The Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History at the Breman Museum
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William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History Weinberg Center for Holocaust Education THE CUBA FAMILY ARCHIVES FOR SOUTHERN JEWISH HISTORY AT THE BREMAN MUSEUM MSS 250, CECIL ALEXANDER PAPERS BOX 1, FILE 32 SPEECHES, 1967-1982 THIS PROJECT WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE ALEXANDER FAMILY ANY REPRODUCTION OF THIS MATERIAL WITHOUT THE EXPRESSED WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE CUBA FAMILY ARCHIVES IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum ● 1440 Spring Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30309 ● (678) 222-3700 ● thebreman.org •• 1 MR. EUGENE C. PATTERSON: Thank you very much. Ladies and Gentlemen: I am· glad to see the large turnout of ladies. It reminds me of James Webb's comment. The Administrator of the Space Agency was addressing a large press conference in the State Department auditorium in Washington recently and he was being cross questioned as to why he was picking certain people to be astronauts and certain other people could not make it. Wny no women, for instance, why no Negro yet, and so forth. And Mr. Webb finally, a little confused, heatedly denied in his own words that "I have any prejudice whatsoever agai nst women ~r 8r'J1 other minority group!" (Laughter] Ladies and ge~t lerren, it is good to be here among friends. It looks as i f I brought much of rey hometown with me! [Lnughter] We have, of course, I have seen at this meeting, Armand May from Atlanta, DeJongh F~anklin, Cecil Alexander, Louis Regenstein, Morris Abram, of course, Charles Wittenstein and Joe Ross, who ia now in Detroit and it is our loss. I have seen the ~;ro rk they have done in the AJC in Atlanta . It has been great work. But I have also seen the CubaFamilywork they have done as individuals in thatArchives t~1n. Joe Ross, at a time during the sit-in crisis in our to\'m leading to · !Segregate luncheon counters, it was done under his leadership Mss 250, Cecil Alexander Papers, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History at The Breman Museum. •. • 2 in one of the great department stores there. So DeJongh Franklin, who led an election last year against a cand1date for Lieutenant Governor, who, while not defeated by DeJongh, was so severety chastened by him that we have not heard much from his since. I have seen, of course, Cecil Alexander get urban renewal off the ground and I have seen him in just recent weeks in one of those quiet actions that constantly occurs in our society and very few people know about them, resign from the Boar9 of a private school because the Board did not share his views that children should be admitted witho~t regard to r ace or color. You see these quiet things done by quiet people throughout the length and breadth of the land and perhaps that is what your organization is all about. The individual rna.n is the per3on who makes the progress . And so I am glad to be among such people and, of course, I do not need to tell you a bout Morris Abram. I have come here direct from Cape Canaveral. ~he magnificent flight of the astronaut Gordon Cooper was the stor,y there to cover. But something else happened the~e to form the CubaFamilythought that I \'la nt to bring you briefly Archives today . The time was the 25th hour of Major Cooper•s flight. The deadly peril of descent from orbit was still ahead of the man and a lot of us Mss 250, Cecil Alexander Papers, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History at The Breman Museum. 3 newspaper men 1 tense and sleepless --and we were from ·all over the world, 50 foreign countries were represented there among 800 newspaper men covering it. We were in the apace flight press center following the' destiny of a man and a nation•s space effort overhead. In one corner of that bright and littered room down at Cape Canaveral there was a· television set tuned to a conunercial program, and another was the Mercury control amplifier bringing in the voice of Gordon Cooper from space. ~10 southerners spoke in that room last Thursday, one Alabaman, one Oklahoman, both drawled. The Oklahoman carne up the hard way. He enlisted after graduating from high school. He went to college at the University of Hawaii and to the University of Maryland night school classes in Germany while flying mighty jets by day. He was a dozen years out of high school before he struggled through to a B.S. Degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology. The Alabaman is Governor of his state . The television set in the . corner of that press room at Cape Canaveral presented first the face and the words of Governor George Wallace, "I am sick and tired.," he said, CubaFamily"of this pro-communist line, our people Archiveswondering what people somewhere else are going to think of us ." He was responding to expressions of shock following the race riots in his state. Mss 250, Cecil Alexander Papers, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History at The Breman Museum. 