Civil Rights Prospects-Three Articles
PERLMUTTER, WILLIAM M. MCCORD / MELVIN WULF / NATHAN
Civil Rights Prospects-Three Articles The View from Mississippi By William M. McCord " How much is a dollar?" a Negro boy asked me one night last June. "What all can you buy with it?" We sat on...
...John M. Wisdom and Richard T. Rives regularly uphold the rights of Negroes in civil rights cases, and Judge Griffin B. Bell generally goes along...
...Judge Clayton has been something of an enigma, particularly since the vacancies developed on the Court of Appeals...
...In the south, the civil rights Negro is more self-consciously Negro than in the North...
...I have in mind those men who are forever forecasting violence in the ghetto's streets unless this or that needed reform is made...
...After all, roaches and rats are somewhat more elusive enemies than chain store lunch counters or Jim Crow laws...
...The agenda rolled on without further discussion of the story...
...Of course, not all of their listeners or readers were...
...told me he no longer dares took to the future...
...It was followed by silence...
...The bus in Alabama, the beach in Florida, the lunch counter in Georgia- they are all battles won...
...If the threat of Negro disorders justifies the assignment of Negro qua Negro police to the colored neighborhood, isn't there logic in Southern insistence that violence will result if Negro policemen or Negro teachers are assigned to white areas...
...4. Young Negro leaders increasingly discuss another alternative : the launching of armed guerilla warfare...
...Still, I did keep the diary...
...Yet of the five others, all Negroes, two men, their bodies severed in half...
...The rise in the North of the Black Nationalists is an inverse, perhaps perverse, evidence of it...
...a loyal servant of the Confederacy, and the recent retirement of Judge Joseph Hutcheson of Texas...
...For instance, in the South...
...The first-generation American wants to walk down Fifth Avenue and to be accepted as "belonging" there...
...Then he explained that the Unity Committee consisted of the traditional civil rights agencies, church groups...
...In the South the problem has been here a lunch counter, there a beach, the local bus and where to sit in it, or possibly passage of an equality law or the judicial scuttling of Jim Crow...
...But actually, he says more...
...When they made the prediction often enough, it fulfilled itself...
...Only here, Negro police officers were transferred out of white precincts and assigned to Harlem...
...The tension in the courtroom was palpable as I took my seat...
...It's education: Negro ghetto kids are comparatively unlearned and the ghetto's adults are living proof of it...
...and between citizens and their government...
...The issue is particularly important now because of two vacancies to be filled in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has appellate jurisdiction over Florida...
...If, because he actually reflects Southern mores, or because he is too insecure to do otherwise, he persists in running a segregated operation, there are Negroes who will draw conclusions-generalized and stereotypical-about "selfish Jews...
...But it's different in the North...
...He suggested that the cause of racial justice is bi-racial and that it deserves-even if only as a matter of sound tactics-to be projected accordingly...
...But the appointment of a Circuit judge who has no doubts about the supremacy of the Federal Constitution and its condemnation of racial segregation and discrimination would further assure enforcement of the law...
...The balance is the other way in the South...
...The last was, admittedly, a pitifully small increase: Only 6.7 per cent of eligible Mississippi Negroes have won the franchise, and only about half as many Negroes are registered today as were in 1875...
...This, in brief, has been the rationale civil rights organizations have been pursuing while urging police departments to be color blind...
...Sadly, however, when the bigot holds forth, too often they also say nothing or laugh nervously...
...The opinion concludes with these words: "We recognize that in some Counties compliance with these constitutional requirements may present difficulties, but they must be surmounted if the criminal laws are to be effectively administered...
...Government agencies could ensure that programs of rural aid and manpower retraining would be administered impartially by agents sent directly from Washington and subject only to Federal direction...
...I can give one concrete example of what I mean from my own experience...
...In the racial revolution now afoot, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit plays a crucial role...
...It bespeaks the nation's philosophy that grave disputes shall not be left to home-made remedies which too frequently deteriorate into violence...
...And that was it...
...In Alabama, he says, it's the Negro...
...someone jumped up and shouted...
...We sat on the front lawn in front of his house in Jackson, talking of all those topics which intrigue little boys...
...Even James Silver, disheartened and persecuted...
...It seems to me that if this kind of sauce is good for the Northern goose, then the Southern gander has himself a case...
...In a very real sense the Northern Negro is more defiantly Negro...
...His record during the past year has not measurably improved...
