They underscore the fact that the States’ Rights Party, which ran Strom Thurmond--today at the center of the controversy that brought down Sen. Trent Lott from his post as Senate majority leader--as their presidential candidate, promoted a system of institutionalized racial segregation that was enforced by extralegal, lynch mob terror. They also show that Jim Crow was already being challenged by growing struggles led by Blacks in the South, which were having an impact on broader layers of working people and youth.

Dixiecrat Fascism (editorial, Aug. 23, 1948)
The Dixiecrats movement headed by South Carolina’s Gov. J. Strom Thurmond is more than a mobilization of the Southern lynchocracy for the preservation of "white supremacy" below the Mason-Dixon line. It is the rallying center for the native fascists of the entire country.

Almost half the delegates at last month’s Birmingham convention of the so-called "States’ Rights" Democrats were connected with such fascist outfits as the Ku Klux Klan, the anti-Jewish Party, the Christian nationalist crusaders, etc. Among the founding delegates was Gerald L. K. Smith, the most prominent fascist in the country.

The Dixiecrat movement makes no bones about its intentions to defy and violate all laws for the protection of civil and democratic rights. Its very composition, the very adherents it has attracted are proof positive that this movement bases itself upon "lynch law."

Let no worker dismiss the Dixiecrats as some two-bit assemblage of "crack pots." It already has deep roots in the official governmental structure of the South. Its seed is falling upon a rich political soil of reaction fertilized by the manure of bigotry and prejudice. It is a sign of the times, a sign that the class struggle is sharpening in this country.

The Negro people especially must take cognizance of this new development and act accordingly. Their fight for civil rights legislation will henceforth have to be viewed as simply a part of the general struggle to build a powerful mass movement ready, willing and able to resist the lynchers and secure their rights.

Students Protest Oklahoma Jim Crow (Feb. 9, 1948)
Mrs. Ada Lois Sipuel, Negro applicant for the University of Oklahoma Law School, has refused to register in the one-student Jim Crow "Law School" that Oklahoma officials set up overnight. Mrs. Sipuel has appealed to the Supreme Court to issue an immediate order to Oklahoma University officials to admit her at once to the regular Law School.

As the court delayed taking action, a thousand white students at the lily-white Law School in Norman, Oklahoma held a mass meeting at which leaders of campus organizations made speeches over the loudspeakers demanding that the University be opened to all students regardless of race or color.

Jim Crow elements among the students then tried to organize a counter demonstration. Their meeting in support of University officials in the fight against non-segregated education was a miserable failure. Other students converted the meeting into a debate and carried the bulk of the audience with them.

Both Parties Okay Jim Crow in Employment (Mar. 19, 1948)
By William E. Bohannan [Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Congress in New Jersey]
Both the Republican and Democratic Parties are making a big show about their friendship for the Negro people this election year. But in a vote taken in the House of Representatives on March 8, they showed their true colors.

By a vote of 119-40 both capitalist parties got together to kill a proposal to withhold federal aid to states which deny equal job and educational opportunities to all.

In killing the amendment to a Labor Department-Federal Security Agency appropriations bill, they in effect gave a slap in the face to the Negroes, Jews and other minorities in this country.

A majority of the members of both parties in the House debate deliberately stayed away from the discussion so that they would not have to vote on the amendment. The name for that is hypocrisy, not friendship.

A majority of the members of both parties who were present voted against the amendment. The name for them is a bi-partisan coalition to perpetuate Jim Crow.

It proves once again that the Negro people can expect nothing but double crosses from the capitalist parties.

It emphasizes the need for the Negro people to get together with their real allies--the white workers--and to build a party that will run independent labor and Negro candidates determined to put an end to Jim Crow wherever it exists.

Protests Save Mrs. Ingram’s Life (Apr. 12, 1948)
Mass protests against the death sentence for Mrs. Rosa Ingram, Negro mother of 12 and her two sons Sammy 14, and Wallace 16, have won a first victory.

Judge William M. Harper of Americus, Georgia, who sentenced the Ingrams to the electric chair for the self defense slaying of a white farmer, has been forced to commute the sentence to life imprisonment.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, it is believed, will appeal the case to higher courts in the battle to free the Ingrams.

Mrs. Ingram, a sharecropper, was attacked by a white neighbor when her pigs wandered into his fields. Armed with a rifle he threatened to shoot her and when she grabbed the rifle he beat her severely. At this point her two teen-age sons ran to the aid of their bleeding mother. A blow on the head resulted in the death of the white farmer.

The Ingrams were immediately hauled off to jail, denied legal right and found guilty by a lily-white jury. The landlord confiscated the livestock and tools of the Ingram family. The remaining Ingram children, the youngest of whom is 17 months, have been living in a tiny shack since the imprisonment of their widowed mother.

Mass protest has saved the Ingrams from the electric chair. Mass action must now be organized to free Mrs. Ingram and her two children from the Georgia prisons.

