U.S. NEGROES MOOD OF DOUBT BESETS CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31117, 21 July 1966, Page 14

U.S. NEGROES MOOD OF DOUBT BESETS CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS

(By a tptcial correspondent ol "The Times” latelp In Jackton. Mississippi* (Reprinted from "The Times”?

Long joumevs have a way of changing subtly those who make them. The Mississippi “Freedom March” was begun by Mr James Meredith to overcome the fears of Mississippi Negroes to register to vote, but it ended with doubts among all the civil rights leaders about how to accomplish the basic goal—achieving a social revolution in America through i ballot box. This is the new mood of doubt and groping which hasi now emerged after three weeks of Mississippi’s intense heat and racial bit term.. >.

Mr Meredith said at the end of the march here they were aiming to change nothing less than the “white power structure.” Mississippi, well known in Washington as politically and economically the most backward state of the Deep South, developed into something of a test case. But the national response which Dr. Martin Luther King, the Nobel peace prizewinner, and the other Negro leaders, who took up the march after the wounding of Mr Meredith by a white sniper, were looking for and did not materialise. The leaders were disappointed by the response from northern whites. President Johnson spoke up—and refrained from intervening—but the kind of civil rights “invasion” of the south by idealists which characterised earlier years was missing. Standing Aside The national Churches, which since 1963 have played an important role every year, were somehow unable to make a clear response. On the Negro side the veteran and middle-class National Assocation for the Advancement of Coloured People, sensing correctly these pressures, stood aside. Instead of arousing the national conscience, it argued, such “publicity methods” did more harm than good to the cause of Mississippi’s Negroes. Even on the original aims of the march there are doubts. By the best estimates it added 4000 names to the registers, leaving 300,000 Negroes of voting age in the state untouched. Dr. King has now appealed to the federal Government to send federal registrars into each of the 82 counties in the state. After the passage of last year’s Voting Rights Act these officials added 114,000 Negroes by March. At the 1964 presidential election less than 7 per cent of Mississippi Negroes were registered, compared with more than 70 per cent of whites. Much is being made of the disunity among Negro leaders their personal rivalries and debates over tactics and now over who pays the inevitable march expenses. But the doubts which unite them are

■ far more significant. Dr. King who alone provides leader •ship of national stature today i confessed at the end of th< ■ march that while he “still ha: a dream” of racial equalitj I for America, he had manj j times seen it turn into t ."nightmare” of racial in ) justice. I “Black Power” I The young man who caugh the limelight, and who ver I tainly has doubts, was Mi Stokely Carmichael, head ol the Student Non-Violen Coordinating Committee. Th( dispute was about “biacl power,” a slogan which hi first coined running hi: “Black Panther” group ir neighbouring Alabama. Marct leaders have little doubi “black power,” taken bj whites as black nationalism played an important part ir the disappointing responst from northern whites. It has made many of them doubi their place. On the Negrc side, today’s doubts come about how the leadership car deliver the goods expected by the Negro masses—in Mi Meredith’s phrase, “changes in the white power structure.” The most dramatic moment of the march was not really when Dr. King led a contingent of the marchers (and the press) back to Philadelphia, but a day-long debate within the leadership about how long to respond to the rout in Canton by Mississippi state police using tear gas when they tried to pitch a tent in the grounds of a Negro elementary school. So much symbolism was involved that 25 young Negroes volunteered to attempt to repitch the tents the next night and were willing to risk their lives at the hands of the state police. After much debate it was decided against. This episode can be taken as proof of the moderation of all the Negro leadership of any significance in the United States at the present time. (Since the demise of Malcolm X the violent, racialist Negro groups have nowhere yet, either in the south or the northern cities, “come over the horizon.”) Will Lose Most The march leaders calculated that, if a second attempt were carried through, Washington would have had to send troops in for the Negroes in Mississippi have no doubt that the state police would have shot the non-violent volunteers down ruthlessly. The situation, they feared, might have got totally out of hand. The present generation of Negro leaders is profoundly American, including Mr Carmichael. They shied away instinctively from anything so sombre as a “massacre of Canton” to advance their cause. They would have violated their own (American) belief in progress. They also speculated that the mood the whole country was in was more likely to interpret such a desperate stand as another Watts. All the Negro leaders who attempt a national appeal realise, that with only 20 million Negroes in the country when irrationality takes over they will lose most. Mr Carmichael's approach, in my view, derives from a conviction that the white community has not delivered the promises of the early 19605. For the present what he is after is still within the American political tradition of absorbing the ethnic minorities. What he has been doing is to organise the Negroes in local communities where they are in a potential majority and to teach them they must elect candidates responsible to them, who will give them the adequate schools, the sanitation, the paved roads, and the more equitable taxes they have been denied by the white racialists in the Deep South. Electing black sheriffs is the logical and necessary conelusion of the voting registration dries. The next stage is state and federal office and this is being attempted by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an interracialisl political movement which challenges the official Democratic Party dominated by Mr Paul Johnson, the segregationist Governor, and Sena tor “Big Jim” Eastland, a Delta plantation owner. Most Backward State But if the overwhelming majority of United States Negro leaders remain moder ates, this cannot be said ol these present Mississippi poli tical leaders. There are a num ber, tragically few, white liberals in Mississippi’s closed bigoted and backward society Some of them are required tc show great courage swimming against the stream. Many oi the better elements have left this poverty-stricken little state of only 2,100,000 inhabit ants (920,000 of their Negroes at the last census) The brutal tone is set by the segregationists and main tained by all kinds of intimi dation. This may be 196( and the United States, bul there is lawlessness in Missis sippi and Mr Meredith’: “March against Fear” has tc be taken quite literally. Canton, where the tear gai was used, is a country when (Negroes of voting age out 'number whites two to one Before the Voting Rights Ac ■there were 450 registers

