Signal

Among 1,000 Southerners who swarmed into the auditorium of conservative Birmingham, Ala. last week for a Southern Conference for Human Welfare, were scores of Negroes, mostly educated. As this was a "progressive conference expressing the progressive spirit of the South," in response to the findings of President Roosevelt's National Emergency Council on "the nation's No. 1 economic problem" (TIME, July 18), blacks mingled freely with whites in selecting their seats. They did so, at least, for two days. Then the police of Birmingham appeared and, herding the black delegates into a segregated section, enforced the city's Jim Crow law.

The Negro delegates took their herding quietly. But before the Conference dispersed, after establishing itself as a permanent, continuing body, a signal resolution was passed without dissent: no future meetings for Human Welfare shall be held in any city having a Jim Crow law.*

>Hugo Black, only living man to have belonged to both the Ku Klux Klan and the U. S. Supreme Court, got a Thomas Jefferson medal from the Conference for being "the Southerner who has done most to promote human welfare."

>Birminghamans were incensed when they learned that besides President Frank Graham of University of North Carolina and Mrs. Louise Charlton, U. S. Commissioner of the Federal District Court, one of the Conference's chief organizers was Joseph Gelders, Southern representative of the Committee for Peoples Rights, in Birmingham for "communistic" activity among Birmingham steelworkers.

*Representative Arthur W. Mitchell of Chicago, only Negro member of Congress, last week lost his case before ICC against Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway for kicking him out of a Pullman seat when one of its trains entered Arkansas, making him ride in a Jim Crow day coach (TIME, May 24, 1937). ICC ruled that demand for Pullman accommodations by Negroes is so small it would be unfair to ask railroads to Supply separate Pullmans so as to comply with local Jim Crow laws.

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