Civil Rights: The Dangers of Militancy

While white men in Washington were arguing about civil rights legislation, the surging Negro outburst crashed beyond the limits of law, beyond the old framework of passive resistance, into a dangerous new dimension of violence. In their new mood of militancy, many Negroes were jeering down moderate leaders as "Uncle Toms" and heeding more violent voices.

Militancy brought clashes of fists, stones, clubs, guns. In Cambridge, Md., a brief truce between Negroes and whites quickly gave way to warfare, with bands of armed and angry men roving the streets (see following story). In Savannah, Ga., ignoring appeals for caution voiced by responsible leaders, Negroes broke into a window-smashing, tire-slashing rampage that lasted sporadically for two nights and a day. The outbreak began when 1,000 Negroes marched downtown to protest the arrest of a Negro leader. A young New York Negro named Bruce Gordon, a member, oddly enough, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, urged the crowd to march on the city jail. Police moved in with tear gas and fire hoses. The following night, Negroes lay down in the streets to stop traffic. When police began hauling roadblockers away, a pitched battle erupted. Negroes hurled rocks and bottles. Again the police dispersed the crowds with gas, concussion grenades, and the threat of riot guns. All told, 167 adults and children were arrested, and four people were wounded by gunfire.

Signs of Objection. A consequence of the Negroes' heightened militancy was that it brought some signs of dismay and hostility among Northern whites. In Chicago, Lawyer Stephen Love, a white member of the N.A.A.C.P., angrily resigned from the organization because its leaders refused to apologize to Mayor Richard Daley for the jeering he received at an N.A.A.C.P. meeting. In Washington, Ohio's Democratic Senator Stephen Young warned that if any Negro demonstrators try a sit-in demonstration in his office he will "personally and forcibly" throw them out. In New York City, demonstrators besieging a White Castle hamburger shop (they were demanding that the owners of the chain hire more Negroes and Puerto Ricans) met with a Dixie-style barrage of jeers and insults from white youths of the neighborhood.

More important, perhaps, were the signs of objection to the new brand of Negro militancy that began to appear in the moderate press. When pickets from a local organization called the Joint Committee on Equal Opportunity began a prolonged sitdown demonstration in the corridor just outside Mayor Robert Wagner's office, the civil-rights-minded New York Times was sorely disturbed. "Demonstrators," said the Times, "cannot be allowed to interfere with government (city, state or national)," and the committee, "by these tactics that go beyond the bounds of legitimate picketing, is building up resistance against achievement of the just goals it seeks." Syndicated Cartoonists Bill Mauldin (Chicago Sun-Times) and Paul Conrad (Denver Post), strong pens for the cause of Negro rights, drew sharp pictorial jabs against the bitter criticism that other Negroes at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Chicago had thrown at University of Mississippi Student James Meredith because they considered him much too moderate.