The Inexorable Process

For six months-ever since a feeble little bus boycott-Negroes in the furniture and textile town of Lexington, N.C., had returned silently to their Jim Crow world. Then last week, caught up in the fever of the Negroes' national revolution, 14 Negroes decided to try for service in a few of Lexington's segregated stores.

It went pretty well. They were taunted by some whites. A few rocks were thrown. But, surprisingly, a segregated drugstore counter sold them food. The next night things were different. Scores of whites began gathering at Lexington's Red Pig, a rigidly segregated beer-and-barbecue spot in the center of town. The talk was of the Negroes' gains the night before. The crowd grew larger and suddenly someone yelled: "Let's hang the first nigger we find!" The mob began to move menacingly through town. It found no victims, and it surged on until 800 angry whites were standing in a roaring wall along the street that separates white and Negro homes in Lexington.

"We'll Start Shooting." A warning cry sounded through the Negro district. Some 400 people charged out of their homes to face the whites, and a deafening roar of insults, obscenities, threats rose from the white men's mob. The Negroes answered in kind.

Police nervously patrolled the center of the street, hoping to keep the races apart. But rocks, sticks, bottles-some filled with gasoline-flew back and forth across the police line. A Negro girl dropped to the sidewalk when a rock struck her on the head. A photographer for the High Point (N.C.) Enterprise, Art Richardson, 24, set himself to snap a picture, collapsed in the glare of his own flashbulb. He had been shot in the back. From a Negro apartment building came furious shouts: "Tell the white people to get back or we'll start shooting!" The white men stayed. Bullets began to ricochet off the pavement, spurting sparks as they hit. The thunder of the mob rose-louder and louder-until even the sound of gunfire was drowned out.

One of those shots struck Fred Link, 25, an auto mechanic who had left his rural home that night, telling his family he was going to town because he was curious to see what would happen after the Negro sit-in attempts. The bullet hit Link in the head. He died on the way to a hospital in Winston-Salem, 20 miles away. State troopers had joined Lexington police and firemen by then. Using fire hoses, they drove away the crowd. Next day seven young Lexington Negroes and twelve whites were arrested. Police said the Negroes were armed with a zip gun, a shotgun and a sawed-off .22 caliber rifle.

An Appeal to Reason. Even before last week's killing, an anxious Justice Department official had said, "I'm afraid we'll get down to a different kind of Negro-the knife and club type." He explained that the various Negro groups were competing with each other in militancy and fervor, and that there was a danger that the leaders would become followers. "There's competition among the N.A.A.C.P., CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), 'Snick' (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and Martin Luther King Jr.'s group. They think the group that's most militant will wind up on top."

The Kennedy Administration for weeks had been scrambling to catch up with that frightening fact. Last week the President, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy met at the White House with 100 top executives of chain stores operating in the South. The President coolly appealed to reason. Said a Southern theater-chain executive: "He kept stressing that voluntary action by businessmen was far more effective-and preferred by him-instead of forcing integration through new laws."

But the Administration still had legislation in mind-although it is not necessarily good legislation. Because he needed Republican support, Kennedy put off for at least a week the dispatch to Capitol Hill of a bill that would outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodations-hotels, motels, restaurants, etc. Under that bill, no major facility selling an item passing through interstate commerce (catchup, mustard, salt, pepper, or whatever) could close its doors to Negroes. Kennedy plans to exclude small local establishments, concentrating on larger operations that have been the target for most Negro demonstrations.

"Invasion of Rights." Such legislation would, in Administration eyes, be justified not by the 14th Amendment but by the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. That clause has been used to outlaw child labor, to control liquor traffic, prostitution, lotteries, and to set up food purity codes. But never has it had such a sweeping application as in the civil rights bill that Kennedy would propose.

That application, if approved by Congress (and it will certainly face a Senate filibuster by Southerners), might raise far more questions than it answers. If the interstate commerce clause could be used to enforce civil rights because the owner of a corner hot-dog stand uses out-of-state mustard, then there seems no particular limit on the powers of the Government to impose strictures on individual operators. Phil C. Neal, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, says: "If the idea is to ask for legislation that comprehensively does away with segregation in stores and restaurants, this would undoubtedly represent a substantial breaking down of whatever remains in the way of a dividing line between national and state powers. Other extensions of the commerce clause have not been as far divorced from the national commerce interests as this."

But the week's most forthright appeal to reason-both legal and emotional-came from U.S. District Court Judge Seybourn H. Lynne, 55, a softspoken, white-haired little legal scholar who has always lived in Alabama. Lynne granted an injunction barring Alabama Governor George Wallace from interfering with Negroes scheduled to enroll this week at the University of Alabama. Even so, the pugnacious Governor continued, at week's end, to insist on making his "schoolhouse door" stand despite stiff-backed opposition from university officials and students (see EDUCATION) and Judge Lynne's unassailable logic. Wrote Lynne: "Thoughtful people, if they can free themselves from tensions produced by established principles with which they violently disagree, must concede that the Governor of a sovereign state has no authority to obstruct or prevent the execution of the lawful orders of a court of the United States."

And in a moving addendum to the crisp legal language of his order, Sey bourn Lynne made a personal plea for peace:

"May it be forgiven if this court makes use of the personal pronoun for the first time in a written opinion. I love the people of Alabama. I know that many of both races are troubled and, like Jonah of old, are 'angry even unto death' as the result of distortion of affairs within this state, practiced in the name of sensationalism.

"My prayer is that all of our people, in keeping with our finest traditions, will join in the resolution that law and order will be maintained, both in Tuscaloosa and in Huntsville."

Sensible & Serene. On the same day that Judge Lynne delivered his plea, a young NegroCleve McDowell, 21-walked into the law school building at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Nine months before, two men died and dozens were injured when another Negro, James Meredith, enrolled at that school. Last week it was all peace and quiet, law and order in Oxford.

And there were sensible and serene gains chalked up for Negroes in other parts of the South: in Spartanburg, S.C., most downtown restaurants and lunch counters quietly dropped their racial barriers. At the University of Chattanooga, eight Negroes registered for the summer session without incident. In Birmingham, Martin Luther King Jr. led 400 Negroes into city hall to register to vote. In Dallas, a new $350,000 hospital opened-one of the first integrated hospitals in the South. At Texas A. & M., three Negroes were admitted for the first time in 92 years. And in North Carolina-where Fred Link fell fatally wounded under the feet of a mob-the mayors of Winston-Salem, Durham and Charlotte announced that dozens of restaurants in their towns had quietly canceled policies of segregation. Thus, while national leaders fretted and found causes for alarm, the inexorable process continued.

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