A postcard of downtown Greenwood. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Forty-four years ago this month, on a Sunday afternoon, police officers began visiting mom-and-pop stores in Greenwood, Mississippi. At each stop they bought one or two seemingly random items. A clawhammer. A pair of pantyhose. Handkerchiefs. A set of bedroom slippers. By Sunday evening they had made purchases at more than two dozen businesses. They returned to those businesses on Monday and Tuesday, only this time they were not looking to buy anything. They were making arrests.
The merchants who sold items to police that Sunday—December 9, 1973—had done so in violation of Mississippi’s “blue law,” a 150-year-old law that restricted what businesses could sell on the Lord’s Day. The law’s original, puritanical purpose had been to ensure that Sunday remained a day for rest and Christian worship. By the 1970s, though, arrests for blue law violations were rare, as the law had become more symbolic than official.
But something strange happened in Greenwood that fall.
As the holiday shopping season approached, a few large chain businesses had let it be known, through advertising, that they were open for Sunday business. This must have offended a handful of Greenwood’s more religious and conservative residents because the mayor, Clay Ewing, received about fifteen complaints. Ewing responded by meeting with representatives from the businesses and, after they agreed not to open on Sundays moving forward, he thought the fuss was over. He was wrong. Within a few days, a petition signed by more than 550 Greenwood citizens arrived at City Hall demanding that the state’s blue law be enforced.
That is what led police to conduct blue law compliance checks that Sunday.
In all, twenty-eight merchants were arrested. They came from every corner of the town. Among them were men, women, military veterans, Delta natives, and Chinese immigrants. They were each released on their own recognizance and told to be in Greenwood municipal court at 1 pm on Wednesday, when they would appear before a little-known, 34-year-old judge named Luke Schissel.
Fraiser argued that the bracelet could be considered a memento and the pantyhose could be a grooming device. (Mrs. Hogue testified that properly groomed women wore hosiery.)
The city council had appointed Schissel to the bench just four months earlier. A tall Air Force veteran who grew up on an Iowa farm, he had a reputation for holding unbending beliefs. “I have never known anyone in my entire life,” someone wrote to the local newspaper, “who stands firmer on his convictions than he does.” He was also known for doling out harsh sentences for minor offenses: He had fined a 14-year-old boy $20 for driving without a license and would later sentence a pregnant woman to fifteen days in jail for stealing a $2 brassiere.
The merchants, who each faced $200 fines, could not have been optimistic.
When they gathered in Schissel’s courtroom, only one of them, a drugstore owner named James Hogue, brought an attorney. Hogue’s businesses had sold two items to police—a bracelet and pantyhose—and his attorney, John Fraiser, said both were exempt from the blue law.
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The law had been tweaked several times since the 1820s, when it first went on the books. The most recent change had come in 1964, when the state Legislature approved a list of exemptions. In some places the list was explicit, like when it named ice cream, tobacco, maps, and light bulbs. In other places, though, it was ambiguous, like when it named mementos, souvenirs, and grooming devices.
Fraiser argued that the bracelet could be considered a memento and the pantyhose could be a grooming device. (Mrs. Hogue testified that properly groomed women wore hosiery.)
“We are walking on thin ice with this type of law, with the so-called pantyhose case,” said Fraiser.
Robert Carpenter, the city prosecutor, said that while the law may be unpopular, the only thing for the court to decide was if it had been broken. “Nobody is saying we like it,” he added. “The point is, it is the law. And like it or not, we have to enforce it.”
Two days later, Schissel did something no other Mississippi judge had ever done: He declared the state’s blue law unconstitutional. He noted that the purpose of the law, according to lawmakers, was to “promote the health, recreation and welfare” of Mississippi. Schissel said he could find no reason to believe that selling a pair of pantyhose was a threat to anyone’s welfare. The charges against the merchants were dismissed, and city officials were told not to bring any more people charged with blue law violations into municipal court.
The dismissals made waves. The next edition of the Greenwood (Miss.) Commonwealth, the local newspaper, carried a two-deck headline: “Schissel: Blue law unconstitutional.” National wire services spread the news, and a number of Greenwood merchants announced that they planned on opening up their businesses on Sundays. It seemed like the state’s blue law had been dealt a significant blow.
The December 15, 1973, issue of the Greenwood Commonwealth discusses the case.
Less than a week later, though, Travis Clark, the county prosecutor, announced that while the city might not enforce state blue laws, his office would. “If the law is violated and it is reported to me or the sheriff’s office, the law will be enforced,” said Clark. “I don’t have any other choice.” Letters were mailed to approximately 350 area merchants, outlining what could and could not be legally sold on Sunday in Mississippi.
With that, Schissel’s ruling faded away, becoming an obscure footnote in the history of an archaic law.
Thirteen years later, in 1986, the state Legislature repealed the law. By then, a large segment of the population had come to agree with Sid Salter, one of the state’s finest political columnists, who wrote at the time: “Blue laws are an outdated relic of a bygone era. Such laws are a classic intrusion of a well-intentioned church on the state.”
Still, in the Bible Belt, it was a controversial move. Gov. Bill Allain allowed the repeal to take place but declined to actually sign the legislation. He said he did not want to appear in favor of all businesses being open on Sunday.
Allain did offer one criticism: He described the law as “vague,” just as Schissel had done more than a decade earlier.
The Greenwood city council replaced Schissel as municipal judge in 1977. He continued to practice law in the Delta town until January of this year, when ill health found him. He died this summer, at the age of 78. His final weeks were spent at a V.A. home in south Mississippi, where I visited him several times.
It was hard seeing my grandfather in tough shape. He had always been, essentially, a man of few words, not because of shyness but because he took the quickest route toward making his point in conversation. In his V.A. bed, though, he seemed uninterested in conversation. We sat in a lot of silence.
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One day, two weeks before he passed, I asked my grandfather about the blue law cases to jump-start a conversation.
He looked at me for a few seconds and then said, “Clay and his damn pantyhose.”
I knew nothing about the case then and figured my grandfather was confused. Of course, later I discovered he was referring to Clay Ewing, the mayor, and one of the items police had bought from a merchant.
Using my phone I searched the Internet and found, to my surprise, a 1973 newspaper story that mentioned the case. I read a sentence aloud: “City judge Luke Schissel said Friday the state blue law…defies reason, is vague and discriminatory, and unconstitutional.”
When I looked up he was smiling at me. “What else did you say?” I said. “There had to be more to it.”
He turned his head away, kept smiling, and said, “That’s pretty much it.”
