• U.S.

THE SOUTH: With a New Weapon

2 minute read
TIME

Before the civil rights bill passed through the last stretch of the Senate foundry last week, the South’s most famous Negro leader was drawing up plans for a Southwide campaign to make prompt use of the new weapon. Alabama’s the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., hero of the history-making Montgomery boycott against Jim Crow buses, announced that his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (membership: 100-odd Negro leaders, mostly clergymen, in eleven states) is going to undertake a long-range drive to get Negro names on Dixie registration rolls by:

¶”Arousing masses of Negroes to realize that in a democracy their chances of improvement rest on their ability to vote.”

¶Setting up “voting clinics” in Southern cities to tell Negroes about “the techniques of voting and registration.”

¶Using “all facilities of the law,” notably appeals to the Justice Department under the brand-new civil rights measure, to prevent interference with Negro registration and voting.

In its get-out-the-Negro-vote drive, said President King, the S.C.L.C. will seek help from all Negro churches in the South, try to raise $200,000 the first year from churches, labor unions, foundations, civic organizations. First step ahead: a S.C.L.C. meeting in mid-September to set up the drive’s central headquarters in Atlanta.

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