St. Paul recorder. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1934-2000, 1952-02-15
Notion Magazine:
Predicts Florida Death
Of Negro Leader May
Have Tremendous Effect

Idlcu. n DtiIlOCIdLlC ANlillIlLSlId
ton cannot now do what a Re
publican Administration could not
then do" In Georgia, Governor
HERMAN Talmadge introduced a
constitutional amendment that
would turn the school system over
20 private individuals should the
courts ever order Indignation OF
Negro and white schools. A ma
Jor political aide, Roy Harris,
threatened that If segregation
should be outlawed, Negroes
would be driven forcibly from
fifty Georgia counties, and Tai
madge himself said that integra-
ton would create more contu-
sion, disorder, riots, and bloodshed
than anything since the War Be
tween the States. There are not
enough troops or police in the
United States TO enforce such an
order" Governor Fielding Wright
said that Mississippi would en-
force segregation regardless OF
the costs or consequences" The
Alabama legislature warned: We
will not submit to the informing
ing of races IN the public
schools"
No clearer declaration of de-
fiance of law and provOcation to
violence could be possible than
these statements. What they
mean, and were intended to mean,
Is that the South will never vol
unfairly abandon the system
which has kept Negroes in their
place" these many decades. Segre-
cation is part of strategy of
dominance, the ultimate sanction
of which is force. 1t is absurd,
therefore, to condemn the UNI
known and perhaps demented in
dividual who placed the bomb un-
der Harry Moore's home without
condemnlng the pattern of force
and violence" upon which the
structure of white supremacy
rests. 1t is equally absurd to in
weigh against racial prejudice"
or xxx hoodlums without con-
demning the elected public Of
ficials who incite the violence
which, for special reasons, has
broken out in Florida but may
soon spread throughout the South.
This is the same phenomena that
came with the organization of the
xxx in the Reconstruction per-
iod: 1t is political terror, instiga-
ted by Bourbons and applied by
Kluxers, to prevent the real en-
ancipation of Negroes in the
South. Once before a deal rob-
bed Negroes of the full fruits of
the victory of the Union forces in
the Civil War. Today the coali-
ton" between Dixiecrats and Taft
Republicans being engineered by
Senator Karl Mundt and others
threatens to repeat in 1852 the
famous bargain of 1876. If this
coalition becomes reality, it
will rob Negroes of the Civil-rights
gains of the New Deal and the
last six years as surely as the bar
gain of 1876 robbed them of the
protection of the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amend
ments.
Not to recognize this is also to
miss the clear meaning of contem-
porary events of major historical
importance For the murder of
Harry T. Moore is likely to bring
about an imponderable change in
the political thinking of American
Negroes. 1t was not the Negro
leadership that proposed a huge
meeting in Birmingham, Alabama,
to protest the murder of Moore;
the idea came from rank and file
Negroes whose patience is utterly
exhausted not merely with Dixie
crat provocation but with the re-
Taxed middle-Class attitudes of
some of their leaders, who have
been quite willing to issue fur
Their political bills of credit to Mr..
Truman on the basis of his stale
civil rights speeches of l94S and
the lesser-evil premise. II these
leaders show reluctance to chal-
lenge the threatened forfeiture of
gains made in the last decade, the
Negro people see the danger and
will no longer be put off with
feeble promises and slippery phra-
SEES. The bell that tolled for Harry
Moore may thus have sounded the
political death knen of Harry
Truman. The Moore bombing was
not another incident; it was a
date in history.