Walter Irvin (in bed), a defendant in a criminal-assault case in Florida, was shot en route to a hearing. He claimed the sheriff deliberately tried to kill him.

For a year now newspaper headlines from Boston to Moscow have repeatedly touched on cases of bigotry and terrorism in Florida. "There's martial law in Miami," the rumors said. Does the state deserve this bad name? Here's

# The Truth About the Florida Race Troubles

By JOE ALEX MORRIS

F LORIDA is probably the most contradictory state in the Union. It is the site of the oldest European settlement in the nation, yet today it is one of the most rapidly changing and growing states. It has long been a stronghold of the old-time religion and the white-ribbon league, but it is also a gay and sometimes rowdy pleasure resort land with more than its quota of racketeers and—at least until recently—big-time gamblers. Its population is one of the most heterogeneous in America, drawn from many states, many lands and many faiths, and including one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Yet for the last year newspapers around the world have been unduly concerned with reports of minority and racial prejudice, bigotry and terrorism in Florida.

"Florida clearly leads the nation in cases of race prejudice and violence," the Boston Herald remarked editorially.

"Florida, United States," was the headline in Moscow's Communist Party organ, Pravda, above a report on the murder of a Negro organizer. "This is the twentieth century and this is democracy in the United States of America."

The fact that the Boston newspaper was indig-
nant—as were most Floridians—about a brutal kill-

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ing and the fact that the Moscow newspaper was
interested only in propaganda against the United
States should not conceal the unhappy fact that
many sincere persons were forced to ask whether the
nation was facing a resurgence of bigotry comparable
to the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan.

No objective observer could ignore the all too ob-
vious dangers behind the events of 1951 in Florida.
The record shows that the only lynching in the
United States last year occurred in Florida. A Negro
prisoner also was shot to death and another wounded
by a sheriff. Six attacks or attempted attacks were
made with dynamite and two with rifles against
Jewish schools and synagogues. An attack with
dynamite and another with a smoke bomb endan-
gered Catholic institutions, and a threat, signed
"KKK," was received by a Catholic priest. Heavy
charges of dynamite were set off on three occasions
in a Negro housing development that impinged on a
white residential area. Dynamite was used to mur-
der a Negro schoolteacher and fatally injure his wife.

These incidents occurred in widely separated areas of Florida. In addition there were numerous minor outrages or threats of violence of a similar nature, including one directed against a, handsome new school for Negroes in Orlando. Under the circumstances, it is not strange that persons telephoned anxiously from other states to inquire about the safety of relatives or to ask whether it would be dangerous to visit the placid beaches of Florida. "One friend telephoned me," a college professor recalled, "to ask whether martial law was still in effect in Miami. There had never been any martial law, but people making these calls were deadly serious and afraid."

Looking merely at the record, anyone must agree
that there is reason for serious concern. Yet the
record seldom tells the whole story and, contradictorily,
it should also be pointed out that significant
progress is being made in Florida toward a
lessening of minority-group tensions and toward a
more effective enforcement of civil rights. This does
not mean that the danger of further violence has
passed. But it may well mean that the state with the
worst record of outrages last year is more ahead of
than behind the forward march of events in the
South.

"It seems a contradiction of the record," one
qualified observer pointed out recently, "but I con-
sider these violent incidents a kind of indirect proof
that progress is being made. They represent a vi-
cious but unorganized outburst against significant
changes taking place in the state and against the
effectiveness of outside pressures such as the deci-
sions of the United States Supreme Court on Negro
education. Oh, I don't mean that we've solved the
problem of minority-group relations. Nothing like it.

We're not even moving very fast. But we're going
forward, not backward. And that, in an oversimpli-
fied way, is what the bigots are shooting at."

Oversimplification of the minority problem in Florida is a major hazard. It is another contradiction that, although Florida lies deep in Dixie, it cannot accurately be compared to other parts of the South. It never fitted snugly into the plantation economy, and only the northern part of the state developed in the traditions of the slave owners, the "wool-hat" boys and the "crackers." Elsewhere, the most important development came much later, with a vast influx of widely divergent peoples, attracted, for the most part, to the sun-burnished beaches and resort centers. Thus Florida, in a sense, was a "new frontier" long after the South had been stabilized. Half of its population are immigrants to the state, a unique mixture of diverse cultures developed through periods of spectacular boom and bust. It has some of the most progressive and some of the most backward communities in the country. It has inherited some of the best and some of the worst characteristics of the rest of America, and it is a common saying that "a lot of Northerners who come down here turn out to be more intolerant than the natives" in regard to minority relations.