...It must be very wearing...
...Th'as right," his five-year-old sister added, "but now you be sure, boy, not to get 'em from a white man in a truck...
...Twenty ice cream cones," I said...
...But soon as be came in...
...When flagrant abuses occurred- a church-burning in Natchez, a bombing in McComb, a cross-burning in Jackson- Negroes would fire back at their attackers...
...Something else troubles me about that meeting...
...It took him more than a year, after being instructed by the Supreme Court, to issue an order forbidding segregation in the railroad and bus facilities in Jackson, a decision dictated by a doctrine of constitutional law that is two decades old...
...In Harlem, hatred of "Whitey" is a broad and deep running river...
...For eight years I had been director of a white...
...COFO "freedom schools" were set up and continue to teach 2,000 students in 21 communities...
...The alternative...
...In the same vein, it's high time some civil rights leaders hereabouts let up on the "dire consequences" theme...
...James Baldwin has observed that every society needs its hate symbol...
...Victory is in the eyes of the beholder...
...You got to buy your ice cream only from a brown man...
...It has only embattled Negro tacticians...
...As a practical matter, what is required is that the county officials must see to it that jurors are in fact and in good faith selected without regard to race...
...And, at least on the emotional level...
...Augustine, disinclined to stand up and eyeball it with a loud mouth...
...Frequently, the forecasters were reputable types...
...After the new Civil Rights Act was passed, segregation in the larger towns eased...
...We want to help, he said, want so much to help, but somehow feel that of late the civil rights movement itself has become segregated, become, as it were, a black movement...
...the white man's power structure, the white man's liberal enclaves...
...The rationale...
...This terror continues with the active collaboration of the Mississippi police and courts, in a systematic fashion so foreign to our nation that few Americans can fully under stand its nature...
...And in September he wrote a sensible opinion discharging Chief U.S...
...In fact, the concern of most of them is to try to channel what remains of 1964's enthusiasm into a realistic program...
...I came to New York City to do battle with the dragons hereabouts...
...It should be Negro-led, he agreed, but we ask that you include in your planning such talents as we may have...
...As far as I know, it was only the second time in this century that the Mississippi Supreme Court has reversed on those grounds...
...In Harlem, the Jew...
...Cause that man in the white truck, he throws bombs on you...
...I have no doubt the court was offended hearing it from my lips, though I hoped that at least part of the message would get through...
...COFO'S leaders, in contrast, refused to integrate any public accommodations : They believe that a legal approach is superficial, and will not tip the balance of power in the state...
...I think the incident explains why many of us participated in the 1964 invasion of Mississippi-to release Negro children from the fear that ice cream trucks carry bombs...
...But the third-generation fellow comfortably walks the Avenue not giving a thought to nor caring a whit about who owns it' And he, of course, is the one who has made it, Hopefully, here in the racially turbulent North, the third generation of Negroes is in the making...
...Let me tell you what happened last night," he began, "at a meeting of our Unity Committee in Harlem...
...While the record was checkered, the civil rights movement in Mississippi registered some important advances during 1964: Token integration of public schools and places of accommodations was achieved...
...A like-mind ed group of state legislators scuttled a law designed to close the public schools by adding cleverly worded but intentionally unconstitutional amendments to the measure...
...And shall we, in order to counteract these threatened disorders, maintain white police, white teachers, and white everybodies, in Southern white communities...
...black nationalists, Muslims, and a variety of other ghetto groups...
...and 2,150 Negroes registered to vote...
...Comes the anti-white rioting and they're the handy dolls...
...Did he get out...
...Case after case...
...It's more civilized than using live Jews...
...Near the end of the argument I said to the court that a failure to condemn the practice, and a refusal to insist on the selection of jurors without discrimination, would soon result in the disintegration of the criminal law in the state because the Federal courts will invariably reverse convictions secured through juries from which Negroes are excluded...
...Now, sitting between two summers, what can be learned from the one just passed as plans are being made for the one soon to come...
...That was an educational meeting...
...COFO' S professional workers and some 200 volunteers carry out a diverse program, often with an air of conspiracy (code names are used, periodic spy warnings are issued, and an elaborate headquarters communications system traces the movements of each COFO agent in the state ) . COFO envisages building community centers, maintaining freedom schools, launching programs of health education, " infiltrating" the white community, providing legal services, and organizing Freedom Democratic party cells...
