In Tallapoosa

Black mixed with Red last week to make a bloody brew for Tallapoosa County, Ala. At a rural church in the woods outside Camp Hill several hundred Negroes met furtively by night. Ostensibly they came together to form a sharecroppers' union against what they were told was the oppression of white landowners. One Ralph Gray was posted outside as a picket. Inside, the management of the meeting was taken over by a black Communist from Chattanooga. He represented, he said, the "Society for the Advancement of Colored People." He told his auditors to demand social equality and white intermarriage. If they did not get what they demanded, they were to take it anyway.

To inflame his hearers more the speaker directed their attention to the death sentence passed on eight young blackamoors at Scottsboro for raping two white girls in a freight train (TIME, June 22). He denounced these sentences as "legal lynching," demanded that the black boys be retried by a black jury. Into such a frenzy of excitement and protest did he whip his audience that they were openly threatening the life of Governor Benjamin Meek Miller unless he released the condemned men.

At the height of the meeting Sheriff Kyle Young and his deputies arrived at the church to disperse the assembly as a menace to the white man's peace. Words passed between the sheriff and Picket Gray. A round of shots was fired in the dark. Sheriff Young and a deputy fell wounded. So did Picket Gray. From the church came a volley of fire. Deputies on the outside volleyed back. The Negroes inside the church went scampering away to cover through the night. Four of them were left behind wounded. The deputies burned the church to the ground. Later a posse sought Gray in his cabin. When they were met with a fusillade, they broke in, shot Gray dead. Next day 200 white men scoured the county with bloodhounds, rounded up 60 thoroughly terrified Negroes who had been at the meeting, jailed 32 on charges of attempted murder and assault, criminal conspiracy, and carrying concealed weapons. The four wounded fugitives had vanished. Camp Hill's police chief cryptically remarked: ''They went out to chop stove wood and haven't returned yet."

By the end of the week most of Tallapoosa's Negro population had moved to neighboring counties. Still uncaught was the Red black from Chattanooga who had incited the outbreak.

Tallapoosa's racial clash produced reverberations outside Alabama. In New York the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which has been conducting a legal defense of the Scottsboro convicts denied that it was connected in any way with the Camp Hill affair. It charged that Communist agitators were deliberately "muddling the matter" and warned that their tactics to win Negroes to Communism were "the best means in the world" for getting the Scottsboro boys hanged or mobbed. The International Labor Defense, a Red organization which has been exploiting the Scottsboro case for political purposes, said the Camp Hill meeting was instigated for economic reasons and that white landowners had ordered it broken up to suppress the idea of a sharecroppers' union.

Meanwhile, bewildered by all the outcry their case was creating, the eight blackamoors of Scottsboro sat in death cells at Kilby prison waiting for the Supreme Court of Alabama to review their convictions next winter.

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