They're Not Going to Stop

Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was not mincing words. "The Negro citizen," he said, "does not subscribe to violence as a method of securing his rights. But he has come to the point where he is not afraid of violence. He no longer shrinks back. He will assert himself, and if violence comes, so be it." Since Wilkins' sympathies are well known, his speech was not entirely surprising. Much more remarkable was the burst of applause he got from his audience--composed of 127 white police officers, most of them from the segregated South.

Among those on hand in Louisville's Sheraton Hotel were 16 top cops from North Carolina, ten from South Carolina, twelve from Alabama, nine from Texas, two from Tennessee, 16 from Florida, twelve from Virginia, 20 from Kentucky, and four from Arkansas. (Mississippi and Louisiana were notably absent.) They were attending a conference on "police responsibility in race tension and conflict," sponsored by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and financed by the Ford Foundation. A main aim was to give the officers a side of the segregation story that they do not often hear back home. They got an earful.

"The Wrong Business." Wilkins predicted that "There will be no racial peace in the nation, in the South or in the North, until segregation and inequality are gone." The Negro timetable calls for a speedup in the integration process, and the N.A.A.C.P. intends to expand and intensify its efforts on all fronts. "The slow pace heretofore and the brazen cheating that has gone on in schooling, voting and employment especially, have forced the Negro to demand acceleration and still more acceleration . . . Law-enforcement officers will have to bring extra measures of understanding and restraint to this situation."

Equally outspoken was James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, the outfit that sponsored the Freedom Rides. Said he: "We do not ask the police of the South to be partisans, partial to our side; we do ask you to be impartial." Negroes, said Farmer, "are not afraid to go to jail now. They wear jail sentences as badges of honor. Not even being shot at terrorizes them. These people aren't going to stop."

In a deep Southern drawl, Atlanta's Police Chief Herbert T. Jenkins spoke in agreement. "If a police officer is so thinskinned that he is afraid of being called a 'nigger lover' because he is doing his duty, then he is in the wrong kind of business and should follow some other vocation . . . The time has come, it is here now, my friends, when an individual cannot be denied any public or official right or privilege because he is a Negro. The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is the law of the land. We might disagree on many things. But if there is disagreement on this point, I am anxious to hear it.''

One Man's Belief. "Drivel," retorted Walter L. Allen, safety education chief of the Alabama Public Safety Department. "As a Southern white man and a police officer with a record of which I have no shame, I can. do and shall disagree. I for one shall not abjectly surrender." Southerners, said Allen, have "no real hate for the Negro. We merely despise the mores, actions, principles and behavior of the mass. It is our sincere belief that by accepting the unusual Negroes we open every door to the most undesirable ethnic group in the civilized world."

But Allen's expressions were an exception in Louisville--and much more typical was an Alabama lawman who said that the sessions were such that he only wished his mayor and city council could have been there.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.