Eastland earned a reputation as a vociferous opponent of the civil rights movement and a supporter of the Jim Crow laws. When the three civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney[?], and Andrew Goodman went missing in Mississippi on 21 June 1964, he reportedly told President Lyndon Johnson that the incident was a hoax and there was no Ku Klux Klan in the state, surmising that the the three had gone to Chicago, Illinois. As such, he was portrayed in the Hollywood version of the incident, Mississippi Burning. The judge in the Mississippi Burning trial (United States versus Cecil Price et al.[?]) was Judge William Cox, who was a former college roommate of Eastland at the University of Mississippi.
When the Supreme Court decision in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 1954 was delivered Eastland denounced it saying,
Eastland was an ally of Joseph McCarthy and served on the Committee investigating many Americans' connections to the Communist party. Even after McCarthy was discredited, Eastland tried to press the issue. Using his power as chairman of the Internal Security Subcommittee, he subpoenaed a number of employees of the New York Times, which was at the time taking a strong position on its editorial page that Mississippi should adhere to the Brown decision. The Times was not intimidated. Its 5 January 1956 editorial read in part
Eastland was an open and unashamed racist. Eastland is quoted by historian Robert A. Caro addressing a rally of the White Citizens Council in 1956
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