Nation: From Satisfaction to Fury

Meeting in Washington for the 55th annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, some 2,000 delegates could find real cause for satisfaction in the advance of the Negro revolution.

The Supreme Court, in a busy, term-ending week, had just invalidated the trespass convictions of 42 civil rights sit-in demonstrators in three Southern states. And the long-awaited civil rights bill would surely be signed into law by President Johnson on or about July 4.

Since the N.A.A.C.P., oldest, largest and among the most levelheaded of civil rights organizations, has long concentrated on court and legislative action instead of street demonstrations, the delegates now felt the correctness of their course had been demonstrated.

That was the spirit in which the convention began. Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins decried the “reckless adventurism” of more militant civil rights groups. Warned Carl Rowan, a Negro and director of the U.S. Information Agency: “Don’t use an elephant gun to hunt toads.” Counseled Guest Speaker Hubert Humphrey, the Senate’s Democratic floor manager for the civil rights bill: “There is a place and a time for banners. But there is also a time to stack the banners for a while and get down to the patient, infinitely detailed work of making civil rights realities.”

But then, into this atmosphere of calm, cool and collected reasoning, came word of the three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi. And in that instant the whole tone of the N.A.A.C.P. convention changed. Charles Evers, brother of Mississippi’s assassinated N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers, passionately demanded that the delegates stage a protest march on the Department of Justice. “Let’s go,” cried the delegates, and only with difficulty did their national leaders dissuade them from marching instantly.

And then, acting in an outraged, all-night session, the N.A.A.C.P. Board of Directors adopted a resolution demanding that President Johnson “invoke the power of the Federal Government” by “taking over the administration of the state of Mississippi.”