Freeze & Thaw

The young Negro's rebellion against segregation continued to spread last week, touching off a great swell of mass arrests in the South. Items:

P:In Orangeburg, S.C., 1,000 students left two Negro college campuses and marched silently in files of two toward downtown drug and variety stores, bent on sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Town, county and state police, backed by three fire-department pumper trucks, blocked the marchers. "Let the leaders come forward," ordered police. Replied the students, surging on: "We are all leaders." Fire hoses and tear gas scattered the Negroes, threw them into choking confusion. Police arrested 350 students, marched them to a makeshift stockade behind the wire fence of the Orangeburg County jail's parking lot. At week's end they were being tried in relays of 15 for breach of the peace before a jury of five whites and one Negro.

P:Moving with planned precision, 200 Negro students from six Atlanta colleges staged Georgia's first mass sit-in by appearing simultaneously at ten segregated lunch counters in a variety store, rail and bus terminals, city hall, the state capitol, the county courthouse, and two federal office buildings. Arrested under Georgia's new anti-trespassing law were 77 Negroes.

P:In Memphis' first sit-ins, Negroes hit a lunch counter one day, next day moved on to the segregated public libraries. Thirty-six students and five Negro newspapermen were hauled from two libraries, arrested for threatening breach of the peace, disorderly conduct and loitering.

P:In Rock Hill, S.C., Negro students picketed a drugstore, town hall and two bus terminals. Arrested: 70.

But even as the civil rights impasse seemed to be freezing hard, there were signs of thaw on Southern fringes. In San Antonio, a Negro girl sipped a Coke at a lunch counter previously reserved for whites only. "I feel funny," she said, "but it's nice of them to serve us." San Antonio (pop. 575,000) had responded to appeals from its Negro population (9%) for lunch-counter equality after several meetings of white and Negro clergymen, businessmen and store managers. Opened to Negroes without incident were lunch counters in seven variety and 23 drugstores. Also, six Negro students from Fisk University were served at Nashville's Greyhound bus terminal restaurant where, only two weeks before, 56 students had been arrested for refusing to leave while police searched for a reported bomb.

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