Mississippi: See America First

Before the holocaust of Detroit, Michigan’s Governor George Romney had worked out a timetable of international travels designed, like Richard Nixon’s global peripatetics, to make him a Republican presidential candidate equipped by firsthand knowledge to deal with foreign policy. This month he was to tour Europe’s capitals; he planned to visit South Viet Nam in November for his second personal look at the war.

But the summer’s riots have changed his itinerary. Though he has not previously had any such deep involvement in urban problems, his embroilment in Detroit has caused him to switch his priorities. Just before the Midwestern Governors’ Conference opened at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks last week, Romney announced that he will spend this month touring the nation’s cities, postponing his expeditions to Europe and Viet Nam until later this year.

The decision signaled a major switch in the emphasis of his campaign, although no change in Romney’s thinking. All along he has said that the greatest threat to the U.S. could arise from within. Last week he merely redoubled the warning, coupling it with some of his strongest attacks yet upon Lyndon Johnson and his Administration.

“If you want to start a revolution,” he said, “one of the best ways is to build up false expectations. If you create the idea that you are going to have sudden, instant results, you are going to create disappointment, frustration, bitterness, hatred.”

Still smarting from his hassle with the President on the need for federal troops in Detroit, Romney angrily told a press conference: “I think frankly that everything that President Johnson has done has been done on a political basis. I think he’s a political animal.”

His travel plans indicate that George Romney also is learning to be a political animal.

MISSISSIPPI

Vote for the Past

“This year again,” mused James Peden, University of Mississippi law student, “they chose the past. The past covers Mississippi like a shroud.” The past, in this case, was personified by John Bell Williams, 48, who last week won the Democratic primary runoff, thus virtually assuring his election in November as Mississippi’s next Governor. By 362,300 votes to 304,200, Williams, a 21 -year congressional veteran and arch-segregationist who was stripped of his House seniority by Democrats for supporting Barry Goldwater in 1964, defeated State Treasurer Wil liam Winter, a racial moderate backed by Mississippi’s Negro leaders. Also defeated were all 22 Negro candidates—for local and county offices, including four for sheriff.

N.A.A.C.P. Field Secretary Charles Evers, who has sought to weld newly registered Negroes into an effective bloc-voting machine, said that in at least three heavily Negro Delta counties the elections amounted to “outright robbery,” even though federal observers were on hand to monitor the balloting.

In fact, the reasons for the Negroes’ defeat and Williams’ victory were more complex than mere fraud. For one thing, many Negroes voted for white candidates over Negroes because, as Evers conceded, “a lot of Negroes just can’t imagine any Negro being half as smart as a white man.”

Then, too, Winter and Evers played a Machiavellian game that backfired.

During the campaign, Winter met secretly with Negro leaders, explained to them that he would have to sound like a segregationist in public in order to pick up the white conservative vote that he needed, along with Negro support, to win. Realizing that this was the only course that would win Winter white votes, Evers and his lieutenants went along with the ruse. Evers even advised a Winter aide on election eve:

“Tell him to pour it on hard tonight.

We can take it.”

Plainly, many Negroes could not take Winter’s racist rhetoric—or were simply confused by the stratagem worked out by Evers and the other Negro leaders. Many even voted for Williams, or did not vote at all. Only about 100,000 of the state’s 194,000 registered Negroes cast their ballots—a surprising drop from the August primary, when about 70% voted.

Come November, Mississippi’s Negroes may have even less inclination to goto the polls. For their choice then will be between Williams and Republican Rubel Phillips, a Jackson attorney who is as outspoken a segregationist as his opponent.

*The runoff did not affect Negro gains in last month’s primary, when 15 Negroes were chosen for county posts such as justice of the peace and chancery clerk.