Southern Discomfort

All one afternoon in Chicago, 16 Democratic party bigwigs sat around a discussion table assuring each other and a part-Negro audience of the unyielding Democratic support for the Fair Employment Practices bill. "You're either for civil rights or you're not," declaimed Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, to whom all issues are just that simple. "We don't have to dance around the pinpoint on that needle."

But when they had finished, Jonathan Daniels, national committeeman from North Carolina and onetime White House assistant, walked to the microphone. "I was one of the eleven Southern delegates who voted for Harry Truman in 1948, so I don't have to prove my allegiance," he began. "I come as a representative of southern Democrats--not Dixiecrats. I want to see an advance in the liberties of all the people. But I'm opposed to a compulsory FEPC, not because I want to keep people in slavery, but because we are making progress in the South . . . We cannot have a prohibition law against segregation in the South . . ."

There was a polite murmur of applause, and the meeting broke up.

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