Something of all these divergent traits can be
found in the great citrus belt stretching westward
across Florida from the Indian River, a hot and
lovely land where golden groves cover, mile after
mile of rolling countryside. Here the traditions of
the Old South are strong, and it was here, in 1949,
that the seventeen-year-old wife of a farmer living
near Groveland reported that four Negroes she had
never seen before had knocked out her husband on a
dark road about midnight, abducted her and raped
her. She later identified her attackers, although the
identification of one of the accused had to be by
photograph. He had been killed by a posse.

Details of the Groveland case followed the classic
pattern of the Old South for the most part, but with
some significant variations. It was traditional that a
large part of the community assumed the four
Negroes—one already dead—to be guilty rather
than innocent, prior to presentation of evidence.
There was good reason to believe that the prisoners
were beaten. Word was put out that they had con-
fessed, although no confessions were ever officially
produced. The next step in the pattern was the
gathering of the mob. In Groveland, it gathered
quickly.

Later, when the case was in headlines all over the
country, many responsible citizens felt that their
community and state had been unjustly damaged by
newspaper accounts of terrorism. They pointed out
that the community was overwhelmingly decent—
as it is—and that only a handful of hoodlums was
responsible for the disorder. "The whole case,"

The seated woman is Mrs. Rosa Moore. The mur-
der of her son, an NAACP worker, is still unsolved.

In July, 1949, a mob set fire to this group of Negro homes in Groveland, Florida. The National Guard put down the violence. Although the leaders of the mob were known, no action was taken against them.

Sheriff Willis McCall, of Lake County, Fla., was
absolved in the shooting of two Negro prisoners.

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said Ed Ray, executive editor of the Orlando Sentinel and an active worker in behalf of Negroes, "became an awful series of events that was pyramided out of all proportion. The nation got an entirely erroneous picture of people in this area. Unfortunately, there is a small lunatic fringe, and that fringe is responsible for the violence that reflects on everybody."

This, obviously, was an honest opinion and it represented the belief of most residents of the area. Yet, when the chips were down at Groveland, it was not the decent and progressive tendencies, but the traditions and fears and prejudices of the community that became a dominant factor. Except for removal of some Negro families to safety, the responsible citizens did little or nothing to curb the "lunatic fringe." Four clergymen, sponsored by the Committee of One Hundred to promote justice and equality for Negro citizens, later made an inquiry and concluded that: "'Consciousness of kind' is the dominant factor of this community as in most communities—to agree with the majority, to be in step, not to awaken antagonism against one's self as different from the popular attitude. ... The atmosphere was not, for the most part, 'hate-ridden,' but rather indifferent. Only a few persons expressed active opposition."

The mob that gathered at Groveland was intuitively but firmly aware of this psychological climate; of the unlikeness of any individual or group opposing them. Members of the mob roamed the countryside, shooting into Negro homes, burning several houses, stopping automobiles to search for Negroes. They descended on the jail and the demanded surrender of the three prisoners, but Sheriff Willis V. McCall had hidden them in his home and later rushed them to the state prison farm. Gov. Fuller Warren called out the National Guard and the violence was ended. Leaders of the mob were well known, but no action was taken against them.

The trial of the three defendants lasted two days. The youngest, who was sixteen years old, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The two others were sentenced to death. The case might, in the traditional pattern, have been over and over again, but a few years, forgotten. But it wasn't because the interests of the community were soversal case, but for Florida, if it was most unprecedented. The public re-action was summed up by the publisher of an important newspaper who said editorially that "Editor Poynter is just an ornery trouble-maker."

The trouble, however, was just beginning. In the spring of 1951 the United States Supreme Court upheld

the appeal of the death sentences and ordered a new trial because of the unconstitutional manner of selecting a jury. The court failed to rule on whether the defendants had a fair trial, but Associate Justice Robert Jackson noted the "evidence of brutal, inhuman beatings," cited the fact that the alleged confessions had not been produced and said the defendants were "tried by the press before the jury got the case."

