Meredith Shooting Helps Negroes

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31084, 13 June 1966, Page 13

Meredith Shooting Helps Negroes

(From FRANK OLIVER, Special Correspondent—N.Z.P.A,) WASHINGTON, June 12. The gunman who put three charges of buckshot into the back of James Meredith is bringing considerable dividends to the Negro civil rights causes and he has managed to blacken still further the already tarnished reputation of the white supremacists. Whatever his aims were at the time is anyone’s guess except that he cannot possibly have foreseen the results he did achieve. From the point of simple, sensible, everyday living Meredith was foolish, to put it mildly. He was, as they say, asking for trouble walk-

ing through racist Mississippi. He was lucky that he did not suffer the fate of others demonstrating for civil rights, for many who tried similar things are now underground. Meredith, fortunately, is alive and reasonably well and he is likely to do more for Negroes and for civil rights than several others who in recent years have died for those causes—not because he was any braver or more daring, but simply because the South has been changing and changing for the better where civil rights are concerned. I have just completed a tour of five Southern states and was on the road when Meredith was mowed down with a shotgun. Reactions now are very different from what they would have been a few years ago, even a couple of years ago. A few years ago the wide reaction of the South would

have been that the silly man deserved it and he got it. But this time there was a Southern outcry against this. Let me quote just a couple of Southern newspapers picked up haphazard on the journey. The first is from a fairly conservative organ:

“The ambush shooting of Meredith did a great deal more harm to the cause of white supremacy in Mississippi than it did to the national Negro figure who was gunned down. . . . Angry violent open confrontation in the racial argument is not a pretty thing or desirable but it stands out like a shining light against cowardly concealed sniper-like attack. . . . The darkest political spot in the matter is that it will be used as a strong argument by that group in Congress which wishes federal law enforcement to replace local law enforcement” ,

In short, the sniper did much more harm than good to the white supremacists. The headline under which the comment appeared was significant: “Brutal—and stupidaction.” A progressive Southern newspaper said flatly: “The real horror Is that the good name of the whole decent South could be gravely wounded by one obscure, insignificant gunman. ... We can depend upon such creatures. They will - . . smear the civilisation of which erroneously they consider themselves a party. They will shoot a coloured man without it ever entering their idiotic minds that they are assailing their own pretentions of white supremacy.” The graver wound, it adds, was not to Meredith but to the South. In these matters I find today, the liberal papers of

the South more outspoken and the conservative papers saying things they would not have said a few years ago.

The Meredith affair is having its repercussions in Washington. The 1966 civil rights bill of the President—con-

cerning housing—was considered a dead duck for this session but the Meredith shooting has brought it to life again. Acts of violence have helped the pusage of all civil rights Bills during the Johnson Presidency and the Meredith shooting may get the 1966 Bill through the Congress whereas a few days ago non-one thought it had a dog's chance in this session.

Meredith took great chances on his march through Mississippi. He was seeking to get out the vote but he probably will achieve a good deal more than that Civil rights continue to march on.