...Notes from the North By Nathan Perlmutter What follows are entries from a diary, my diary...
...New to the group...
...recalcitrant Federal judges sit in the other Southern states as well...
...The price they paid , however, was high...
...If effective, such a pro gram might indeed influence the state's economic elite...
...Judge Warren Jones is inconsistent, as was Judge Hutcheson, and Judge Walter Gewin seems to be competing for Judge Cameron's reputation as the spokesman of the Old Confederacy...
...any boycott would dam age the Negro at least as much as it would hurt the white plantation owner...
...However, the visible white man, the one on the premises, is the policeman and the Jewish merchant...
...It will not accord with the laws of nature or history to brand colored people a race of cowards," he told Congress, in arguing for Federal supervision of state elect ion s. " I ask Senators to believe that no consideration of fear or personal danger has kept us quiet and forebearing under the provocations and wrongs th at have so thoroughly tried our souls.' Negroes have avoided violent response to their degraded station in life, Bruce continued, "only because we determined to wait until such time as an appeal to the good sense and justice of the American people could be mad e." A Crucial Court By Melvin Wulf Few would any longer deny that serious deficiencies within the Federal judiciary reinforce the perfunctory kind of justice Southern state courts regularly dispense where civil rights are concerned...
...All clearly seemed to be victims of racially-connected incidents...
...Get him out of here!' " That was the story...
...An excellent article in the November Yale Law Journal, on the records of judges under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit, notes that in his first two years on the bench Cox had only one civil rights decision affirmed...
...What bothers me is not so much that the white man, for no other reason than his color...
...But I think it does establish that if lawyers tell the Mississippi Supreme Court what the law indisputably says, without apology, some progress will become visible...
...The NAACP will continue to emphasize voter registration, despite the obstacles, and will press for th e full enforcement of Federal law...
...The keeping of diaries is best suited to the young, or at least the innocent, and after 16 years in the civil rights field I am without either qualification...
...It would have been infinitely more effective had the Mississippi Supreme Court been confronted with the same truth by leading members of the Mississippi bar rather than by a New York lawyer...
...Prissy word that, but that's what it was, unwholesome...
...Registration and voting laws should be fairly and impartially administered for all...
...Along Jackson's appropriately named Lynch Street (where the headquarters of civil rights organizations cluster) , Negro leaders have been debating four strategies for action in the future . 1. COFO'S leaders, who are typically "men of the Left," hop e to reform the fundamental social conditions which have perpetuated white domination . "This movement is pointed not toward the downtown whites " Bob Moses has said, " but really toward the organization of a new Negro society...
...They will understand the ghetto and it them...
...After a brief pause, a Negro clergyman responded...
...On December 7 I argued an appeal before the Mississippi Supreme Court on behalf of a Negro who was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted rape in a rural part of the state...
...Since Mississippi ran ks first in those states receiving Federal aid ( in ratio to its low contribution to the national tax coffer s) , Washington could also use these funds to manipulate state officials...
...The Mississippi whites would retaliate with their usual lack of mercy, and the rest of America would demand that " order," perhaps based on an even more unfair status quo than currently exists...
...Their leaders, like Medford Evans of the White Citizens Council...
...It's bad for the morale of the officer involved, making him feel less than a full-fledged member of the force...
...In short, the problems in the North are basically economic, and because economics is infinitely more complex a battlefield than civil rights, the North has produced no victorious Martin Luther Kings...
...The Negro leadership, moreover, is itself badly split : Young Negro es see Martin Luther King as trying to "dominate" their movement, and derisively call him "de Lawd...
...If there is unanimous agreement on anything among Mississippi's civil rights workers , it is th at the movement alone can not solve the state's racial problem . Despite Washington 's disclaimers...
...This is especially true in Mississippi, but the problem is not confined to that state alone...
...Its opinion, in singular terms, warned the lower Mississippi courts that time had run out on the practice of excluding Negroes from jury service...
...Perhaps because in confrontation with the vivid, livid, civil rights summer of 1964 all of us, professionals included, were young in the sense of being without matching experience...
...Lastly, it's good for whites to see Negro policemen in their precincts...
...Though the Justice Department had little success with its voting suits in Clayton's court before last spring, he handed down a satisfactory decision in June in a case from Tallahatchie county...
...Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas...
...North and South, white and black, somehow or another, the Jew's in the middle...
...But I keep thinking that the people of the South, by and large, are also not bigots...
