The Backlash

Some of the staunchest friends of civil rights were worried about excesses in the Negro revolution--and about the white reaction to those excesses.

Declared President Johnson last week: "We do not condone violence or taking the law into your own hands, or threatening the health or safety of our people." In a joint statement, Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey and Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel, leaders of the Senate drive to pass the civil rights bill, warned: "Civil wrongs do not bring civil rights. Civil disobedience does not bring equal protection under the laws." And national leaders of the N.A.A.C.P., the Urban League, CORE and the National Council of Negro Women got together to urge "orderly, nonviolent demonstrations," and to condemn a tie-up this week of New York World's Fair traffic proposed by the Brooklyn chapter of CORE.

Increasingly, local civil rights demonstrators seem to employ pointless, often destructive and sometimes dangerous tactics. New Yorkers last week got a foretaste of what the Brooklyn CORE group's plan might mean: even without a deliberate stall-in, the opening-day crowd at new Shea Stadium, hard by the fairgrounds, caused a memorable traffic jam. The stall-in idea dismayed even the militant national leaders of CORE, who suspended the Brooklyn chapter.

In other recent incidents, Berkeley, Calif, demonstrators filled supermarket carts with food, then abandoned them in the store, left perishables to spoil. Militants in New York City threatened to waste water by leaving their faucets open. Negroes entered a segregated Atlanta restaurant, urinated on the floor, drew from former Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield a stinging speech on the question: "Is Urination Nonviolent?"

Rocks for N.A.A.C.P. The adverse reaction is all too visible. In a Boston St. Patrick's Day parade, an N.A.A.C.P. float bearing the slogan, FROM THE FIGHT FOR IRISH FREEDOM TO THE FIGHT FOR U.S. EQUALITY, was pelted with rocks, eggs, beer cans and vegetables. When Roman Catholic pastors in Michigan read from their pulpits a pro-civil rights statement, members of a Catholic Laymen's League stood outside the doors of 52 churches, passed out some 100,000 leaflets denouncing the civil rights bill.

A California poll indicates that 58% of the state's voters now oppose the legislature-approved Rumford fair housing act, which will be challenged by an initiative in November. That represents an increase of 12% in the opposition since January. After the Cleveland bulldozer death of Presbyterian Minister Bruce Klunder (TIME, April 17), some 225 of the city's Presbyterian elders and 75 ministers met and questioned three Presbyterian clergymen who had taken part in demonstrations. Not satisfied with their explanations, the Rev. John Bruere, minister of the integrated Calvary Presbyterian church, protested: "We have had to remind ourselves that we were not witnessing the antics of college students during their bacchanalian Easter vacation. The Christian way of solving difficult intellectual, spiritual, social and political problems is being reduced to a childish pantomime."

Like Vigilantes. Even California's Episcopal bishop, James Pike, a veteran champion of civil rights, was fed up by the horn-tooting antics of sit-in demonstrators in San Francisco automobile agencies. "What the mob did," he complained, "posed the same problem the vigilantes did when they went out raping, robbing and murdering. The law isn't adequate, they said, and took out their own venom."

The big vote polled by Alabama's Governor George Wallace in the Wisconsin presidential primary was further evidence of the extent of the backlash among Northern whites on the race issue. There are indications that Wallace may do even better in the Indiana and Maryland primaries. Democratic Senator Daniel Brewster, who is standing in for President Johnson against Wallace in Maryland, was heatedly booed at a Baltimore-area Masonic Lodge, cursed, jeered and spat at by others on his campaign rounds.

CORE's Achievement. Some businessmen who have tried to meet Negro job demands are becoming discouraged. Explains Los Angeles' Daniel R. Bryant, an executive of big Bekins Van Lines Co.: "I know many businessmen who are trying to get qualified colored people into high executive positions. But they get a letter from CORE demanding their records and wanting to come in and get their files--and they become balky." Adds Los Angeles Builder Ralph Lewis, who is a leader in the drive to retain the state's much-disputed fair housing law: "If I had a business and demonstrators came in, I think I would throw them out even though I am in favor of civil rights."

Aroused by a peaceful CORE sit-in in Denver, the Denver Post charged editorially: "CORE has managed to do what Bull Connor, Governor Wallace, Governor Faubus, Governor Barnett and the Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan couldn't do--it has made the cause of human rights look silly."

Not a Word. Causing still more uneasiness was the creation last week of a new national civil rights committee called ACT, which includes such extremists as the Black Nationalists' Malcolm X, Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Cambridge, Md.'s Gloria Richardson, and the Rev. Milton Galamison, zealot leader of New York's school boycotts. Nor could anyone find much comfort in the attitude of New Orleans CORE Attorney Lolis Elie toward what the summer might bring, particularly if the civil rights bill is defeated. Says he: "It is frightening to think of what will happen. There might be armed rebellion--and I wouldn't say one word to discourage it."

Last year, in waging the Negro revolution, civil rights forces enlisted millions in their cause. So far this year, the actions of a few threaten to lose many of these converts. The militants insist that they must continue to agitate or their movement will lose momentum; they argue that those who become disenchanted never were really with them anyway. Yet Hubert Humphrey's warning was well put. Said he: "The scenes of police dogs and policemen with clubs being used against peaceful demonstrations caused great public outcry. But if extremists in the civil rights movement decide to inconvenience hundreds of thousands of people, it's going to have the same reaction in reverse."

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