The Land of Boycott

After meeting a pair of friends for lunch, the New Orleans lawyer ordered a Falstaff beer, touched a match to a Philip Morris cigarette, and settled comfortably back for a session of table talk. "Oh-oh," chided one of his friends, "I guess you drive a Ford, too." The remark had a point, and the lawyer caught it all too easily. He admitted that he did drive a Ford, but added: "I'm changing."

In parts of the Deep South, Ford, Falstaff and Philip Morris have been nicknamed "The Three Fs" and made the targets of an extraordinary whispering campaign and economic boycott. The charge: they have aided the cause of Negro equality. But the boycott movement goes far beyond the phonetic Fs and, as practiced by both whites and Negroes, has spread to nearly a score of other companies. Most of the affected companies are reluctant to discuss the subject. Says the general manager of the Coca-Cola bottling plant at Birmingham: "I could tell you a whole lot about it, but I'd just rather not say anything." Says an official of the Kraft Foods Co. (which was criticized for sponsoring a television showing of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones'): "If you start fighting, you just give these idiots a dignity they don't deserve."

Most of the boycotts are unorganized, word-of-mouth affairs. Some crop up overnight and wither as swiftly. Others last for weeks or months in the ebb and flow of their effectiveness.

The Knowing Smile. Of all the companies, Ford has probably been the most affected. It is blamed for the civil rights spending of the Fund for the Republic--over which the company has no control.

An Alabama dealer says his sales are off 50%, attributes part of that drop to the boycott. Says he: "If somebody says something about it--even a friend--and you deny it, they just smile at you." Adds W. M. Turner, a dealer in Selma, Ala.: "The criticism of the whites--and I'm sur prised at some of the intelligent people involved--hurts, and we haven't got the Negro trade, so you can see how it is." Ford efforts to combat the criticism have been less than successful. The Memphis assembly plant, for example, began pasting its car windows with stickers, reading: "Built in the South by Mid-Southerners." One result: the slogan led to such gutter parodies as: "Built in Africa by Apes."

The Reverse Switch. The Falstaff Brewing Corp. of St. Louis got into trouble late last year, after it bought for one of its Negro salesmen a $500 life membership in the N.A.A.C.P. on the theory that it would help him in his dealings with Negro customers. The White Sentinel, a sewer sheet published in St. Louis by John Hamilton, an ex-Communist, printed a photograph of Falstaff's Vice President Karl Vollmer handing the check to an N.A.A.C.P. official. Squawked the White Sentinel: "When you drink Falstaff beer, you are aiding the integration and mongrelization of America." White Sentinel copies were circulated in Mississippi's Delta region, where Falstaff sales were cut. Vice President Vollmer flew to Jackson to say publicly: "No officer of Falstaff has ever commented favorably or otherwise on the principles of the N.A.A.C.P." After that, officials of the Jackson Citizens' Council declared the company innocent of the charges against it. Now Falstaff sales are back up--except that some Memphis Negroes, angered by its explanation, have switched to other brands. Philip Morris has had trouble partly because of a false rumor that it contributed to the N.A.A.C.P., partly because, like a great many other companies, it employs Negro salesmen. Snarled the White Sentinel: "The owners of Philip Morris may discover that their cigarettes are just for Negro consumption." A Philip Morris executive traveled to Montgomery and said: "Neither Philip Morris Inc. nor any of its subsidiaries has made a contribution to the N.A.A.C.P. The rumor possibly results from the fact that we, along with other leading tobacco companies, contributed to the Urban League." The Urban League, which works toward improved race relations, is a Community Chest member in Louisville and Rich mond, where Philip Morris has plants.

Economic boycott is a two-way street, and Negro reprisal efforts are by no means limited to the Montgomery bus strike. A persistent report--as persistently denied --that Coca-Cola bottlers had contribut ed to White Citizens' Councils caused a sales drop around Orangeburg, S.C. (where a Coca-Cola machine in a Negro-owned service station carried a sign saying, "This machine has economic pressure. It is dangerous to insert money").

In Florida Gulf Life Insurance Co. (which does about $6,000,000 a year in business from Negroes) was threatened by boycott after one of its directors, Sumter Lowry, filed as a race-baiting candidate for governor. Lowry was swiftly dropped from the Gulf directorate, and the threat eased. But C. Blythe Andrews, publisher of a Tampa Negro weekly, says: "If, after the first primary or later, we find General Lowry has been put back on the board, the insurance company will be in for trouble."

"Banners of Bitterness." Last week from the heart of the South came a strong warning voice against the dangers of the economic war. Said Mississippi State Senator William Alexander: "We have lifted the banners of bitterness and prejudice above our feeling of common sense and decency against some people and companies whose records for as long as a half a century have been friendly and helpful." Noting that the Land of Boycott is hardly a place to attract new industries, Alexander pointed to an all-important--and often forgotten--fact. Cried he: "We cannot afford boycotts. We have the problem with us of sustaining and augmenting the tremendous advances we have achieved in the postwar period."

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