...In addition, various politicians, although publicly proclaiming fervent segregationist principle s, have moved behind the scenes to persuade businessmen to obey the new law...
...All of these problems have been vulnerable to lawyers, to passive resistance, or to negotiators...
...The tone of the opinion is interesting' for it seems to indicate that resistance to change, at least as far as fair administration of the criminal law is concerned, can no longer be tolerated...
...This holds for the low-brow rioter who in running wild fulfills the stereotype of Negroes and doesn't give a damn, and it includes the middle-brow Negro who would send the liberal white packing and go the revolution alone -a revolution Made in Harlem By Negroes...
...The United States Constitution does not require proportional representation of the races on a jury, or even that members of a particular race must be on a particular jury...
...It's housing: If the density of population in some of Harlem's streets were carried over into New York City, every man, woman and child living in these United States would be packed into three of the city's five boroughs...
...In fact, civil rights legislation is old hat up here...
...And less than two weeks ago the Mississippi Economic Council, in its Dow-famous pronouncement , declared that "Order and respect for the law must be maintained...
...Governor Barnett's and Governor Wallace's were also correct...
...When the mood hits us, out with the pins...
...Businessmen in Jackson, operating through the Chamber of Commerce, also persuaded merchants to avoid violence when the Civil Rights Bill was enacted...
...More conscious of his Negro-ness because he is less secure in it, he tries to "think white" when relating to whites...
...In any event, as I type in winter what I scribbled in summer, I find here and there a change I might make...
...The vacancies were caused by the death last April of Judge Ben Cameron of Mississippi...
...was ordered to leave, or even that there was no one there to defend his presence...
...Nevertheless, the symbolic effect of each new Negro registration reverberated in the Negro community...
...It must be strengthened by the appointment of judges who respect the law, not diluted by the appointment of any who are uncertain that the United States is a nation of free men...
...If a single member of the Mississippi bar who lives and practices there possesses those attributes he will be extremely difficult to find, for hardly one can be heard to state publicly the truth about Mississippi justice...
...Negro policemen will serve as a sedative to the restless natives...
...Of the seven judges who presently sit on the Fifth Circuit, Judges Elbert Tuttle, John R. Brown...
...In that case, Judge Cameron's replacement becomes crucial, and as his seat is considered to belong traditionally to Mississippi, the prospects of anyone but a segregationist being appointed are slim indeed...
...confidently advise that if the nation's laws require race mixture, " then the law be damned...
...What bothers me is that at the meeting of civil rights workers where this story was told, no one deplored the story, or took issue with it as a fitting response to B's plea...
...It was an issue that could be debatable only in the Mississippi Supreme Court because the uncontested evidence showed that for the past 101 years, in a county with 8,069 Negroes, only eight were summoned for jury service and only a single one had actually sat on a jury...
...This, in turn, supports my thesis that the white members of the Mississippi bar are not yet competent to occupy the Federal bench, for if they were committed to encouraging enforcement of Federal constitutional law, this kind of decision by their Supreme Court would hardly be newsworthy...
...But supporting them now were middle-class housewives in Jackson, Oxford, Moss Point, Greenville and Tupelo, who organized "Mississippians for Public Education," and lobbied for keeping the schools open even if they had to be integrated...
...be restored...
...We are ready for them . We can blast them out of here," one leader in Rankin told me, as we sat in a darkened room which resembled a blockhouse and bristled with guns...
...COF O' S Bob Moses, a humble and usually pragmatic man, speaks of Negroes se-ceeding from Mississippi, creating a new nation, and requesting diplomatic recognition from the capita ls of the world...
...Brave white dissenters, like Professor James Silver, continued to take the lead...
...Shortly before the meeting got under way," he continued, "one of our people walked in with a white man...
...They have in common infinitely better manners than Judge Cox, though Mize is no less rigidly against civil rights than his colleague...
...It's bad for the ghetto inmate who senses that the police are a white corps and its Negroes a kind of auxiliary, doing watchman duty "among their own...
...When finally the lunch counter was desegregated, you could taste the victory in that hamburger and you were grateful to Reverend King and you weren't as bitter at "downtown" as you were the day before...
...Yet COFO hopes also, unrealistically, for an alliance with poor whites...
...Enhances the Negro image among whites...
...A Federal judge in the South must he free of local cant and possess a tough-minded independence that enables him to resist the forces of local prejudice...
...was the answer...
