Essay: BREACHING THE WHITE WALL OF SOUTHERN JUSTICE

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Ultimate solutions await the day when the Southern Negro has the voting power to elect Negro judges, sheriffs and prosecutors, or at least whites who get the message. Growing Negro registration has already begun to alter the political balance in the South, forcing certain politicians to be more responsive to Negro demands and resulting in the election of some Negro officials. The problem of segregated justice can no longer be avoided. It breeds contempt for law among the very Southern whites whom it seeks to favor; it goads the Southern Negro to take the law into his own hands, as in the case of the gun-toting Deacons for Defense and Justice. And in the Negro who flees the South, it reaps a harvest of hatred that explodes in the violence of Harlem and Watts. But above all, it is the inescapable moral imperative that demands "equal justice" for all citizens, in the South as elsewhere.