Wrong Target

Something euphemistically called the Georgia Commission on Education was only a one-stenographer state agency charged with inventing anti-integration laws until Redneck Governor Marvin Griffin decided that it was meant for bigger things. To the unexploited office of commission executive secretary he appointed an ambitious, possum-shaped Atlanta lawyer named T.V. (for Truman Veran) Williams Jr., 26. Williams soon multiplied the commission staff by ten, moved into prominent quarters across the street from the state capitol. He talked the legislature into giving him the power of subpoena, plenty of money for a dreamy assortment of private-eye equipment--long-lens camera, wiretap recorder, pocket mikes, etc.--to sleuth on any citizen suspected of disagreeing with white-supremacy dogma. Finding Georgia too small for his ambition, he got authority to spend taxpayer money publicizing racial conditions all over the U.S. Hammering his stock line that integration of the races is a Communist plot, Williams felt free to:

P: Invade neighboring Tennessee by sending a state photographer into the Highlander Folk School at Monteagle, use the pictures of its integrated sessions for a slick-paper charge (200,000 copies) that it is a "Communist training center."

P: Pass out 100,000 booklets aimed at proving that N.A.A.C.P. is Red-run.

P: Broadcast leaflets reprinting an American Legion attack on the Southern Regional Council, respectable, old-line Atlanta interracial agency.

P: Mail legalistic pamphlets in support of Arkansas' Racist Governor Orval Faubus to 20,000 Little Rock voters on the eve of their gubernatorial primary.

P: Assign his photographer to sneak pictures in the Episcopal Cathedral's Hall of Bishops in Atlanta, where pastors and church ladies gathered for an integrated meeting of the Georgia Council of Churches.

T. V. Williams Jr. rode high and hard until this month, and then he swung the ragged blade of bigotry against the wrong people: Georgia politicians. Backing a rabid racist, Baptist Preacher W. T. Bodenhamer, to succeed Griffin in his scandal-scarred governor's chair, T. V. Williams Jr. even smeared Lieutenant Governor S. Ernest Vandiver in a headline charge that

"VANDIVER FORCES BRING RACE-MIXING FARM TO GEORGIA." Vandiver is the front-running candidate for Governor and choice of anti-Griffin Democrats headed up by powerful U.S. Senator Herman Talmadge. Suddenly Attorney General Eugene Cook, until then an approvingly silent member of the commission board, threatened an investigation of T.V. Williams Jr. and all his works.

Last week Williams resigned, bounced off to lend Bodenhamer the full measure of his private talents.

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