THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Struggle for Civil Rights World headlines were focused on two parallel events in the United States during the past...
...f In Lowndes County, Alabama, Negro retail merchants who tried to register were refused service and deliveries by white wholesalers...
...A minister's wife lost her county school teaching job because she stressed voting and other constitutional rights in her course in civics...
...The Commission found unanimously—all three Southerners concurring—that "many Americans, even today, are denied the franchise because of race [in direct violation of the Constitution...
...The Commission documented its conclusions with a devastating array of uncontested facts, some of which are these: f In fourteen Mississippi counties with a total 1950 population of about 230,000, of whom 109,000 were Negroes, there was not a single Negro registered...
...Three years ago Congress passed the first civil rights law of any consequence in eighty-two years...
...The county has 15,000 Negroes but not a single Negro voter...
...There have been some hopeful developments...
...The result is an ever-tightening ring of resistance against reform...
...They are denied credit...
...In Leflore County, Mississippi, when a Negro veteran tried to register, the clerk had him write his name and address on a piece of paper...
...f Testimony before the Civil Rights Commission revealed that Negroes who try to register in Fayette County, Tennessee, are soon discharged from their jobs and ordered out of their rented homes...
...Some of the protesting groups gathered first at their neighborhood churches, participated in prayer meetings, and then moved on to fight for freedom with Bibles in their hands and hymns in their hearts...
...In some communities, the resistance movement has tentatively invoked the first forms of economic boycott, which could become a deadly instrument of reprisal against many of the merchants in the South...
...He did not, for fear of reprisals...
...The Progressive is always happy when it is able to report progress, however modest, in the field of desegregation, and it does so again, in surveying a few pockets of school integration, in the "Notes in the News" department in this issue...
...This is accomplished through the creation of local impediments, administrative obstacles, and positive discouragement engendered by fears of economic reprisal and physical harm...
...In Macon County, Alabama, William P. Mitchell, chairman of the Tuskegee Civic Association, was required to make three visits to the board of registrars, two appearances before a federal trial court, two appeals to the fifth circuit court, and one petition to the United States Supreme Court, before being admitted as a registered voter...
...Her offense was that she had misstated her age by one day...
...it merely ceased to function publicly for another eight months...
...In four parishes of Louisiana with an adult Negro population of 20,000 there were no Negro voters...
...It is clear from their conduct in almost every city where the technique has been tried that these Negro youths are prepared to face abuse, imprisonment, reprisals, and injury to express their peaceful protest against racial discrimination...
...The movement began without fanfare in Greensboro, North Carolina, where a group of colored students unsuccessfully sought service at the lunch counter of a variety store...
...The force for reform generated by the militant, yet non-violent Negro students, represents far more than a collection of daily headlines...
...f Florida has a better record of allowing Negroes to vote than many of her neighbors, but the Commission found that although nearly 11,000 Negroes of voting age live in Gadsen County, only six were registered...
...They accused him of trying to stir up trouble, warned him not to make another attempt...
...Ethel A. Smith, a Negro teacher...
...H In three counties of Florida with 3,000 voters of Negro age, there were no Negro voters...
...She wrote: "I am now sixty-nine years, eight months, ten days old...
...It's my duty," the veteran replied...
...Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi dismissed the report as "mutterings from Moscow...
...There are countless white Southerners, in a variety of fields, who have counseled a course of lawful desegregation, but all too often their affirmative voices are unheard in the clamor of Southern politicians raised against any basic improvement, however moderate...
...The deeper meaning of the sit-in demonstrations, the Council reported, "is to show that segregation cannot be maintained in the South, short of continuous coercion and the intolerable social order that would result...
...That act created a Civil Rights Commission with modest authority to investigate and act on the denial of voting rights to qualified citizens...
...Their wages are garnisheed...
...f A not untypical case in Washington Parish, Louisiana, involved Mrs...
...All this took three years...
...Scene one was the South, where a spreading wave of student sit-in demonstrations marked a determined drive by restive Negro youth to speed the process of racial integration...
...Their applications for GI loans are turned down...
...This is the kind of shabby opposition against which the forces for civil rights must contend...
...There are nearly 300 Negro teachers in the county but almost none registered...
...f Show yourself courteous and friendly at all times...
...But the board took no action on these applications...
...f In Haywood County, Tennessee, no Negro has been permitted to vote for fifty years despite the fact that Negroes own more land and pay more taxes than white persons in that county...
...The registration form required a careful statement of her age...
...A Negro minister who suggested from the pulpit that his congregation should register and vote was denied a bank loan...
...Congress was still locked in bitter debate when this issue of The Progressive went to press...
...They quietly refused to leave...
...Their efforts were characterized by a quiet persistence, simple dignity, nonviolence, courage, and religious fervor...
...f Don't hold...
...In a special report surveying the scope and significance of the snowballing sit-ins, the Southern Regional Council, distinguished for its thoughtful researches on race problems, concluded that the new movement demonstrates that the South "is in for a time of change, the terms of which cannot be dictated by white Southerners...
