white girl, Sissy Marcus, kissed two African American boys, nine-year-old James "Hanover" Thompson, and seven-year-old David "Fuzzy" Simpson, on their cheeks as she had recognized one of them as a childhood friend. James Hanover's mother had worked for the family of Sissy Marcus when she was a toddler and they had played together at that time. During Hallowe'en week, on October 28, 1958, the boys were biking near Sissy's home when she recognized him. Sissy's mother, Bernice Marcus became enraged when Sissy told her the story, called the police and accused the boys of assault.

In his book Negroes with Guns, Civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, head of the local Monroe chapter of the NAACP cited Patrick Jones,

"Rarely in history does an incident so small open a window so large into the life of a place and a people, a window that revealed both the visceral power of sexual questions in racial matters and the complex dynamics of Cold War politics for the African American freedom struggle."

Williams described the racial environment in Monroe in the months before the incident when a "large, heavily-armed" Ku Klux Klan motorcade led by James W. "Catfish" Cole, had attacked the home of Dr. Albert E. Perry, the Monroe NAACP chapter vice president and a World War II veteran, as the NAACP became more vocal in calling for desegregation, focusing on the local tax-supported Monroe swimming pool at the Monroe Country Club. Harry Golden, in a 1959 article entitled "Monroe, North Carolina and the 'Kissing Case,'" argued that these attempts to desegregate the pool were 'unwise', 'naive' and 'unrealistic' because of the "crude emotions of a small agricultural community," Monroe. White parents did not want their children to swim or play with black children.

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