"Nobody Turn Me 'Round"

The Grand Dragon of Mississippi's Ku Klux Klan, an unemployed truck driver named E. L. McDaniel, lives in Natchez. Another familiar figure there is Charles Evers, militant state field director for the N.A.A.C.P. and brother of murdered Medgar. Surprisingly, though these hostile organizations both have strong followings in the old riverfront town (pop. 12,000 whites, 11,000 Negroes), they managed to coexist--until six weeks ago. Then, when the president of the town's N.A.A.C.P. chapter was cruelly maimed by a booby-trap bomb wired to his automobile accelerator, Natchez Negroes could no longer contain their anger. Week by week, as bitter anti-Klan demonstrations have expanded to protest other longstanding Negro grievances, Natchez has inched toward the flash point.

Tensions reached a new peak last week as a result of a state court order enjoining both Negroes and countermarching Klansmen from street demonstrations. Negro pickets continued to parade for a dozen demands--notably a city council statement condemning the Klan, desegregation of public facilities such as the library and auditorium, addition of four Negroes to make a total of six on the 50-man police force--and were arrested in droves.

Snarls in the Streets. Since local jails were too small to hold them, hundreds of Negroes were shipped aboard chartered Trailways buses to Mississippi's Parchman State Penitentiary, a notorious bastille 204 miles away. There, demonstrators charged, they were forced to strip to their underwear and sleep without blankets, many on cold cement floors. Prisoners also protested that they were made to take laxatives but for two days were given no toilet paper. Their plaints, filtering back to Natchez, fanned Negro resentment--and by now the Klan was mobilizing its own forces. One night, enraged Negroes and snarling whites surged menacingly toward each other; only a plea by the N.A.A.C.P.'s Evers persuaded his people to disperse. In five turbulent nights a total of 537 civil rights demonstrators were arrested. Meanwhile, Negroes added several more stores to the list of businesses they are boycotting for refusal to give Negroes better-than-menial jobs; so effective did the boycott become that Negro faces almost vanished from the downtown shopping area.

Last week, just as things seemed to be getting out of hand, Federal Judge Harold Cox of Jackson, acting on the N.A.A.C.P.'s appeal of the state court injunction against demonstrations, ruled that Natchez Negroes could parade against grievances if they marched two abreast on sidewalks and obeyed traffic signals; not to be outdone, the Klan won the same right in a Mississippi court. Cox also ordered all jailed demonstrators released on $200 bonds. The night of their federal-court victory, Negroes paraded 1,000-strong through Natchez in the city's biggest civil rights demonstration, chanting:

Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round,

Gonna keep on awalking,

Keep on atalking,

Marching on to Freedom Land.

Truce at the Table. During a temporary truce at week's end, Lebanese-born Mayor John Nosser sat down with Evers and other local leaders to dis cuss their grievances. Whatever the outcome, responsible Natchez citizens, white and black, could take some solace from the fact that Nosser is a moderate. The mayor, who has long urged fairer treatment of Negroes, has had his house bombed by white racists and his four stores boycotted by both Negro and white militants. Without Nosser's cool head and Evers' abhorrence of extremist action, Natchez might already have erupted into another Selma.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.