The Supreme Court decision merely hardened the sentiment of the community. The intervention of the NAACP, in the first place, had been almost unanimously resented as "outside interference." Even those citizens who regarded themselves as liberal-minded joined the common front against the NAACP because it brought critical national attention to the case and because it suggested that the community was incapable of justly handling its own affairs. It is a universal but now threadbare argument in the South that such "interference" merely makes matters worse and that, if left alone, the Southern states will solve the racial problem one of these days. Although events have long since demonstrated the weakness of this argument, it was interesting that during a long journey over all parts of Florida only one comment was heard in favor of the NAACP organization, and that was indirect. Speaking of Walter White, the energetic executive secretary of NAACP, a prominent citizen remarked, "I'll say this much for him—he makes us work a lot harder in order to keep his organization the hell out of our affairs."

But, instead of accepting the possibility that through the NAACP appeal the Supreme Court had prevented a miscarriage of justice, the community roundly denominated the reversal, the newspapers complained, the prosecutor deplored and even the sheriff publicly criticized the decision of the nation's highest court on a technical point of law. In other words, the effectiveness of outside pressures was being felt and it was bringing expressions of resentment and frustration not from the lunatic fringe but from the responsible elements of the community.

The climax came a little later. The two defendants, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, were handcuffed together to be taken in Sheriff McCall's automobile to the town of Tavares for a routine hearing before a second trial. En route, at night on a road both, prisoners were shot three times. When officials from the town of Umatilla reached the scene both were presumed to be dead, but it was then discovered that Irvin was still alive. In a hospital a few days later, he charged that McCall deliberately shot him twice and Shepherd three times, and that Deputy James L. Yates, who had been in another automobile, then arrived on the scene and shot Irvin a third time in the neck. McCall later told a coroner's jury that the two prisoners had attacked him—he had a bruise on his forehead—and that he shot in self-defense. He denied Yates was present. The jury found he had acted properly in the discharge of his duties.

The shooting started a furor that far overshadowed all that had gone before and that was to continue throughout 1951. The communists seized the opportunity to fire new propaganda blasts against Americans. Russia's Andrei Vissinsky charged in the United Nations that the case was a violation of human rights and attacked "this American way of life." A Negro school-teacher and state co-ordinator of the NAACP, Harry T. Moore, who lived not far away at the town of Mims, demanded further investigation and worked vigorously to raise money to

carry on the Groveland-case battle. The FBI was called in—its report has not yet been published—to determine whether there had been a violation of civil rights.

Publicly, ranks were closed against the outsiders. A scientific poll, with questions carefully camouflaged, showed that in Lake County (Groveland) 63 per cent of the people were "sure" of the guilt of the four Negroes regardless of whether they were well acquainted with the case. And the community obviously approved the coroner's-jury verdict clearing McCall.

But under the surface there was another reaction too. Thoughtful citizens felt that Florida was being put on the defensive. They frequently complained that "a lot of dumb mistakes" were apparent in the arrangements for transporting the two prisoners who were shot and that the incident had "done more to damage Florida's reputation than anything in years."

The furor, however, might well have faded out—Irvin was soon retried, again sentenced to death and the case is now back in the appellate courts—had not been for another series of incidents that overlapped the Groveland case and demonstrated that the civil-rights problem was not limited to the "wool-hat" area. There had been, in April of 1951, a strange outbreak of amateurish bombings and attempted bombings of public buildings and a Jewish Center in Miami. Police finally seized several young students and broke up a gang of thrill-seekers responsible for the outrages.

But, on one way, the damage had already been done. Something that law-enforcement officers dread—a kind of senseless psychological chain reaction—had been started, and it quickly spread to a dangerous and highly explosive field. Miami is a handsome, modern and cosmopolitan city that regards itself, a bit complacently perhaps, as a progressive and up-to-date community, a cultural center and the winter home of many of its fabulous and famous Americans. It also has some of the worst slums in the South. After the war some progress was made in alleviating this situation, but local officials dragged their feet and only halfway measures were taken.

Last year one section of a private housing development, originally intended for white residences, but not venting well, was offered for occupancy by Negroes. This section, renamed Carver Village, adjoining a Negro district, but jutted out into an area, was by white working families, many of them originally from other Southern states. There were demonstrations and protest meetings and appeals to local officials, but eventually Negro families moved into Carver Village. Then, on the night of September twenty-second, two dynamite charges were set off in a building that was still under construction.

Authorities recognized that this was far different from the amateurish outrages of thrill-seeking students, although the basic idea of bomb-and-run was the same. Yet Miami wasn't alarmed or even very much concerned; there was always danger of some kind of violence in such a situation. Nor was there any great excitement on October first, the first day of Rosh Hashana, when an anonymous telephone call warned that the Northside Jewish Center would be blown up. Members who hurried there found a three-foot cross bearing anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish slogans in crudely printed German words. They also found symbols of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. In the next two weeks two unsuccessful dynamite attacks were made on Jewish

schools and synagogues, on one of which was painted a blood-red cross and the letters KKK. The bomb psychology was spreading rapidly.

