St. Paul recorder. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1934-2000, 1960-05-13
Negroes To Use
Dollars In Fight
AqoinSf Race Bios
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store diningroom manager, very
unobtrusively, if they could be
served lunch; they were shopping
in the store. A telephone call to
the store office resulted in their
being seated, at a corner table,
where they were served without
incident.
Method Questioned
Weeks later police had to break
UP a lunch-counter demonstration
at a chain store in the same city.
The husband Of one of the women,
the president of a large business,
said, They're trying to do what
we're trying to do, but they re
going at it in a different way. I
think they're right in what they're
trying to accomplish but wrong
in how they're going at it. One
thing though, were all fighting
with money"
That's the important thing fire.
quently overlooked in the current
campaign in the South; The Negro
today is fighting with a weapon
new to him: the Negro dollar. In
the next decade of race crisis in
Dixie, that dollar may accomplish
more for the races civil rights
than the years Of struggles on
moral and ethical, legislative and
legal grounds.
How much will be accomplished,
and how quickly anything will be,
will depend to a considerable ex-
tent on whether the Negro econ
omic power can be organized and
Coordinated. Dollar pressure has
very real possibilities" as techni-
que for speeding desegregation If
it can be as highly organized as
the races legal maneuvers were,
according to Mrs. Ruby Hurley,
head of the Southeastern District
Of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored
People.
Other Techniques
Until the lunch-counter demon
STATIONS began, neither NAACP
nor the Congress of Racial Equai-
ty CORE had any direct role in
the quiet efforts of Negro business
and professional people in most
fragrant discriminatory policies of
stores. Indeed, there is no evidence
that either organization was re-
sponsibIe for the protests by Ne
gro students against the refusal
to serve them at white" counters
in chain stores. Both groups were
concentrating at the time on other
techniques-legaI and legislative
efforts.
It is different now. of course.
NAACP and CORE moved into the
counter demonstrations quickly, to
work with student groups to CO.
ordinate protests and demonstra-
tons and extend them from the
more progressive Piedmont area
Of the Carolinas into the more re-
sistant Deep South.
The students demonstrations
were considered a troublesome
harassing development at first
NAACP and CORE participation
and modifying northern sentiment
have combined to make them a
much more serious issue. But
many southern white businessmen
suspect the problems are only be-
ginning to show up. They say
frankly, putting aside some Of the
emotionaIism of the race issue, that
the real threat they face is one OF
mustered Negro buying power.
Important Money
Negroes in Charlotte, NC.
spend an estimated $3.50 900, OOC
or more annually. This is import
ant money in the community
in any community. Withheld from
white stores, it can mean the diff
ferences between operating in tn,
black and running in the red.
Negro dollars are just as i'm
portant other places, and for tn