Negro voters against 6200 white voters. The federal registrars came in and now there are 6000 Negroes, leaving about 3000 still unregistered. But registration is not voting, and here fear is still a weapon. There is evidence |to suggest the state govern|ment insisted —against the wishes of the local white and I business community—in CanI ton on a showdown with the ■ Negro marchers. I The Mississippi legislature lis at present considering a bill to redistribute electoral districts. A chief purpose, it appears, is to merge areas where there is potentially a Negro majority in new ones where whites would predominate, and thus frustrate the Votings Rights Act. Some members of the white political leadership have spoken defiantly of the present civil rights decade as a "Second Reconstruction” which they will frustrate as they did the first with the 1890 Mississippi Constitution. The speeding up of the mechanisation of the cotton plantations during the last two to three years has to be seen in this political context. The weed-killing from the air and the huge harvesters have laid off thousands of cotton choppers and pickers who earn, according to United States Department of Agriculture figures, a median income in the Delta of 456 dollars (about £162) a year. (The annual income of the average Mississippi Negro has been estimated at about a third of the whites’ income.) Violence Condoned About half a million Negroes have migrated from the state in the last 15 years in search of jobs chiefly to Los Angeles and Chicago—where the welfare payments are higher too. This migration is officially encouraged. As one Negro marcher put it: “Now that the Negro has become as surplus as the mule in Mississippi, they want to get rid of us completely.” Violence is condoned by the Mississippi authorities. The United States Department of Justice filed an equal protection suit against Philadelphia as a test case. The deputy sheriff of that town is among 17 whites charged with conspiracy arising from the slaying of three civil rights workers by Ku-Klux-Klan elements in 1964. The Mississippi state police is known in earlier years to have tolerated the beating of Negroes, and even to have taken part, when the Negroes attempted to register to vote. There have been attempts by the Klan to infiltrate them.

The question remains why Washington does not intervene in Mississippi more actively. It is more immediate than reluctance to rekindle the old states' rights issue Mississippi voted 87 per cent for Mr Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and 12 per cent for Mr Johnson, a Southern Democrat. No-one knows just how far America is from a white “backlash” vote at this stage in the march to wards racial justice. But the President, as his third Civil Rights Bill shows, is ahead of white opinion and the Republicans could make gains in November if he moved now against the south. The Negro leaders’ doubts are well justified.