"The strange thing about all this," Burnett M. Roth, a Miami Beach councilman, said later, "was that the community couldn't be seriously aroused up to this time. There was tension in sections directly affected, of course. But Miami Beach is one of the largest—over 50,000 population—Jewish communities in the world, and minority-group relations in this area are good. Everybody felt the bombings were due to cranks and that there were no tensions to account for those at the synagogues."

In November, however, there were more threats, dynamite was found on the Dade County Courthouse steps and at a high school and, on November thirtieth an unoccupied unit at Carver Village was damaged to the extent of $22,000 by an explosion. Three days later heavy blasts again damaged Carver Village and the Miami Hebrew School and Congregation, where forty-four memorial windows were shattered.

Something else was shattered too—the complacency of the city. Gay, cosmopolitan Miami suddenly woke up to the fact that bigotry isn't a limited affair; it can touch everybody. Jewish religious and civic leaders marred on police headquarters to demand far more vigorous action. Dade County Sheriff James B. Action asked the governor, in vain, to call out the National Guard because "there are very inflammatory conditions here and Negroes are carrying guns." Rev. Edward T. Ullrich, of the Robertson Memorial Church, offered to recruit an armed guard to protect synagogues. The Jewish War Veterans heard proposals to form protective groups but decided against it. The Co-ordinated Committee Against Bombing was formed, with Burnett Roth as chairman. The city council voted $10,000 for extra police protection and the Federal Bureau of Investigation put a score of extra agents on an inquiry into the bombings.

The outrages didn't stop. In the next few weeks a Catholic church, the Coral Gables Jewish Center, the Hialeah-Miami Springs Jewish Center and Property of two members of Jehovah's Witnesses were involved in attempted bombings or similar outrages. And on Christmas Eve, near the town of Mims on the east Florida coast, a powerful charge of nitroglycerin or TNT exploded under the bedroom of a little house in an orange grove, killing Harry T. Moore, state co-ordinator of the NAACP, and fatally injuring his wife, Harriet.

The brutal murder of the Moores climaxed the worst year of minority outrages in the history of Florida or probably any other state in recent times. Moore had been a tireless worker in behalf of the Groveland-case defendants and in the campaign to increase registration of Negro voters. Governor Warren sent a special investigator to Mims and offered a $5000 reward, but Warren has been on the political downgrade during most of his term and dynamic top leadership has been lacking throughout the series of bomb-and-run incidents. The governor, for instance, took no action on a proposal by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which earlier had investigated the outrages, that he call a conference of top law-enforcement officials to make sure that "all investigative efforts are co-ordinated and prosecuted with utmost vigor." The FBI entered the Mims case, however, and set up a field headquarters with nine agents, three stenographers and a supervisor. "The

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

heat was turned on from Washington," one local official said later. "The agents felt that some heads would roll if they failed to get results."

Getting results has not been easy. The investigation will go on and a break might come at any time, but the only immediate development in the case was an exchange of impolite remarks between Warren and NAACP's executive secretary, Walter White. The latter contended that Warren was failing to take sufficient positive action to halt lawlessness in Florida. The governorian replied that he was doing everything possible—his police powers are limited—and denounced White as a "hired Harlem hate-monger" who was doing his "utmost to disrupt the friendly relations that exist in Florida between the two races."

Such outbursts, however, did not distract attention from the fact that the serious situation in Florida was being echoed in other states where the bomb-and-run psychology showed up late in 1951 and early this year. A Jewish temple was desecrated in South Carolina. A dynamite charge exploded near a Negro social club in Georgia. Dynamite was found under a railroad engine in Georgia. A blast shattered windows in a farm home in Alabama following a Klan cross burning. An anti-vice crUSAder's home was bombed in Alabama and an explosion in North Carolina damaged the home of a Negro farmer built on the former site of a white church. In Philadelphia several synagogues were damaged by young vandals, and one was attacked with crudely made fire bombs.

