The Divided Negro Vote

Having won the vote, the Southern Negro must now decide what to do with it. In eight counties of Alabama's Black Belt, Negroes are divided over how to use their new power. The Democratic primaries next week will indicate their choice. Among the options: P: Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and some other civil rights groups are urging Negroes to vote--either for Negro candidates who are seeking Democratic nominations or for the most moderate white nominees available. "To give the Negro the vote," says Amelia Boynton, chairman of the Dallas County Voters League, "has cost worry, blood, sweat, jobs and lives. It is a privilege he should have had all the time. It is one he should use regardless." In Dallas County many Negroes are bent on ousting racist Sheriff Jim Clark and support his rival, Selma's relatively moderate Public Safety Director Wilson Baker. -- The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee under Stokely Carmichael has mounted a door-to-door campaign to keep Negroes away from the primary polls, even if it means the defeat of Negro candidates or sympathetic whites. Carmichael argues that the Negro has no hope of power within either major party as they are now constituted and so must exert his in fluence elsewhere. "To ask Negroes to get in the Democratic Party," he says, "is like asking Jews to join the Nazi Party." Carmichael's alternative is to organize independent parties at the county level, where Negroes have a registration majority or close to it, and then run third-party candidates in the general election. If successful, Carmichael's strategy could lead to a collection of all-Negro parties able to win only in counties with Negro majorities. -- In Macon, one Alabama county where Negro voters outnumbered whites even before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Negro leadership based at Tuskegee Institute supports the notion of racial balance in local government. In 1964 this group helped elect a white mayor of Tuskegee and a council of three whites and two Negroes. This year it has withheld support from a Negro candidate for sheriff because, says C. G. Gomillion, retired dean of the institute, "we would be vigorously opposed to anything that could lead to all-Negro government."

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