Time Bomb

Trouble simmered all over the South last week. When the Supreme Court decided (8-to-1) that Texas—and, by implication, all Southern states—must allow Negroes to vote in white Democratic primaries, the lid came off the race problem. At the end of a jittery, egg-walking week three facts emerged:

¶ On the white-supremacy issue, the South was still solid.

¶ U.S. Negroes had won a considerable moral victory, and had gained a little political ground.

¶ Everywhere south of the Potomac, the New Deal had lost a little more ground.

White Rule. Many a white Southerner believes that the Negro is a happy, simple creature who laughs and sings, content with his lot, unless he is “stirred up” by radical Yankee agitators. Summing up this popular philosophy last week, Mississippi’s John Elliott Rankin lashed out: “The Negroes . . . are having their hope of peace and harmony with their white neighbors destroyed by … parlor pinks in the Department of Justice [who] are already starting to harass the Southern states as a result of the blunder of the Supreme Court.”

On the basic issue of white rule, no major Southern politician raised a dissenting voice. In thunderous harmony (marred only by a few plaintive newspaper editorial writers) Southern thought was in favor of keeping the Negro in his traditional place. Florida’s New Deal stalwart, Senator Claude Pepper, had been having great difficulty in his primary race for reelection. Now, liberal or no liberal, he hopped nimbly on the bandwagon: “The South will allow nothing to impair white supremacy.” Said Louisiana’s Senator John H. Overton: “The South, at all costs, will maintain the rule of white supremacy.” And a desperate call to arms came from another candidate for reelection: Senator Ellison D. (“Cotton Ed”) Smith of South Carolina. He told his constituents: “All those who love South Carolina and the white man’s rule will rally in this hour of her great Gethsemane to save her from a disastrous fate.” In a fourth state, Alabama, white supremacy had already become a dangerously bitter issue. Against well-to-do, balding Senator Lister Hill, the 100% New Dealer who nominated Franklin Roosevelt at Chicago for Term III, up rose well-to-do, tall James Simpson, a corporation lawyer who decided to load his biggest campaign guns with the race question. Simpson accused Senator Hill of betraying “the South’s traditions” to “outside agitators.”

Black Hopes.’ The pot was almost to a boil. In Washington, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other Negro organizations sat on Attorney General Biddle’s doorstep, demanding proper legal backing for the Court’s decision. They would keep after him; this was an issue not lightly to be evaded, or easily stalled off. In Dallas, a Negro Baptist preacher filed as a candidate for the Dallas County school board. His alarmed white opponents used paid newspaper ads : “Vote the white ticket straight.” In South Carolina, a Negro Citizens Committee raised more than $300,000 to fight for their voting rights in court. Every where below the Mason-Dixon line, Negroes were demanding their political rights, or were beginning to think seriously about their rights.

Since post-Reconstruction days, Negroes have been excluded — for one reason or another — from Democratic primaries in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, Arkansas ” and Georgia. During the past 17 years, usually with prodding by the N.A.A.C.P., the U.S. Supreme Court has passed on four cases designed to abolish “white supremacy” in Southern voting. Three times the determined South has been able to retain its white poll supremacy. In last week’s ruling, the fourth, the Court said: Dr. Lonnie E. Smith, Negro dentist of Houston, must be allowed to vote in Texas’ Democratic primaries. Hastily, the South’s best legal minds went to work with the frank, unabashed intention of getting around the ruling.

The sober Dallas News suggested cautiously that Negroes might perhaps be given “their fair and just political and economic rights along with segregation. . . . The Court’s ruling will have its profound effect. We might as well accept it as a warning.”

But most Southern politicos were in no such sweetly reasonable, give-&-take mood. Louisiana’s Governor Sam Jones said calmly: “We’ve always handled that question—and always will.” Texas’ Representative Nat Patton remarked evenly: “Texas will find some way to work out a Democratic primary for white folks.”

Grey Future. Politically, the Court’s decision was a time bomb with a steadily accelerating tick. The bomb may go off at any minute. Much depends on the general patience of the U.S. people. For soon the whole U.S. will have to listen to about as much Southern oratory on the race question as anyone can reasonably endure. For of all things, the first item of business scheduled to come up before the returning Congress is the Marcantonio anti-poll-tax bill.

The Southerners in Congress are already overheated by the long States’ rights wrangling during the soldier-vote-bill debate. They have been brought to a boil by the Supreme Court decision. Now they face a bill authored by New York’s Communistic Vito Marcantonio. They are ready to oppose it with 1,000 amendments, no less—and with weeks on weeks of unrestrained oratory, pro & con everything in sight.

By that time the whole U.S. may come to a boil.

Still on the Border

Democrats found out that last fortnight’s Oklahoma election did not mean that Oklahoma is Democratic. Last week Tulsa’s city administration, Democratic since 1928, was thrown out. The new mayor: Olney F. Flynn, 48, oilman, campaigned as an anti-New Dealer, Oklahoma is still a border state.