Catching Up

The Rev. John Henry Scott should be familiar to the folks of East Carroll Parish, La. He has lived on East Carroll's rich Delta cotton land all of his life--an amiable, chatty man who leads a church founded by his great-grandfather. But seven times in the past ten years, he has been unable to prove his identity. The county voting registrar requires vouches of identification from two registered voters. But all the registered voters were white, and Scott, like 61% of East Carroll's 14,443 residents, is a Negro. A friend once said hopefully, "I have some white friends, and we're all Christians." Scott answered: "Nobody's a Christian when it come down to identifying you."

Last week Scott at last found a Christian. Federal District Judge Edwin F. Hunter Jr. signed registration cards for him and 25 other East Carroll Negroes. It was the first time a federal judge has used the 1960 Civil Rights Act to break through a "pattern of discrimination" by registering voters himself.

Back 100 Years. As the all-important primaries start around the South this week, registration of 26 Negroes in the lonely northeast corner of Louisiana is a typical milestone in the tedious, undramatic campaign for Negro voting rights. While the White House alternately butters up and bemoans the powerful Southern Democrats in Congress, another part of Administration policy is to regard voting--and the political leverage that goes with it--as the key to all Negro rights in the South. Justice Department lawyers are prosecuting 30 voting cases, painstakingly gathering evidence for 70 more. With Justice Department prodding and some healthy foundation grants, four Negro civil rights organizations have joined in a Voter Education Project, administered by the respected Southern Regional Council and designed to thicken registration rolls through mass action.

Voter registration often means months of legal action against constant evasion, miles of doorbell-ringing arguments against fear and apathy--but it is beginning to pay off. White and colored students working in Raleigh, N.C.--where an 8,000-vote Negro bloc has been the deciding factor in the last two municipal elections--cruised through Negro neighborhoods with a Negro registrar in their bus and station wagon, registered 1,300 new voters at the curbside in six weeks. In Terrell County, Ga., a federal injunction two years ago finally resulted in the registration of 51 of the county's 8,209 Negroes. Last week New York Times Correspondent Claude Sitton was on hand when the Terrell County sheriff and an ominous crowd of whites tried to stop a new drive to get Negroes to register. Sheriff Z. T. Mathews had not expected to find outside reporters present when, on a hot summer evening, he confronted the Negroes at a registration rally in a small church. But, taking over the meeting, he apparently thought he could produce the right answers: "Are any of you disturbed?"

(After a little hesitation): "Yes."

"Can you vote if you are qualified?"

"No."

"Do you need people to come down and tell you what to do?"

"Yes."

"Haven't you been getting along well for 100 years?"

"No."

That approach failing, Mathews ordered a deputy to take down the names of all present in the church, so that he would know who in Terrell County was not happy. Afterward, as the Negroes walked out into the hot Southern night, Sitton heard a deputy remark: "We're going to get some of you." Said Sheriff Mathews: "We don't need no outside agitators in here. We want our colored people to stay just like they have been for the last 100 years--peaceful and happy. If they want to register to vote and they can't qualify, that's their tough luck."

The methods of making sure that their luck will be tough are unchanging: economic and physical intimidation; registrars who are chronically unsatisfied with the way a Negro interprets the state constitution or completes a registration blank. A registrar in Forrest County, Miss., found five college graduates illiterate. In Plaquemines Parish, La., the Civil Rights Commission was told that finding the registrar was "like a game of hide and seek." In 13 Southern counties Negroes constitute a majority of the population--and not one vote. In 35 other counties, 3% or less of the qualified Negroes are registered.

Choice Between Evils. But in bigger cities, and in the border areas, the Negroes have made considerable progress, and already are a political force to be taken into account. In Texas--where Negro registration has increased from 33,000 to 300,000 in 20 years--the race issue is dead in statewide elections, and in this onetime Confederate state both candidates for governor this fall are taking a moderate line on civil rights. In Atlanta, Savannah and Macon, Ga., tightly organized Negro voters' leagues form a powerful coalition with moderate "uptown whites."

Facing a newly significant Negro vote, politicians are suddenly careful not to alienate it. In Memphis, where a huge Negro vote was created by the late Boss Crump for. his own political uses, incumbent Congressman Clifford Davis anxiously dubs as "very vicious" any criticism of his 19th century voting record on civil rights, has abandoned his campaign custom of telling a Negro dialect joke here and there. Five years ago, when Atlanta Businessman Ivan Allen Jr. was sounding out the all-powerful white rural vote for support in the governor's race, he backed an outlandish plan for resettlement of Negroes. Last summer, campaigning for mayor of Atlanta in a city with registration 31% Negro, he found the city's school integration "a beacon light to our willingness and readiness to move forward." He won without a majority of the white vote.

Even so, most candidates in the cities still run as segregationists. "In many cases," says A. T. Walden, head of the Negro Voters League, "it's a choice between evils." Often Negro leaders--happy enough to be bargained with at all--fail to get firm promises for the choice they make. Says Southern Regional Council Executive Director Leslie Dunbar: "They just haven't learned to cash in on their power yet. It doesn't make any sense in cities like Atlanta, where Negroes have strategic power, to wait until 1962 till Negro policemen can arrest whites." But at least there are Negroes on Atlanta's police force--and the Negro's vote put them there.

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