Civil Rights: The Pistol on the Steps

Cleve McDowell was the second Ne gro, after James Meredith, to be admit ted to the University of Mississippi. Un like Meredith, Law Student McDowell rarely granted press interviews, made no splash at N.A.A.C.P. meetings, made himself as unobtrusive as possible. But last week, as he hurried up the steps of the law school building for his third day of classes in the new fall term, McDow ell dropped his sunglasses. He stooped to retrieve them — and out of his pocket fell a .22-cal. pistol. When he walked out of class, he was arrested by County Sheriff Joe Ford. A day later, McDow ell, 22, was expelled from Ole Miss.

Only a few days before, McDowell had told a campus newspaper reporter that he felt things were going pretty well. “I’m not walking around in fear of constant attack,” he had said. Yet he confided in Ole Miss Episcopal Chaplain Wofford Smith that he had bought the pistol because he was “scared.” The few U.S. marshals who had been living on the campus to protect both Negroes had left after Meredith’s graduation in Au gust. Recalled Smith: “McDowell said he had applied for a permit to carry his pistol. I told him this was the perfect tipoff that he had it. He said he couldn’t help it—he was afraid somebody might kill him.”

As it happened, Sheriff Ford, who is head of the Oxford, Miss., White Citizens Council, had already been tipped off about McDowell’s pistol. Boasted he: “Thirty minutes after he bought that little nigger pistol over in the Delta, the Citizens Council headquarters in Jackson knew about it.” Ford merely waited for the right moment.

Other events on the civil rights front:

> In Birmingham onetime West Point Football Coach Earl Blaik and former Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall flew into the city at President Kennedy’s behest to find ways of reconciling the Negro and white communities. White city officials deliberately failed to invite Negro leaders to the airport to welcome Blaik and Royall. Mayor Albert Boutwell, an ailing (diabetes) and so far totally unimpressive “moderate,” set the tone by declaring that the Blaik-Royall mission would be of course purely advisory, added Birmingham’s familiar refrain that past cooperation between the races had been “hampered largely by professional outside agitators.” With that, he led the visitors off to a private lunch at Birmingham’s exclusively white sanctuary, “The Club.” Then early next morning, two bombs exploded in a Negro district; there were no injuries, though several houses and cars were damaged by flying shrapnel. Through the rest of the week, Blaik and Royall spent their time listening to the problems of first the whites and then the Negroes. Said Dr. Lucius Pitts, president of the all-Negro Miles College: “It appears to me that this group is going to have rough sailing.”

> In Washington a House Judiciary subcommittee approved its own version of President Kennedy’s civil rights bill. It expanded and even liberalized the Administration’s package. Under the leadership of Brooklyn’s civil-rights drumbeating Congressman Emanuel Celler, the committee added a provision for a powerful FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission); ballooned the public-accommodations clause beyond Administration-set limits to include almost every establishment offering goods and services to the public; greatly expanded the injunctive powers requested for the Attorney General; boosted voting-rights guarantees to include not only antidiscrimination in federal elections but in state voting as well.

> In Richmond the Rev. Martin Luther King, echoing a suggestion by Negro Author James Baldwin, called for a nationwide boycott of Christmas-gift buying as a symbolic gesture to the six Negro children who were killed recently in Birmingham (TIME, Sept. 27). One adverse response came from Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. Said Wilkins: “I find it difficult to go against Santa Claus. I feel a good many other Americans would find it difficult also.”