"The Better Element"

The Chattanooga Times spoke the concern of many a Southerner: "[Picky Pie] Hill was murdered, but it is the South which again was lynched in the unreasoning fury of a cowardly mob." There was some question whether it was actually the act of a mob (see above). But inevitably, the report of the year's first lynching* attracted wide attention in the nation's press, obscuring the slower, less spectacular but undeniable improvement in the Negro's lot in the South.

Some 700,000 Negroes qualified to vote in the 1948 elections--six times more than in 1940--and the Atlanta Constitution's Editor Ralph McGill predicted that 2,000,000 would go to the polls in 1952.

In Atlanta, a bigoted little obstetrician named Samuel Green, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, was frantically exhorting his Kleagles and Cyclops to mass for a big night of cross-burning and hate-spieling at Stone Mountain next week to prove to everybody that his movement wasn't on the skids. But one Southern governor had denounced the Klan, without suffering for it, as a mob of "hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks," and in the past year antimasking ordinances had been passed in Atlanta, Columbus and Macon, Ga., Miami and Tallahassee, Fla., and a number of smaller communities. In Grand Dragon Green's home town, the fight against him had been led by the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Georgia Council of Churchwomen and leaders of Kiwanis, Lions, Rotary and other civic clubs. Reported Alabama's (Negro) Tuskegee Institute last week: "The better element of whites is against [the Klan] and Negroes are no longer afraid of it."

To Court. Only 25 miles from Picky Pie's murder, a federal grand jury last week indicted seven men for beating a Negro, and a deputy sheriff for letting them do it. Occasional cowardly attacks on Negroes still took place in the back country, but more & more such cases were winding up in the courts.

In Dallas last week, the City Council ignored grumblings of a delegation of whites, voted unanimously to let 36-year-old Bill Cothrum, a white contractor, build a 408-unit Negro housing development on land adjacent to a white section. "We talk of doing things to house the Negroes," argued one of Cothrum's supporters, "but I don't blame them for looking at us with distrust in their eyes...of course we have to make sacrifices." The city of Jackson, Miss. opened a new $500,000 park for Negroes, then voted a $350,000 bond issue to build a civic auditorium in the park.

Jim Crow. Some Negro leaders resented the very steps, small and often grudging, that were making the South a more tolerable place for the Negro to live. They argued that every attempt to build better segregated parks and schools was only perpetuating what they were fighting to end: Jim Crowism. It was probably a valid conclusion. Many white Southerners were working unselfishly to reduce the Negro's squalor, illiteracy and ill-health, to end his disenfranchisement and ease his fear of violence. Perhaps a majority of these same Southerners still insisted that segregation was an institution that must not be changed.

* There were two last year, both also in Georgia. Since 1940 there have been 34, compared to 127 in the preceding ten years, 932 in the years from 1898-1907.

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