• ''••e We Shall Not Be Moved'' Dcmomrra1in1t (o r cii•il right.\. -..:nuthild 1\ 'eg rut'S kneel and ptay he/t>re thf' l iry i-Jai{ in ,1ihunJ,'. Ca. '/ hey 1-rt're w ;estcJ hy police ,i hen they reiuscd to disperse. Negro Youth's New March on Dixie A new generation of Negro leaders is pressing home the bitter battle against segregati By BEN "· BAGDI This phetograph was taken hours after the Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Sasser, Georgia -- a church on i n the Deep South. • KIAN used for SNCC voter registration meetings -- was burned to the ground. Standing near the smoking ruins, their hands joined in prayer, are voter registration workers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com­ mittee and Negro citizens from Terrell County -- "Terrible Terrell" as it is called. Robert Parris Moses is a twenty-seven-year­ ways looked on the defensive, cringing. This time the 5000 voting-age Negroes, one is registered to old Negro of soft voice and hesitant manner they were taking the initiative. They were kids my vote. Moses and his friends were- and are- -con­ whose life up to February of 1960 was focused on age, and I knew this had something to do w ith ducting semisecret schools to coach local Negroes As you have just read in the SATURDAY EVEN­ Samuel Block and threeotherSNCC field secre­ his native New York City, scholarly work in the my own life. It made me realize that for a long how to pass registration tests. What happened to ING POST, the Student taries had to flee Ivy League and teaching in an expensive private time I had been troubled by the problem of being Moses is not unique; a week later a colleague was Nonviolent Coordinating over the roof of their office in school. He had never been in Committee faces real danger in Greenwood, Mississippi, the South and had a Negro and at the same time being an American. kicked to semiconsciousness, a month later an­ its campaign for to avoid a potential never wanted to go. But he did go, at last. This was the answer." other was shot dead. Much is at stake, for Amite democracy in the South. lynching by a white mob armed with guns and On the morning·of August 29, 1961, Moses was Robert Moses and his project are significant, is one of 137 counties in the South where Negroes Since the POST article was written, a wave of ropes. walking in khaki chinos and a T shirt down the but more significant still is the new generation of are a majority but have few votes. Such counties terror has swept over Georgia and Mississippi: Robert Moses, SNCC field secretary, and dusty main street of Liberty, Mississippi (popu­ American Negro that h e typifies. It is a body of are the backbone of a powerful conservative others lation, 642). There he was s Four churches -- two of which were used as were arrested in Indianola, Mississippi, for "dis­ truck down by a young men and women who will make an impres­ white force in American politics. When Negroes cousin of the local sheriff and beaten on the head sion on the history of their country. ft is the first begin voting in these counties there will be pro­ meeting places for registration rallies -- have tributing handbills without a license." (The hand­ until his face and clothes were covered with blood. generation of American Negroes to grow up with found changes in Southern and national politics. been burned to the ground in Southwest Georgia. bills advertised a meeting on voter registration to Considering where he was and what he was up the assumption, " Segregation i s dead.'' It has Nonviolent themselves, the students appear un­ Prathia Hall, Jack Chatfield, and other SNCC take place that evening.) to, the violence is not surprising. Moses-A.B. transformed integration from a legal contestlo a moved by the violence of others. In 1960 their workers were Hamilton C ollege, M.A. Harvard, Ph.Q. candi­ mass movement, fighting not for future c hange battleground was the lunch counters. In 1961 it shot at in Dawson, Georgia. And yet, despite the terror and the intimidation, date-was trying to upset the social structure of b Two young Negro girls SNCC's ut for results here and now. Sensitive to the was Freedom Rides on buses. From 1962 onward were seriously injured program of voter registration and direct the Deep South and change party politics in the emergence of colored men all over the world, it will be the ballot box, and in this they march in Ruleville, Mississippi, when nightriders shot action WILL continue. United States. His method: helping rural Negroes conscious that there is a time bomb ticking in the wi th a massive army. Wii l\ them are all major into the home of a couple prominent in a SNCC For information on how you can help these stu­ register to vote. crowded Negro slums of t he United States, the· Negro civil-rights groups, strengthened by $325, .. voter registration drive. dents and their efforts, please contact " One day at h ome in New York," Moses told Negro college students of J962 are welded into 000 in cash from the Field Foundation in Chicago me, " I saw a picture in The New York Times of one of the most fi ercely united, d ynamic and and the Taconic Foundation in New York. Back­ Negro college s tudents 'sitting i n' at a lunch optimistic social movements of our time. ing the vast drive to register Southern Negroes to counter in North Carolina. That was in February, Characteristically, they seek out the toughest vote is the United States Department of Justice, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1960. The students in that picture had a certain problems in the toughest places. Liberty, Mis­ which gives the movement moral support and look on their faces- sort of rnllen, angry, deter­ sissippi, is the county seat of Amite C ounty, intervenes with lawsuits and court orders to strike 799 1/2 Hunter Street, N. W. mined. Before, the Negro m the South had al- where 54 percent of the population is Negro. Of down barriers. Atlanta 14, Ga. • kchnique of nonviolence: "If they are insulted, they do not answer back. If they are attacked physically, they do not hit back." Robert Moses, a teacher, went Charles McDewattendedcol/ege south when the sit-ins began. in the South, stayed to fight. Who are these young Negro revolutionaries? integration, I could return as a reporter and still hold it in, play it cool. This is the kind of self­ papers than the students, but which permeates How did they get this way? Why are they so dif­ find most working-class whites proclaiming that repression every Negro builds into himself. But the slums in large cities. These are the Black ferent from their parents? How do they work? in the Deep South integration would never come. when you do something personally to fight Muslims. What have they done so far? But today doubt is replacing certainty. I have prejudice there is a feeling of great release." Muslims mean business. They pray to Mecca In two years they have revolutionized the drive just finished talking with Negro leaders in New Something like this was happening to other five times daily, they dress soberly, work hard, for integration. With sit-ins and Freedom Rides York, Washington and Atlanta, and with Negro college Negroes. Charles Frederick McDew had pay their bills, forbid drinking and smoking, they have won equal treatment at lunch counters, students and their leaders through the Deep been a high-school athlete in Massillon, Ohio, so manage their own apartment houses and depart­ buses, terminals, public parks, swimming pools, South. I listened as well to whites. For the first accepted by everyone in his town that he grew ment stores, and teach in their state-accredited theaters,churches, libraries, museums and beaches time, in places like Birmingham and Jackson, one up without race consciousness. His father had schools that the white race is rotten and the in many cities and towns of the Deep South could hear the hard core cracking. There was the gone to a Negro college in South Carnlina, and colored races will inherit the earth, including the which orthodox civil-rights groups had privately Mississippi farmer in town for the day saying, "I to please him McDew went to the Deep South U.S.A. They teach members not to strike first, written off for decades. suppose integration's coming, what with the Fed­ for the first ti me, to go to college. In his first three but if struck to be prepared to die in retaliation. They have done it with the sophisticated tech­ eral Government pushing it"-and then with months he was arrested three times and struck oy For millions of Negroes unable to accept the nique of nonviolent protest, adopted from their bitter puzzlement- "and those damn young a policeman for doing or saying things that had Muslim theology or puritanical life, the Muslim patron saint, the Indian Mahatma Gandhi. They niggers." been normal back in Massillon- trying to enter message still has a powerful, emotional appeal. ask politely for equal service in a public place the main YMCA in town wi th his Ohio member­ The influence is strong in every large Northern and wait until something happens. If they are in­ New Heroes, New Expecl:ltions ship card or sitting in a "white" railroad car.