The immediate causes for such outbursts are usually easy to locate. Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, divided the Florida incidents into four categories: thrill-seekers who perpetrated the initial Miami bombings; clever and bigoted persons who attacked synagogues and churches so they could "enjoy reading the resulting publicity"; persons involved in "smoldering tensions between Negroes and whites over housing problems" who damaged Carver Village; and persons motivated by "other factors"—the tradition of so-called white supremacy—who murdered the Moores. The league has been working, with some success, to combat such immediate causes by enactment of controls over sale of explosives, by surveys to determine tension spots in advance and by projects at the community level to offset "basic issues of racial and religious hatreds."

But behind the immediate causes of violence, observers see a broader pattern that represents a psychological or crackpot reaction—sporadic, unorganized, dangerous—against the whole idea of progress toward better human relations. "The bombers in Florida seem to be trying to halt by intimidation the advances that have been made in recent years," Balkin noted. In the league's opinion, "bigotry still continues to attract a segment of the South which has been alarmed by successfuloads made on segregation in housing and in education. Social change—in the South as elsewhere—always meets with resistance."

In the past, one of the principal sources of such resistance has been the Ku Klux Klan, but, significantly, authorities are now fairly well agreed that the Klan is not directly linked to the violence of the last year in Florida. It is true that the Florida Klan recently has been more obnoxiously vocal than in some years and that the "spirit" of

the Klan obviously underlies the state's minority troubles. Florida Grand Dragon Bill Hendrix, for instance, has carried on a virulent anti-Semitic campaign and lost no opportunity to vilify such prominent figures as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Bernard Baruch and Assistant Defense Secretary Anna Rosenberg. Cheap demagogery is always a danger. But it is on the credit side of Florida's ledger that the Klan as a political force is a bad joke in most parts of the state, that its leaders have been under strong and steady attack by reputable newspapers in all parts of the state and that the legislative last year struck the organization a serious blow by outlawing the wearing of masks at K.K.K. rallies.

Also on the credit side of the Florida ledger is the great increase in registration of Negro voters in the last few years. Negro registration has climbed to something like 150,000 out of a potential 300,000 voters, according to the NAACP officials, and it is possible that it will reach 200,000 before the 1952 general elections. This increase has sometimes been cited as a factor in racial tension and also as a possible reason for the murder of Harry Moore, who was an active worker in the registration campaign. Such theories, however, are strongly discounted by most observers, because there has been no open objection to Negro registration and, on the contrary, it has been actively encouraged by most politicians.

Educational facilities for Negroes also have been greatly improved under the pressure of a series of United States Supreme Court decisions involving segregation issues. In almost every Florida counties, the salaries of white and Negro schoolteachers are now reckoned on an equal basis and the average sum that the state spends per Negro pupil per year has gone up from $71.81 in 1946 to $142.70 in 1951, as compared to a current average for white students of $192.17. In 1946, school construction cost per pupil averaged $2.35 for Negroes and $7.24 for whites, but in 1950 it was $43.62 for Negroes and only $49.99 for whites, although even such a substantial increase will not soon make up for past neglect of Negro schools.

Although much of this progress has been forced on the state by external pressures, there have also been noteworthy changes brought about by pressures from within, by the activities of newspapers, churches, the Urban League, educational institutions and other organizations. Only a few years ago it was an accepted rule that newspapers would play down or even ignore many minor instances of racial bias. Today editors are beginning to forget the rule. The powerful Orlando Sentinel, one of the papers criticized by Justice Jackson in the 1949 Groveland case, has recently been active in bringing under the spotlight various abuses that race-minded law-enforcement officials had been trying to cover up. In Tampa, the Times—with considerable fanfare—forced the release of a Negro orange picker who had been held in a Hernando County jail for eighteen months with no charges filed against him.

Only three years ago a University of Miami football game with a Northern college was canceled when it became known that the visiting team included several Negro players. Mixed teams had never played in the state and the university authorities were afraid there would be trouble. Almost at once, however, the decision was regretted and—

with some foreboding—it was decided to take a chance in 1950. In the last two years Negroes have participated in several important games in Miami and there has not been even a hint of trouble. Kid Gavilan, a Cuban Negro, recently participated in the first mixed prize fight ever held in Florida and nobody raised an eyebrow. Negro entertainers, once banned, now appear regularly in top Miami clubs. Hundreds of Negroes and whites formed mixed audiences last year to hear a concert given in Miami by Singer Marian Anderson and to attend a lecture by Anthropologist Margaret Mead. Many activities on the University of Miami campus included mixed racial groups and the Florida Student Government Association passed a resolution urging the abolition of discrimination on the basis of color.

