Armageddon to Go

Two thousand students from the Georgia Institute of Technology stormed through Atlanta one night last week, whooping up and down Peachtree Street, pushing aside troopers who tried to bar their way, and generally raising hell. At the State Capitol, the boys pulled fire hoses from their racks, adorned the sculpt head of Civil War Hero John Gordon with an ashcan. A dozen effigies of Governor Marvin Griffin were hanged and burned during the students' march, which culminated in a 2 a.m. riot in front of the governor's mansion.

Earlier in the day, the governor had incurred their wrath by a pinhead act: he asked the State Board of Regents to forbid the athletic teams of the university system of Georgia (e.g., Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia) from participating in games against any team with Negro players, or even playing in any stadium where unsegregated audiences breathed the same air.

"The South stands at Armageddon," brayed Griffin to the regents. "The battle is joined. We cannot make the slightest concession to the enemy in this dark and lamentable hour of struggle. There is no more difference in compromising the integrity of race on the playing field than in doing so in the classrooms. One break in the dike and the relentless seas will rush in and destroy us."*

The governor had a specific game in mind: Georgia Tech had contracted to play the University of Pittsburgh in New Orleans' Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2. Pitt has been selling its block of tickets on a desegregated basis, and Bobby Grier, a Pitt reserve fullback, is a Negro.

Many Southern leaders and editorialists scornfully denounced Griffin's action. George Harris, president of the Georgia Tech student body, sent a telegram to the Pitt student body, apologizing for Griffin's action: "We are looking forward to seeing your entire team and student body at the Sugar Bowl." A spokesman for the governor indicated that he was having some second thoughts about the Sugar Bowl game. One of Georgia Tech's regents predicted that the board would back Griffin and adopt for future seasons a rule against playing under unsegregated conditions. But the 1956 Sugar Bowl game would be played as scheduled, "just this once."

The Citizens' Council

There was an orderly meeting of solid Mississippi citizens in Jackson (pop. 117,000) one day last week. Present in the city auditorium were 2,000 planters and small businessmen, 40 state legislators, Congressman John Bell Williams and Governor Hugh White. They were well-dressed people of the sort found at Rotary meetings or dancing at the country club. This was the first statewide meeting of the Mississippi Association of Citizens' Councils. They were addressed by U.S. Senator James Oliver Eastland. His subject: school desegregation. Said he:

"We in the South cannot stay longer on the defensive. We must take the offense. We must carry the message to every section of the U.S." The Senator urged a Southern regional commission, financed by state tax money, to publicize the fight against desegregation, which he called a "monstrous crime . . . dictated by political pressure groups bent upon the destruction of the American system of government and the mongrelization of the white race." The pressure groups, he said, "run from the blood red of the Communist Party to the almost equally red of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. The drive for racial amalgamation is both illegal and immoral, and those who would mix little children of both races in our schools are following an illegal, immoral and sinful doctrine."

Hardly Novel. Senator Eastland, whose message was soberly applauded 68 times and whose tax-supported commission proposal was unanimously endorsed, also paid tribute to his listeners: "No one knows better than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People how effective the Citizens' Councils have been. No one is more aware . . . how highly contagious your organized efforts have been."

"Contagious" might seem an odd word for Eastland to have chosen, but there was no doubt that the Citizens' Councils have caught on throughout the Deep South-- especially in Mississippi. Manning the ramparts against any form of racial equality are 260 new Citizens' Councils in towns across the state, with about 65,000 dues-paying members who claim alliance with similar groups in other Southern states, including Texas, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee.

The first C.C., organized in Indianola, Miss, two months after the Supreme Court segregation decision in May 1954, numbered among its 14 charter members one of the town's bank presidents. He is typical of C.C. members--church-going leading citizens who believe that the cause of the unhappy days upon them is the N.A.A.C.P., whose local members and leaders they are determined to expel from their midst.

But C.C. tactics are far from the crude, violent visitations of the now discredited Ku Klux Klan. The C.C. shuns blood-letting and blunt instruments. It prefers the sharp, sophisticated weapons of economic and political pressures to change the minds of Negroes who work for school integration (or whites who aid them). Examples:

P: Gus Courts, 65, a Negro grocer in Belzoni, declined to remove his name from the Negro voters' registration lists. Courts' landlord refused to continue renting him his store, forcing him into a smaller one; wholesalers denied him service; a bank refused credit; whites warned Negro employees not to trade with him, and his average monthly gross went down from $2,000 to $800. Courts' resistance to these cold-war tactics led to a hot one: last fortnight someone shot and seriously wounded him. The Belzoni C. C., stressing its reputation for being law-abiding, promptly posted a $250 reward to catch his assailants (who have not been caught).

P: W. R. Wright, successful Negro plumber in Yazoo City and active N.A.A.C.P. member, had his credit and supplies cut off, lost jobs, finally moved to Detroit.

P: T. V. Johnson, prosperous Negro undertaker in Belzoni, was treated to the arrival of a C.C.-imported rival funeral home, which tried to slash his business.

Goodbye Terrestrial Ball. Most vocal spokesman for the C.C. is well-tailored Tom Brady, a Circuit Court judge, whose reiterated premise is that slavery brought the Negro "the greatest benefit one man ever conferred upon another . . . a moral standard was presented to him . . . which he . . . does not now appreciate."

Judge Brady is the author of Black Monday, a book titled for the day desegregation was announced. Writes he: "The loveliest and the purest of God's creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman, or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl." By contrast, he adds: "The social, political, economic and religious preferences of the Negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach . . . proper food for a chimpanzee."

* The dike had already been breached many times. Even when Herman Talmadge was governor, Georgia Tech's 1953 team played a Notre Dame team which had Negroes.

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