After not receiving a satisfactory response, a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meeting at the First Baptist Church had several hundred Black residents vote to place a boycott on white merchants in the area.

In April 1968, during the unrest following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., two Port Gibson police officers shot and killed a young Black man, Roosevelt Jackson.

[3] On April 19, 1968, the field secretary of the NAACP for Mississippi, Charles Evers, led a march to the Claiborne County courthouse and demanded for the entire Port Jefferson police force to be discharged.

[9] The decision of the Supreme Court was announced the same day by Thomas I. Atkins to the 3,000 delegates who had gathered for the NAACP's 73rd national convention in Boston.

As delegates sang, 'We shall not be moved,' Mississippi members paraded through the aisles and then to the stage, holding high a signpost bearing the name of their state.

'When you have done your best, there is a God who will do the rest,' said Benjamin L. Hooks, the executive director of the association, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization.The case was cited by the dissent in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010) in which Justice Stevens, the only remaining member of the Court from Claiborne Hardware, joined the majority.