Like many Floridians, Governor Warren sometimes feels that Northerners are inclined to overlook the progress made in the South when they loudly criticize acts of violence that occur below the Mason and Dixon's line. This tendency seldom sits well with Southerners, who are well aware that some of the worst anti-Semitic outbreaks of 1951 occurred among juvenile gangs in the suburbs of Boston and that the most vicious race riot of recent years occurred last summer in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago.

"I think there is no question that race relations in Florida are improving," the governor said recently. "I see signs of it on all sides. Recently I went into every county and spoke to the people from the courthouse steps. Almost everywhere there was a free mingling of the races in the audience and in the line of people who later came to shake hands. And at my inauguration we had the usual barbecue and, for the first time, there was a mingling in such a crowd—and there wasn't a protest.

"An unprecedented case in this state came before our pardon board not long ago. For the first time, a white man in Florida had been convicted of assault with intention to rape a Negro girl. The courts affirmed the verdict and our pardon board refused the appeal for clemency. These things are significant of better race relations."

These developments leave the governor gratified, if not satisfied, by the progress made. He sees no reason to believe that the murder of the Moores was "any more significant than any other murders" and he believes that justice has been served in the Groveland case. The Miami bombings, in Warren's opinion, are not "an important manifestation" because there have always been harmonious racial and religious relations at that level.

This optimism, however, is definitely not shared by many civic leaders in Miami who were rudely awakened by the bombings to a realization that bigotry was not limited to any one group, but could strike at all! One of the results of this awakening was a movement to establish a Dade County (Miami) Council on Community Relations as a county financed and sponsored body to foster racial and religious understanding and co-operation. In reference to the outrages of 1951, sponsors of the movement noted "a public reaction of shame and a determination that these events shall not occur again. Perhaps never before has the community been so determined to do something positive with regard to intergroup understanding." Backers of the council, headed by Hollis Rinehart,

a lawyer and member of the State Board of Control, include prominent businessmen, representatives of newspapers, churches, schools, the Chamber of Commerce and other organizations.

How far such efforts will go in combating the causes of minority-group tensions remains to be seen, but experts have outlined a modern, scientific approach to the problem and considerable civic enthusiasm has been aroused. "All of these things are positive developments in the right direction," M. A. F. Ritchie, chairman of the University of Miami Department of Human Relations, said recently. "And the important thing now is to publicize the forward steps that are being taken. There was a time when the South believed that it was best to remain silent about what was being accomplished in human relations because it was feared that publicity would stir up resentment and antagonism. But now the time has come to tell the world what we're doing and especially to cultivate a pride at home in the progress made. Miami is not, by and large, a community of bigotry and dissension and violence. I don't intend to imply that conditions are ideal by any means. But gains have been made, and especially among the young people. Perhaps the most encouraging thing of all is the attitude of university students. Here there is full opportunity for development of the greatest program of inter-group education in the Western Hemisphere."

These are brave words. They don't make up for the shattered windows of a synagogue or for the broken bodies of Harry and Harriet Moore. Or for the Jim Crow laws. But Florida, alarmed by unexpected violence, pushed by powerful outside influences and irked by a critical world opinion, has made a beginning that holds greater hope than the record of the last year would indicate.

Perhaps one of the most encouraging things about this beginning is that it has demonstrated that a determined effort can accomplish more than most people suspect. An illustration of this occurred during the first football game which University of Miami played against a Northern team that included several Negroes. Faculty leaders and coaches had secured the co-operation of student leaders and local sports writers in an effort to avoid any untoward incident, but they were still nervous about what might happen when the game got under way. Then, at a critical moment of play, the Northern coach sent in a powerful Negro halfback—No. 89—who promptly gained five yards. On the next play No. 89 gained ten yards. In the sorrowful hush that fell over the home stands, a big, red-armed man—obviously not a student—stood up and yelled, "Kill that black so-and-so!"

Malcolm Ross, a tall and shaggy man who is in charge of university publications, was sitting nearby and he quickly moved over to the heckler, explaining to him that the university was eager to avoid any racial trouble and appealing to him not to make such remarks.

"This is a free country, ain't it?" the heckler replied angrily. "I'll yell what I please!"

Ross went unhappy back to his own seat just as the Negro halfback got the ball again and charged toward the middle of the line. The heckler was already on his feet, his clenched fist raised and his mouth open. Then he hesitated, glanced defiantly at Ross and roared, "Yeah, team! Kill that Number Eighty-nine!"

"Reprinted by special permission of the Saturday Evening Post. Copyright 1952 by The Curtis Publishing Company."

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