4 "Some of them do not even know where they are in the world, much less where Alabama is," he said . "They take our foreign aid and then they feel free to criticize our Alabama for its way of life. The South pays 25 per cent of that foreign aid, 11 he said, "so I think it is time we quit wondering what they think of us and let them know it is going to be a matter of what we think of them," drawled the Governor of Alabama. Then the Oklahoma nos voice came softly from the Mercury .control amplifier in that room. Go1·don Cooper was hurdling more than 100 miles above Addis Adaba in Ethiopia. A meeting of African leaders was in session. The small town Southerner from Shawnee, Oklahoma, s~oke a message to them through a transmitter in his helmet, "Hello, Africa, 11 he drawled, "this is Astronaut Gordon Cooper. I am speaking to you frcm the American space craft Faith VII. I want to wish success to your leaders there. Good luck to Africa. 11 Choose your southern voice--two spoke Thursday . What I submit to you is simply that the South has two voices. And the voice of Gordon Cooper and not the voice of George Wa llace speak for it. The voices of men who reason, CubaFamilywho speak, who dare all not for self but Archives for the common good of all men are speaking above the voices of the uncomprehending already in many parts of the South. Two voices, yes. Mss 250, Cecil Alexander Papers, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History at The Breman Museum. 5 I remember the morning in Atlanta when the temple was bombed . I stood in that place and I looked at the little blue ctoir rooms of children lying rumpled under dust and broken glass and I wondered t'lhat property of soul and spirit had to speak with dynamite. But I remember, too, the other voice, th~ other voice of genuine sorrow and shock and outrage in my City that rose up f rom those people . That brick and mortar bound us all into closer community than Atlanta bad known before. I remember the burning of the Negro churches !n southwest Georgia last year where Negroes bad gathered in line to vote. I remember, too, the pencil scrawls on tablet paper that came to ~ desk later With dollar bills and dimes attached to them from humble white Georgians whose voices speak against such desecr~tion and whose contributions to rebuild those churches exceeG~d $10,000 in the Atlanta Constitution's fund alone. I remember the voice of the mob on the night that rioting took my Alma Mater; the University of Georgia, when unclean politicians in the squalid element of the Ku Klux Klan encouraged students to violence against the Court•s order for desegregation, the first in~ State. But I CubaFamilyremember the other voice. I remember theArchives voice of a valiant Governor, Ernest Vandiver who disregarded the counsel of cowardice that 98 out of 100 advisers gave him when they went Mss 250, Cecil Alexander Papers, The Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History at The Breman Museum. 6 to the Executive . Mansion that night and who instead ordered the state troopers to Athens to restore the peace and keep it. One of the two men who stood with Vandiver in that hour and advised him simply to do what was right and who supported him in repelling Georgia ' s school segregation laws and in meeting school desegregation with dignity, Carlos Sanders is his name. That man's voice now speaks from the Governor' s office of my State, for the people know he, like Vandiver, spoke for the right South and the racist bellovls of the demagogue he defeated, a man who, incident9lly, received the campaign assistance of AlabawD 's Governor Wa llace . That man is now finished and forgotten in Georgia, as Mr . Wallace wil l be, I think, in his own state . The South has two voices . The right one is going to p:::•eva il. My South is a great South. My people have known what it is to be poor, to be ill schooled and poorly led, ar.d with all thi s, to be challenged by circumstances beyond their experience in racial changes. But my people have a great compassion and sense of justice, too, and a granite strength, the strength to take the hemlock of Civil War b.ut the greatest CubaFamilystrength for curative change of heart Archivesthat the requirement of human dignity is now demanding of them.