Resist Jim-Crow Draft, Randolph Urges (Apr. 12, 1948)
The threat of non-compliance with the draft was hurled in the face of American capitalism at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Truman’s Universal Military Training and Draft proposal. A. Philip Randolph, president of the AFL Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, declared:

"Today I should like to make clear to this committee and through you to Congress and the American people, that passage now of a Jim Crow draft may only result in a mass civil disobedience movement along the lines of the magnificent struggles of the people of India against British imperialism."

According to the N.Y. Times, committee members "indicated anxiety" at this stage, as well they might. The seething dissatisfaction of the Negro people with Jim Crow practiced by the federal government itself, had here found a clear and dangerous expression.

A. Philip Randolph is one of the best known Negro leaders. After World War I he was a prominent socialist. He turned to the organization of the Sleeping Car Porters and successfully accomplished a job of union building which gave him a national reputation. He came into prominence again in 1944 by leading the March On Washington Movement which assumed such mass proportions that President Roosevelt summoned Randolph to Washington and exerted unprecedented pressure to get him to call off the march.

"I personally pledge myself to openly counsel, aid and abet youth, both white and Negro, to quarantine any Jim Crow conscription.... From coast to coast in my travels I shall call upon Negro veterans to join in this civil disobedience movement and to recruit their younger brothers in an organized refusal to register and be drafted.

"I shall appeal to the thousands of white youth in school and colleges who are today vigorously shedding the prejudices of their parents and professors. I shall urge them to demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the entire registration and induction machinery."

Vigilantes Burn Unionist’s Home, Terrorize Negroes (June 28, 1948)
LOS ANGELES, June 19--Arson, fire-bombings and death threats were employed this week against a prominent former CIO official and a Negro family.

The home of Morris Zussman, former State CIO president and a Murray supporter, was fire-bombed for the second time in a month and a note left warning him to "Get out of town." On June 9 the same house was bombed by pieces of wood covered with gasoline soaked rags, and a small wooden cross planted on the lawn outside the house.

Death threats as well as several arson attempts were directed at the family of Dr. Geraldine Burton, who had moved into a new house in south Los Angeles on June 4 following the recent Supreme Court covenants decision. The note read, "Blacks, go out or we will kill you."

A Hotbed of Jim Crow--Washington, D.C. (Dec. 20, 1948)
The national capital itself, Washington, D.C., is one of the worst examples of racial discrimination and segregation in this Jim Crow country, states a sensational report, based on a two-year survey, released Dec. 10 by the National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital.

The report...charges "dominant real estate interests, commercial and financial interests" with "planning the segregation of Negroes in housing, jobs, theatres, restaurants, parks and playgrounds." Racial discrimination and segregation have grown steadily worse in Washington over the past 50 years and have reached their culmination in the past 16 years of the Democratic Administration, the facts of the report demonstrate.

Even the churches have been turned into agencies for "white supremacy." The report states that "one of the most disturbing aspects of segregation" is the "exclusion of Negro Catholics from ‘white’ Catholic Churches."

More of the Same (editorial, Sept. 26, 1949)
The Negro struggle for social, economic and political equality has grown so strong, militant and effective that politicians seeking Negro votes are compelled to promise some kind of action on civil rights. Accordingly, the Truman Democrats made lavish promises during the 1948 presidential campaign concerning the civil rights of Negroes.

Almost a year has passed since the election but not one of these promises has been kept. Instead the Trumanites have given the Southern "white supremacy" Democrats generous patronage handouts, turned over to them most of the key posts in Congress and allowed them free rein to block civil rights legislation by a filibuster.

The Democratic high command appointed one of the most notorious white supremacists, Senator James O. Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi, to head the Civil Rights subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When the newspaper reporters asked President Truman what he had to say about the appointment of this Negro-hater to a key post from which to sabotage civil rights legislation, Truman replied, "No comment." When they asked Senator Eastland what plans he had for legislation on behalf of the Negro people, he likewise replied, "No comment."

Detroit NAACP Wants 1,000 for Trip to D.C. (Dec. 5, 1949)
DETROIT--The Detroit branch of the NAACP is calling for more than 1,000 people from this city alone to participate in the nation-wide mobilization in Washington Jan. 15–17 to exert mass pressure upon Congress for the immediate enactment of civil rights legislation.

The NAACP’s plans for a militant drive against Jim Crow reach from the local level to the very steps of the nation’s capital, said Gloster B. Current, national director of branches, at a Detroit membership meeting on Nov. 18.

An important part of this campaign was the Detroit branch’s call upon Governor Williams for a special session of the State Legislature to pass a state FEPC law and to abolish segregation in the Michigan National Guard units.

The audience responded enthusiastically to these plans and to the report made by Ernest Dillard on the progress of the branch’s fight against restaurant discrimination, which was launched early in October.
 
 
Related articles:
Lott’s racist views are not unique in Senate cloakroom
What was the State’ Rights Democratic Party?  
 
 
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