...Smith registered to vote...
...Again in 1956, when Negroes sought to register, the board became inoperative for another sixteen months...
...President Eisenhower appointed three distinguished Southerners to the six-man Commission—John Battle, former governor of Virginia...
...The Civil Rights Commission lists the following reasons why no Negro has even attempted to register in the county for several years: fear of physical harm, fear of economic pressure, threats to call loans, failure to grant loans, and fear of loss of jobs—especially among school teachers...
...It is this lack of creative white leadership in the South that tragically bars the way to basic reform...
...f In Mississippi's Forrest County, a pastor with two degrees from Columbia University was accused of being a Communist when he tried to register—solely because he admitted membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...She was really sixty-nine years, eight months, nine days old...
...After one such suit, in 1946, the board of registrars resigned and ceased to function for eighteen months...
...Robert Storey, dean of the Southern Methodist Law School, and Doyle Carlton, former governor of Florida...
...I know some who have applied thirty times and, to the best of my knowledge, we haven't had more than two Negroes qualify and receive their certificate of registration...
...Subsequently, a new board was formed, but its existence and location were concealed from Negro applicants for four months...
...The conduct of these Senators is emulated throughout the South by the army of little politicians who control the city halls and the county courthouses...
...The eighteen Southern Senators who conducted the shameful filibuster speak for the worst in the South on this issue, no matter how moderate or progressive some of them may be in other areas of political decision...
...Few issues confronting this session of Congress carry so great a challenge to advance our well-being at home and our stature abroad as the issue of civil rights...
...But the hopeful pickings are pitifully slim, and slimmest of all in the area most hotly debated in the current civil rights struggle in Congress...
...The whole world—a majority of whose inhabitants are colored—is watching the historic struggle for freedom within the nation that purports to lead the rest of the world in its struggle for freedom...
...They, and the three Northerners, including Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, conducted a painstaking survey of voting rights in areas of the South—often hampered by the relentless opposition of state and local authorities...
...Soon after he returned home two white men called to ask him why he had tried to register...
...Their passive, sit-in technique soon spread into more than a score of communities of a half-dozen states in the South...
...For this was essentially a youth movement, spontaneously formed, ably led, and shrewdly committed to that most powerful of weapons—Gandhian non-violence...
...In Wilcox County, Alabama, a witness testified that "over the past five years, we've had over 800 Negroes go to the board of registrars to get registered...
...In two counties of Alabama with an adult Negro population of 15,000 there were no Negro voters...
...There were disturbing signs that a weasling compromise might be in the making...
...The epidemic of student sit-ins marked a significant development in the long and bitter struggle of the American Negro to shed the cloak of second-class citizenship...
...On the date on which the location of the new board became publicly known, eighteen Negroes applied for registration...
...In the same county, Negroes have brought numerous court actions to achieve registration...
...One Negro citizen tried sixteen times—twice a year for eight years—to register, but he was unsuccessful...
...Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King...
...Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina branded the observations by Father Hesburgh as "Marxist philosophy," and Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia cried out with a straight face that the Commission's finding were "the antithesis of everything for which we Americans claim to stand...
...Remember love and non-violence, may God bless each of you...
...In six counties of Georgia with 3,000 Negroes of voting age there were no Negro voters...
...This is the kind of Southern leadership that held the United States Senate helpless for weeks as it dismissed the uncontested findings of a commission of distinguished Americans appointed by President Eisenhower as mutterings from Moscow, and resorted to the language of the gutter to vilify the United States Supreme Court...
...She was challenged and her name stricken from the voting register...
...f Don't block entrances to the stores and aisles...
...It would be nothing less than a bitter tragedy at home and a crushing setback in world opinion if Congress stops short of a measure which not only goes far toward enforcing basic voting rights for Negroes, but also fortifies Supreme Court decisions in other critical areas of racial discrimination, notably the field of education...
...Scene two was the United States Senate, where a raucous band of Southerners cynically tied that body in knots, resorted to foul language, and generally behaved, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, like "a small lunatic asylum" as it sought to smash every move to strengthen civil rights...
...Sit straight and always face the counter...
...The white leadership, the report emphasized, "has hardly yet begun to conceive the dimensions of change, or to say publicly that the white people must learn to live with change and to acknowledge that the present problem is to reconcile the Negroes of the South to their communities on terms of dignity...
...conversations with store floor workers...
...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Struggle for Civil Rights World headlines were focused on two parallel events in the United States during the past month...
...Estimates in many Southern cities place the proportion of Negro patronage in the five-and-ten-cent stores, which have been the principal targets of protest, at fifty per cent...
...Representative of the mood and spirit of many of the student sit-ins were these instructions given students participating in a demonstration in Nashville: f Don't strike back or curse back if abused...
...There was testimony that they are arrested by the police, and that severe fines are imposed upon them for minor charges...
...Although these and comparable findings were presented as undisputed evidence by even so conservative a Southerner as Virginia's former Governor Battle, Senate spokesmen for the South had the effrontery to characterize the report as a Soviet creation...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 4
