U.S. INTEGRATION WHITE BACKLASH IMPERILS CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRAMME

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31195, 20 October 1966, Page 16

U.S. INTEGRATION WHITE BACKLASH IMPERILS CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRAMME

(By

PETER MINCHELMORE.

writing to the "Sydney Morning Herald” from New York)

(Reprinted from the “Sydney Morning Herald" by arrangement > The tremendous human experiment of making white people and black people live together in a state of complete equality and neighbourliness—whether they really want to or not—is faltering in the United States.

There is little doubt in most open minds here of the historic inevitability of a completely integrated white-black and increasingly mulatto society, but this does not make the attainment any easier.

For more than a decade now the civil rights movement has been forging ahead, scarred and battered with dreadful insult and injury, blood and tears, but moving steadily ahead none the less.

White people and Negro people are today voting together. eating together, travelling together and learning together, both in the North and in many parts of the South, to a degree that would not have been dreamed about 15 years ago.

Apace with the expansion of all facilities for Negroes has been the expansion of their expectations. They expect, and therefore want now, job opportunities to equal the whites, equal housing and equal hospitals, just to name three currently pressing demands.

But almost suddenly, what seems like a majority of white Americans is saying, “Whoa, you’re moving too fast.” The reins have been tightened not only in various communities of the North and South but also on the floor of Congress. The 1966 Civil Rights Bill dealing with open housing was thrown out and now the Senate is drawing back on enforcement of hospital desegregation, one of the landmarks of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Such decent and just legislators as Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democrat majority leader, are saying that the Administration, through the Health Department, is moving too fast in the integration of hospitals. But what is too fast in the Senate, as one commentator said, is too slow in the ghetto. Negro resentment has sharpened, riots flare in the still, cool air of the American autumn, Negro extremists have become more savage in their rabble-rousing, and the white extremists are boil-

ing up a white backlash in answer.

And so today in the United States the civil rights movement has burst apart: white and black are tending to polarise at the extremes and the men of reason on both sides are talking in an empty chamber. Everyone has a coloured word or phrase to describe what is happening in America —“ominous,” “whiteblack collison.” “reaping the whirlwind" —but whatever it is it seems to be setting a far more danger' us situation than any in the last 10 years.

I “Make no mistake about it," wrote the Washington columnist William S. White, "a white blacklash now whips this land, and put in the gravest of peril are all the years of earnest effort by patient and reasonable men to resolve this tragic racial issue in fairness, in responsibility and in commousense." Nominees For Office The backlash became recognised as a widspread emotion last month when an archsegregationist named George P. Mahoney won the nomination to run for the State Governorship of Maryland for the Democratic Party. Then came the swell of the interest around the country when Governor George Wallace, of Alabama, suggested he might run for President in 1968 on a third-party, backlash ticket. Nobody scoffed because political observers are well aware that Wallace could actually carry a number of southern States. After this, throughout the South, noted segregationists started to pop up as Democrat nominees for Governorships and seats in the House of Representatives. It was rapidly adding up to a major political upheaval in the South that appeared to be winning a fair proportion of support in the North, where the Republicans were trotting out their more conservative candidates for the November 8 national and State elections.

But there was hope that the tide would turn in Georgia, the proud old State which had been charting a moderate approach to racial problems. Two men contested the Democrat Governorship nomination there—the statesmanlike former Governor, Ellis G. Arnall, and perhaps the most savage segregationist in the State, Lester G. Maddox.

Maddox won the contest and looks like becoming the next Governor of Georgia. A Biblequoting, Barry Goldwater man, Lester Maddox won his place in infamy in 1964, when he announced he would never serve Negroes in his restaurant, “The Pickrick.” When Negroes came demanding service. Maddox chased them away with a loaded pistol. When they returned he handed out axe handles to his white friends and they beat the Negroes off the doorstep. How did this man become Governorship material for a State with the fine traditions of Georgia? Perhaps the most significant factor is that the 1 South no longer feels under 'pressure from the North to moderate its view on race. Until recently, southern [businessmen were quick to speak out against more extreme segregationists on the ground that their election could scare industry from the South. But with Negro riots increasing in the North—in Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, St. Louis, Brooklyn—and unmistakable signs that many Northerners had reservations about too quick a Negro advance, Southerners became convinced that they had much sympathy in the North. Senator James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, said the "sentiment of the entire country” was with the South, and the South believed him. So. in effect, out came the axe handles that many had thought were put away forever. The other factor in the political retrogression of the South is the emergence of the militant black power bloc—the characters like Stokely Carmichael who keep urging the Negroes on to take what they cannot get under law. This is the trend, and unless leaders of the calibre of Dr. Martin Luther King and President Johnson himself can find a way to stop it, the great American experiment in racial equality will founder for many years to come.