Closer to Home

"I want to go to Washington to fight for more jobs, better schools, more federal money for all our people," pledged Charles Evers, as he stumped his Mississippi district seeking its congressional seat. Carrying his fight to the people via TV, the brother of murdered Medgar Evers insisted: "I want to represent all the people of Mississippi." But the face on the tube was black, and in deepest Dixie, Evers was defeating himself. The votes came flooding in last week to a patently predictable end.

The winner, a protege of John Bell Williams, who switched his Washington seat for the Governor's mansion, was conservative Charles Griffin, 41, and he carefully avoided the race issue. Avoiding the campaign as well, Griffin stayed home with a case of diplomatic flu while Evers' forces staged a get-out-the-vote campaign that resulted in a record turnout for a special election. Evers picked up 10,000 votes from his ticket-topping pace total in the primary. But Griffin got the rest and swamped Evers 87,761 to 43,083.

Forging the Bloc. At his Masonic Temple rally on Jackson's Lynch Street, Evers adamantly espoused the brighter side, declaring himself ready for another round. Although last week's victory allows Griffin to serve the remainder of Williams' term, he must face the regular Democratic primary contest in June. If Evers is a candidate again, he once more has a chance to overcome a splintered white ticket. Or he may avoid the Democratic primary by qualifying himself as an independent and go into a three-man November general election against the Democratic winner and a traditionally feckless Republican. At week's end Evers supporters were planning a drive to register 25,000 more Negro voters, which would give them a total of 98,000 as against 125,000 registered whites.

Already Evers has forged the feuding civil rights factions into the largest single bloc of votes in the district. At worst, he has made prophetic the ugly rantings of Theodore Bilbo, who had warned that some day "niggers would be trying to go to Congress." Griffin himself admitted that in time Mississippi may elect a Negro Congressman. "We can't lose," said Evers. "Every time we run we get closer to home."

It took a jury only two hours last week to convict Ku Klux Klanner Ce cil Sessum in the fire-bombing death two years ago of Storekeeper Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, the first time an all-white state jury had convicted a Mississippi white man in the death of a Negro civil rights worker.

Moreover, Sessum's automatic sentence of life imprisonment was the sternest punishment Mississippi has yet handed out in a racial murder case.

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