Candidates Seek Negro Vote In The South

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30529, 26 August 1964, Page 22

Candidates Seek Negro Vote In The South

fN.Z.P.A.-Keuter—Copyright? NEW YORK, August 25. While he awaits biff nomination President Johnson is already active in an effort to unify his party. This unification effort particularly includes an effort to bring the Deep South back into the family. The effort is going on in spite of the Atlantic City conflicts about seating the Alabama and Mississippi delegations.

One report goes as far as saying that the President is in indirect contact with his namesake in Mississippi, Governor Paul Johnson.

It isn’t suggested that the President’s efforts can do much about influencing voting in the South this autumn but it is believed his efforts could have considerable effect before the Presidential election four years from now. The South is definitely changing and this must be apparent to as acute an observer and enlightened southerner as Mr Johnson. The passage of the civil rights law has already brought changes and the process is continuing.

Mississippi provides a good deal of evidence. It has been a hard summer for that State. It has been a summer of crisis and, as one writer in the “New York Times” said recently, the Sttae will never again be the same. The State is no longer insulated and isolated from the Negro revolution. The influx of freedom workers, the deaths of three of them, the influx of F. 8.1. agents, of lawyers and others and not least of all of reporters—these things have had their influence.

Some Negro churches are still being burned, the K.K.K. still flourishes but some schools are being Integrated and even in Mississippi, Negroes are registering to vote and will vote in ever increasing numbers. CHANGE EXEMPLIFIED Nothing and no-one exemplifies the change coming in Mississippi better than Fannie Lou Hamer. She Is 46, the twentieth child of a Negro farmer and wife of a sharecropper who began picking cotton at the tender age of six. She has been fighting in Atlantic City for a seat in the convention as a member of the freedom delegation which is opposed to the “regular” delegation. She travelled well over a thousand miles to tell of the struggle for Negro registration in her State. Although she had only intermittent schooling for eight years, she is fluent and forceful.

She doesn’t want to leave her State. She wants to change it, she said. “You idon’t run away from problems—you just face them.” She reminded an interviewer that the Negroes are the only face in America “that had babies sold from their mothers’ breasts and mothers Isold from their families.” In a stifling hotel room the •2001 b Fannie Lou kicked off her shoes that hurt her and

told her interviewer: “Ope day I know the struggle will change. There’s got to be a change—not only for Mississippi, not only for the people of the United States, but for people all over the world.” Part of her part of the struggle has been to get Negroes registered to vote. This unlettered woman knows the value of the ballot box. It is what she and thousands of others, white and coloured, all over the South have done that is changing the face of the South. New Negro registration will have a definite effect on this year’s election and by 1968 the effect may be profound. NEW VOTES These new votes may possibly put the highly Conservative Southern States back in the ranks of the progressive section of the Democratic Party. Ever since General Eisenhower carried several Southern States the Republicans have been claiming that they were making headway and that the two-party system was making headway in the solid South. But they were mainly interested in the white vote. They ignored the coloured vote and Senator Goldwater in effect pooh-poohed the coloured vote when he spoke and voted against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. Now it looks as if the progressive Democrats will cash in on what might be termed the black back-lash. By and large the Negro registration throughout the South this year has been phenomenal. The figures from a few States show clearly what is happening in Texas, for instance. Negro registration in 1964 is more than seven times the majority by which Mr Kennedy carried the State in 1960.

In South Carolina it has been 10 times the Kennedy majority, in Arkansas more

than twice the Kennedy majority. In Alabama, even, it is rather more than the Kennedy majority, in Mississippi twice his majority. NEW REGISTRATIONS

There have been substantial .new registrations in all States of the South that Mr Kennedy won, which is important for the prospects of President Johnson. What is more important is that in Florida, Negro registration by November is . estimated at about five times the Nixon majority in that State, two and a half times his majority in Tennessee, and more than twice his majority in Virginia. These figures are such that they give hope for the Democratic ticket to carry States they lost four years ago. Some experts feel it will be touch and go and that irritated segregationists may bolt the party, vote for Goldwater, and upset these prospects. But it seems abundantly clear to many that four years of continued Negro registration will completely change the picture. In Florida 72 per cent of whites are now registered and Negro registration has gone up to an unprecedented 51 per cent.

The figures for Texas are 62 per cent for white and 57 for Negroes, in Virginia 49 for whites and nearly 28 for Negroes, in Virginia 49 for whites and nearly 28 for Negroes,, and in Tennessee 73 per cent for whites and 67 per cent for Negroes. The writing is on the wall.