Thomas Pickens Brady

Thomas Pickens Brady (August 6, 1903 – January 31, 1973) was a Mississippi jurist and a segregationist leader during the Civil Rights Era. A graduate of Lawrenceville School (Class of 1923) and Yale University (Class of 1927), Brady rose to national prominence through his strident discourse against civil rights and integration. In 1965, Time Magazine called Brady "the philosopher of Mississippi's racist white Citizens' Councils." On October 28, 1954 while a Mississippi Circuit Court Judge he delivered an address entitled 'Black Monday',[1] which he later published in an eponymously-titled book.[2]

In Black Monday Brady opines on the sanctity of Southern white women ("[t]he loveliest and the purest of God's creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl") and the bestiality of Blacks: "You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him, and teach him to use a knife and fork, but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development, if ever, before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy. Likewise the social, political, economical, and religious preferences of the negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach. This is not stated to ridicule or abuse the negro. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the caterpillar or the cockroach. It is merely a matter of taste. A cockroach or caterpillar remains proper food for a chimpanzee."[3]

In July 1963 he was appointed an Associate Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court to complete the unexpired term of Justice R. Olney Arrington.[4] He was active in the state's Democratic Party,[5] served as a Democratic National Committeeman from 1960 to 1964, and advocated disbanding the public schools in order to sidestep rulings requiring integration.

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