...It theorizes that rural white "crackers" can give up racism, the source of their precious little dignity , and rally to the slogan, "Race has made us poor...
...That was the Negro clergyman's response to B's statement...
...Hear tell at meetings of White Citizens Councils, and desegregation is a "Jew-Communist plot...
...I suspect that in some measure this accounts for the riots having all taken place in the North...
...The Fifth Circuit has played a remarkable part in securing compliance with the Constitution in the South...
...Consequently his tactics, the tactics of the underdog, are purposefully designed to be acceptable to the liberal Southern white...
...In Miami, for instance, civil rights forces recently scored a modest victory when Negro police officers were transferred out of the Negro ghetto and assigned to a white precinct...
...Second , vigilante groups would administer justice to those whites who have so easily escaped punishment by Mississippi's corrupted courts...
...In the North, the contrary...
...The resultant increased political awareness, for example, enabled a handful of us working out of Jackson to somehow garner 60,000 members for the new Freedom Democratic party between June and September...
...His second-generation son wants to walk the Avenue with the ease of a man who owns it...
...The white moderates, the COFO activists...
...The NAACP's strategy has this obvious flaw : It is an act of braver v at present for a Mississippi Negro to vote...
...There have been no battle victories here the kind you can taste or feel...
...The meeting bothered me...
...Or, in my silence was I like the Negro clergyman himself the night before, or like the people of St...
...There is no legal requirement that Cameron's place be held by a Mississippian...
...Of course, the "movement," as civil rights workers refer to the activity of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and the NAACP, had more concrete aims, which inc1uded registering a mass of Negro voters, mobilizing rural Negroes, and penetrating the segregation system...
...MARTIN LUTHER KING wouldn't have made it in the North...
...were dredged out of the Mississippi River ; a 16-year-old boy was found hanging from a tree...
...And each victory brought to the Southern leadership a closer and more disciplined following...
...Federal marshals could patrol every town, invoking Reconstruction laws to control the more diseased elements in Mississippi...
...and the thousands of Negroes who worked for civil rights can take pride in their accomplishments...
...Heads the anti-Semite wins, tails, the Jew loses...
...This single opinion does not proclaim by any means the finish of discrimination against Negroes in the selection of juries in Mississippi, nor do I suggest that it qualifies any member of the Mississippi Supreme Court for elevation to the Fifth Circuit...
...If he does break Main Street ranks and is the first to desegregate his department store lunch counter, he "proves" what the Klan, the White Citizens Councils, and the radicals of the Right have been saying all along...
...In area s where anarchy prevail s. such as McComb, it could act under Section 10 of the Federal code to send in troop s. These step s would not create a new social order in Mississippi , but they would establish a rule of law...
...I didn't used to think so, but after several months of residence here I have the feeling that an epidemic of laryngitis, localized among several civil rights personalities, would do the cause good...
...The purpose of the meeting was to consider "cooling it" on the riot-torn streets, and to present to the Mayor a constructive bill of particulars for alleviating discontent throughout Harlem...
...At one point, after a number of Negroes had had their say, B, a long-time white civil rights worker, had his...
...Interestingly, the Northern proximity between black and white has lessened the Negro's fear of the white man while sharpening the white man's fear of the Negro...
...It's winter now and summer's bound to return and then it may all need saying again...
...Support of public education must be maintained and strengthened...
...Third, a campaign of economic sabotage would hit those plantations and businesses whose owners have most blatantly maltreated Negroes...
...The Freedom Democratic party has no place on the ballot...
...Mississippi's 950.000 Negroes are confront ed with open disregard for elementary legal procedures and protections...
...Indeed, one of the most surprising results of the summer was the emergence of white moderate groups, acting in a concerted and largely effective fashion to aid the Negro cause...
...liberal civil rights organization in Miami...
...But I won't...
...Since the Court of Appeals sits in panels of three, there are necessarily variations in their composition...
...And at seances of more than a few radical Right organizations in Dixie, "Federal meddling" is all the fault of the "Internationalist Zionist cabal...
...I have heard a few young lawyers speak the truth privately, but they dare not do so publicly...
...We ought to backslide to our primitive forebears and start fashioning anew little dolls of our scapegoats...
...The most persistent offender has been Judge Harold Cox, one of the two judges in the Southern District of Mississippi (and President Kennedy's first judicial appointment...
...Without them he is powerless, having as yet no independent Negro political power such as his brother wields in the North...
