The Other Half of the Battle

When Mrs. Geneva Collins took office as Chancery Clerk in Mississippi's Claiborne County, the two-member white staff quit. Mrs. Collins is black. Dan Nixon, a Negro magistrate in Brownsville, Tenn., was never informed of the date for the swearing-in ceremony after his election and had to seek out a local judge to be formally installed in office. Griffin McLaurin, a black constable in Tchula, Miss., has a problem with the white justice of the peace in his district. Says McLaurin: "When I bring someone in on a traffic charge, if it's a white man, he'll let him go. But if it's a Negro, he'll fine him."

Slowly and painfully, most of the 382 Negroes who have been elected to public offices in the South--ranging from mayor and state representative to constable and justice of the peace--have discovered that getting elected is only half the battle. Now, to help solve some of the problems facing Southern black officeholders, the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council has set up five campus service centers to provide basic training.* These centers hold workshops for potential candidates on legal requirements for filing, costs and techniques of campaigning, and their official duties. They also provide advice to those already in office and help black officials to research and introduce legislation.

Establishing Authority. Valuable as this assistance is, it is still the black officials themselves who must solve the problems of establishing their authority in a largely hostile white society. White intransigence to political integration takes many forms, ranging from defiance to outright intimidation. Black justices and constables are told by white offenders that "no nigger is going to tell us what to do." Moses Riddick, a member of the Board of Supervisors in Suffolk, Va., had a cross burned on his lawn after winning a primary. James Jolliff, a black constable in Wilkinson County, Miss., was arrested on charges of impeding and intimidating officers and was temporarily suspended from his office when he stopped Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents from searching a Negro cafeteria without a warrant.

In several Southern states local officials are paid on the "fee" system, according to the number of cases they handle. In towns where there is more than one justice of the peace, white officers can choose which J.P. they will bring minor offenders to for hearings. If one J.P. is black and the other white, the Negro official is simply ignored. William Childs, a black justice of the peace in Tuskegee, Ala., is one victim of this system. Childs charges that the white J.P. in his district averages 300 to 400 traffic cases a month, while he gets no more than 20.

Crisis of Identity. Frustrating and vicious as white resistance can be, it is only part of the problem. Many black officials are split over the question of whom they represent, often finding themselves in a crossfire between militant and moderate members of the Negro community, including many who feel that they should not have run in the first place. When A. W. Willis campaigned unsuccessfully for mayor of Memphis in 1967, his "real fight" was with the city's black community. His effort, he said, was undermined by Negroes "who felt that a black man had a nerve trying to be mayor," and by black militants who wanted to boycott the entire election. In Richmond, Va., two Negro councilmen were defeated for re-election when the black leadership supported two white liberals to replace them. Both the Negroes had supported a measure to increase city transportation fares, and one had voted against an open-housing regulation, arguing that the council was not empowered to pass such a measure.

The number of Negro-elected officials in the South has been rising steadily since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the surge is expected to continue. With it will grow the crisis of identity that blacks and whites must face in the South, and the problems will doubtless multiply. So, in the longer run, may the opportunities to root out discrimination. Says Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook, Negro professor of political science at Duke University: "Today, while it is true that the Negro still is part subject, it is also true that he is much nearer the start of political equality than at any previous time. He now has a toehold in the Southern political process. Negroes can help redeem the past. They can be liberating and redemptive agents. Black men, working with white men of reason, good will and a sense of justice, can largely free the South from the chains and illusions of the past."

*They are located at Southern University and A. & M. College, Baton Rouge, La.; Clark College, Atlanta, Ga.; Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Miss.; Talladega College, Talladega, Ala.; and Miles College, Birmingham, Ala.

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