SUIT AGAINST NEGRO

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27909, 5 March 1956, Page 11

SUIT AGAINST NEGRO

Damages Claim In Alabama (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) BIRMINGHAM (Alabama), March 2. Suits asking 4 000,000 dollars damages from Autherine Lucy, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and four other Negroes, were filed today by four white men who alleged they had been falsely accused of participation in mob action. The suits were based on a petition filed here on February 9 by Miss Lucy, first Negro student of the allwhite University of Alabama. In it she named the four men as members of rioting throngs which drove her from the school on February 6.

The suits asked 1.000.000 dollars each for Earl and Ed Watts. Kenneth Thompson and R. E. Chambliss. Their names were dropped from Miss Lucy’s petition when it was heard on February 29. Chambliss is a lorry driver in Birmingham. The three other men were listed as construction workers in Tuscaloosa.

Miss Lucy’s lawyer, Mr Thurgood Marshall, special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, said that the suit against Miss Lucy, the N.A.A.C.P., himself and three other Negroes, “appears to be either a counter-attack to escape prosecution or cheap publicity.”

Miss Lucy was “permanently expelled” from the school on the night of February 29 as a disciplinary measure by the University Board of Trustees.

That action was taken because, the trustees said, the Negro student had made the “outrageous” charges that school officials conspired with the mob in order to drive her from the school. Also named as defendants in the suits were Mrs Pollie Ann Hudson, who tried unsuccessfully to enter the university with Miss Lucy, Mr Marshall, Mr Arthur D. Shores, Birmingham N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, and Mrs Constance Baker Motley, an N.A.A.C.P. lawyer. The suit contended that all the defendants conspired to bring “maliciously and without probable cause, singly and in concert” the false charges.