...Each victory served as a safety valve for built-up tensions, for accumulated hate...
...It was unwholesome...
...Was it because I was new here that I didn't backstop my own question...
...The principal issue in the case was whether Negroes had been systematically excluded from service on the juries in the county of conviction...
...These gains were achieved against a background of general progress...
...So to avoid continued disorders contingents of integrated Negro officers are resegregated into segregated Harlem...
...And apparently it did, for on January 25 the court unanimously reversed the convictions...
...In the North, the Negro is increasingly less self-consciously a Negro...
...Like the Warsaw up rising or the Hungarian Revolt, too, such a battle would be doomed from its inception...
...Many Negro leaders, however, doubt such projects can radically reorganize a society that has for so long been dominated-- economically, politically and legally-by white men...
...It's jobs: I've never seen as many grown men standing around on street corners and stoops as in Harlem at midday, while the rest of New York's men are at work...
...2. Aaron Henry (a brave politician, whose home and store have been bombed) leads a group largely drawn from NAACP ranks which takes a political and legal approach aimed at more immediate, if limited, gains than COFO advocate s. Men like Charles Ever s. brother of the late Medgar Evers and now head of the state NAACP, participated actively last summer in testing the new Civil Right s law...
...But guerrilla warfare of this kind would frighten Northern liberals, alienate Southern moderates, intensify the "backlash" in the nation, and outrage conservative Americans...
...Last spring, in the course of a Justice Department voter-discrimination suit, Judge Cox said from the bench, "I am not interested in whether the registrar is going to give a registration test to a bunch of niggers on a voting drive...
...A warning system effectively kept out the cross burners who had previously plague d the community...
...Civil rights workers, people from race relations departments of churches, and so on, to discuss the riots and what to do about correcting the causes...
...they get the pins...
...The purpose of courts of law in a civilized society is to afford a reliable and even-handed forum for resolving disputes between citizens...
...In retrospect, this hardly seems reason for nursing a diary...
...If armed resistance did begin, it would follow a plan which is, at the moment, discussed only in hushed term s. First , Negroes would defend their homes...
...The Federal courts must have no part in denying to any citizen the rights guaranteed by our Constitution-the right to vote, the right to free access to public accommodations, the right to unsegregated public facilities, the right to an unsegregated education, and the right to seek and hold jobs without discrimination because of race...
...Racist organizations, meanwhile, are flourishing as never before...
...The problem here isn't even a civil rights problem...
...I hesitantly ventured the obvious question...
...I asked...
...But since Mississippi's major products are agricultural, and since 70 per cent of the state's Neg roe s work in rural occupations...
...The FDP, in turn, won a pledge that future national Democratic Conventions would recognize only integrated delegations...
...His only leverage is the white man's courts...
...Why not...
...So you came North, and the summer was long and hot, and nowhere was it longer and hotter than in the small, Jewish-owned stores in the rioting Negro ghettoes...
...I had almost completed what I was saying when one of the judges interrupted and said, "I don't think we need a moral comment from you...
...a COFO project leader was killed when his car rammed into another one on a deserted country road ; and the fifth succumbed to "self-inflicted" shotgun wounds...
...the feeling is strong that effective Federal act ion can be taken : Referees could watch each Registrar 's office and polling booth...
...Thus, although recent events constitute a great step forward -one which cynics now discount too easily- most civil rights workers agree that the prospects for further constructive action are bleak...
...When, as civil rights workers III the South, we'd take to the hustings and plead for "law and order" we were implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, deploring white extremists...
...At the Klan fish-fry, it's accepted as gospel that the Jew is "behind the nigger...
...Talk of violent resistance ca n be heard everywhere in the state, but particularly among the Negro "yeomanry" who farm in the hill areas . In Rank in county, as an illustration, I saw a defense unit of Negro farms, protected by electrified barbed wire and fully armed men...
...Now, when we speak of "law and order" here in the North, we're implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, deploring Negro extremists...
...it has reversed flagrantly incorrect District Court decisions, admonished District judges to end their eternal delay in deciding the simplest issues, and entered orders directing District Courts to take specified action in pending cases which judges in other circumstances would perform as a matter of course...
...Purposefully posing asa white man, in both tactical as well as conversational language, he offers himself up, in his very person, as proof that but for color we are indeed, all of us, the same...
...With that, she snuggled closer, somehow ignoring my own white skin...
...What do you think...
