The Outrage of Decent Men

About 45 minutes after Sunday midnight, a reporter at Jacksonville's Florida Times-Union snatched up a noisy phone, heard a man identify himself in pine-soft accent as a member of the "Confederate Underground." He had just blasted the Jewish Center and a Negro school, he bragged, and bombings would continue until segregation is restored everywhere in the South.

Only 15 minutes before the anonymous call, a ten-stick dynamite bomb warped doors at the Jacksonville Jewish community center; some 15 minutes after the call, a nearly identical bomb smashed windows at the all-Negro James Weldon Johnson High School. Next day brought word from Birmingham, Ala., 370 miles to the northwest, that a mighty 54-stick bomb had been found attached to a damped-out fuse in the window well of a downtown synagogue. These three brought to 45 the South's bomb count since January 1957. Most of the attacks have been against Negroes, but. for the first time since a short-lived 1951 outbreak in Miami, the South's spare Jewish population (less than 1%) was suffering directly from the redneck dogma that integration is a Jewish plot. Since last November, bombs have landed at six Jewish centers and synagogues.

Last week's bombs set off a counter-explosion. Moderates and White Citizens' Council members alike condemned the violence, blamed it on the K.K.K. or the "Klan-minded." And action followed the talk. Jacksonville's Mayor Haydon Burns called a quick meeting of Southern mayors eager to do something, by week's end was in all-day working session with mayors and police chiefs of 28 key cities. Two decisions out of their closed-door sessions:

P: Jacksonville's police department be came the clearinghouse for information on bombings anywhere in the South.

P: A total of $55,700 in reward from all cities was put up for bombers intercepted anywhere.

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