St. Paul recorder. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1934-2000, 1942-11-20

will be said about it in the future.
Lewis Jones, six-foot gangling
American, who halls from TEXAS,
but more recently from New York,
is in Federal prison.
Jones was born in the backward
South, got his education the hard
way by earning the money for it
himself, and, like many another
ambitious American youth, went to
New York to seek his fortune.
The best he could do was get an
elevator job-a college graduate
doing the humble work that didn't
require the thinking for which he
had been trained.
Time to Think
An elevator job gives a man
plenty of time to think between
trips, and Jones thought about him
self, his color, his handicaps, his
second-rate citizenship, the world
wide emphasis on freedom and So
cial reforms. Wisely or unwisely,
he came to the conclusion that
there was too much talk about de-
mocracy and individual rights and
too little translation of talk into
action.
Then came the draft call to enter
the U. s. Army and serve in a
segregated unit.
Nothing in the Constitution of
the United States authorizes the
government to set up separate
units based on color. In fact, the
privileges and immunities clause
expressly forbids it.
What the Constitution Says
He got the Constitution out and
read it carefully. He found this
under the Fourteenth Amendment:
No State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citi-
zens of the United States nor
deny to any person the equal
protection of the laws.
Jones said to himself that means
that none of the individual States
may jim crow me (although they
do), and have left the South be-
cause it violates the Constitution.
He re-read the Tenth Amend
ment to the Constitution, which
says:
The powers not delegated to the
United States by the Constitution
nor prohibited by it to the States
are reserved to the States respec-
lively or to the people.
To Jones these provisions may
have meant that the power to
segregate citizens on the basis of
color not having been delegated to
the government by the Constitu-
ton, and being expressly pro-
hibited to the States by the Four
teenth Amendment, such power
could not, therefore, be legally as
sumed by the government.
Up and down in that New York
elevator as he carried his passen-
gers the thought was turned over
in his mind-the government has
neither the legal nor the moral
right to Jim crow citizens any more
than the States.
And, said he, the reason the
Southern States continue to Jim
crow colored people in violation of
the Constitution is that they point
to the Federal Government and
say, "Get right yourself before you
criticize u.s."
Railroad companies which Jim
crow me, companies which decline
to hire me all point to the U. S.
Army pattern as an excuse" Jones
declared.
1.-THE greatest good the govern
ment could do the States would be
to set the example in democracy"
Nobody Could Move Him
And, once Lewis Jones got that
notion in his mind, nobody could
move him. His attorneys, the Fed
eral Court, newspaper men argued
by the hour with him. They got
nowhere.
He made it plain that he was no
draft dodger. He's for the draft.
He's no conscientious objector. He
believes in war. He hates the Nazis
and the Japs. He'll fight them with
everything he has, but only in a
mixed army.
Why He Didn't Desert
He didn't run away to Canada
because desertion is cowardly. He
didn't recommend his example to
others because his convictions were
his own and he's not looking for
publicity.
He doesn't want to lose the war.
but he feels that losing the peace
will be far worse if we use undemo-
cratic methods of segregating citi-
zens because of their race, color or
religion.
Is He Crazy?
Is Lewis Jones crazy? A psy-
chologist who listened to an AFRO
reporter interrogate him for four
hours said "No."
Has he the martyr complex?
The psychologist said maybe; the
war does that to some people. It