...To be sure, these civil rights people are not themselves black nationalists...
...The self-conscious Southern Negro and the assertive Northern Negro are reminiscent of the story about first- and second-generation Americans...
...Hatred for the white officer-an outsider-is running high...
...Yet realistically, perhaps the most we can anticipate is another judge as inconsistent as Hutcheson...
...The Southern self-conscious Negro even makes the small talk of white men when planning civil rights actions with them-no revealing expressions like "cool," "man," and "1 dig...
...He's okay, He's been up front with us and has proven himself...
...As often as not, he's a Main Street merchant...
...Technically, Thur-good Marshall, who sits on the Federal Court of Appeals in New York, could be appointed-just as J. Skelly Wright, a fine judge from the District Court in New Orleans, was appointed to the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia...
...The Yale article also examined the Fifth Circuit's response to the obstructive tactics of District judges...
...In New York City, following this summer's riots, civil rights forces also scored a modest victory...
...But Negro leaders within the state have not allowed their own disunity nor the winter's forced retreats to produce total despair...
...Perhaps it was less complicated an act, like a letter to the self back home...
...Of course, the Jew plays a not unsimilar, hapless role in many Southern communities...
...He asked how we, the white people present, could be of help to the Negro on the front line...
...It is also more likely than COFO to make alliances with the white moderate middle- class, that miniscule but only possible Source of white political support...
...More rioting...
...In 1876, Mississippi 's Negro statesman, Senator B. K. Bruce, issued a warning which should be taken even more seriously today...
...Then come the riots, and Northern civil rights organizations press successfully for wholesale transfers of Negro policemen into Harlem...
...The Negro case is made in the white man's own language-the language of selective Christianity and of applied law...
...Though the present 4-1-2 balance generally insures a just decision in civil rights cases, the addition of segregationists to the Court would reduce that assurance to an extent whose exact degree must be left to the mathematicians...
...Justice Department lawyers who have tried voting suits before him reported that Clayton runs a very stern court, but that he is not given to visible prejudice...
...No problem at the lunch counters, nor for that matter, at 21 or Toots Shor's, No problem either in transportation or with laws...
...Eight men died ; many were brutally attacked...
...Newspapers gave greatest prominence to the murdered trio in Philadelphia- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner...
...He has to...
...When bigots follow this advice, local courts do not prosecute...
...If they Jet off any more murderers like Beckwith ," he said, " I don 't know how long the people will keep under control...
...A number of us had met following the days of Harlem rioting...
...The fact that their prognoses have been correct is not material...
...Don't restrict colored policemen to colored neighborhoods, the argument used to run...
...Marshall James McShane from criminal charges which Mississippi had filed as a result of the insurrection at Ole Miss...
...The problem, be it in Birmingham or in Harlem, is where does the prediction of violence end, and the recommendation of violence begin...
...Roy Wilkins of the NAACP publicly blasts the COFO "firebrands...
...I can think of several Southern politicians who predicted violence there unless the courts ruled favorably to the South, or unless Negroes let up on their demands...
...Theoretically, there need not be any great problem about choosing a replacement for Judge Hutcheson, since Texas contains an ample supply of liberals qualified for the seat...
...King has advocated a national economic boycott of Mississippi 's products...
...In the absence of victories, the disillusioned Northern Negro grew restive, alienated from leaders who don't seem to "deliver...
...White moderates have in large measure returned to their usual protective shells since the summer...
...One cannot realistically demand such acts of most human being s, and it seems unlikely th at the usual methods of "getting out the vote" will soon create a really influential Negro pressure group in Mississippi 3. Martin Luther King and some Mississippi Negroes have lost faith in strictly political measures...
...No morale problems on winning teams...
...This time there was laughter, nervous, I hoped...
...Last June, as New York's long summer was beginning to percolate, my family and I moved north from Florida...
...He don't throw no bombs...
...Now, this white man has been known to many of us for a long time...
...The other two District judges in Mississippi are John Mize, who shares the Southern District with Cox, and Claude F Clayton, the lone Northern District judge...
...But the confluence of tradition and Senator Eastland's chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, plus the custom of Senatorial courtesy where Federal judgeships are involved- a tradition cherished equally by Senator Douglas of Illinois and Senator Eastland-make the problem rather more formidable than it first appears, If the records of the three present Mississippi District judges do not commend them for appointment, it will be equally unrewarding to search among the members of the Mississippi bar...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 4
