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response wittily, too, responding, “T.D., when I was a little boy in Floresville, I never thought you’d have this opportunity, that, “being a businessman,” he is somewhat conservative, is plainly the main drive in this new organization. “SURELY we worked for John Connally against Don. There’s no question about it,” Anderson told the Observer. “We went with Connally all the way down. We went to him, he didn’t come to us.” Anderson said that the national administration’s appointing Connally secretary of the Navy had been “a good endorsement of the man,” and “We didn’t find anything that was obnoxious to us.” True, he said, on the race question, Connally had been silent before he became a candidate for governor, but, then, Don Yarborough had been, too, when he was running for lieutenant governor. “Another key to the situation,” Anderson said: “This is the thing that Anglos are gonna have to learn. Connally in his organization put Negroes in on policymaking levels. I was the overall state coordinator, along with Thomas J. Stones of Abilene. We had also Jodie Sanford, president of Mary Allen College at Crockett, Texas. Those were our three major Negroes. We insisted that Negroes be put on local committees. They were.” As for white liberals, Anderson said, in an interesting adaptation of one of the militant, pro-demonstration Negroes’ arguments to his own more conservative cause: “They talk down to Negroes. Don’t come in and tell me how to do. You haven’t been a Negro. You don’t have a right to tell me what to do.Talking down to Negroes and not including Negroes and coming over and telling Negroes; and it’s so ingrained in ’em that you can consistently tell ’em and they’ll keep doing it. ‘Some of my best friends are Negroes’that sort of thing. White liberals tend to be more condescending,” Anderson said, than the people he deals with “in the Connally group.” Anderson takes pride in the well-offness of the Negroes in his organization. “We insisted that every Negro who participated [in the Connally campaign] put in his money. Pay his way,” Anderson says. “Oh, I think at last count people in our organization put in some $20,000. This is a new day. This old cliche, Negroes taking money forI don’t need any!Frankly, all of the people we have are independent in their own rightand don’t get any money from white people, either.” When he was telling the convention group about setting up candidates to screen prospective candidates, Anderson alluded to the same subject indirectly, saying that one thing they would want to know about candidates was, “What’s he been doing these years?” U.P.O. in Austin endorsed Mayor Lester Palmer against a Negro, B. T. Bonner, in a recent city council race. Bonner is not affluent. Bonner’s supporters assert he received 78% support from Austin Negro voters; Palmer won handily. State Democratic chairman Locke and Gov. Connally made explicit references to 4 The Texas Observer the 1962 campaign in their speeches to the group. Locke said he was glad to see Anderson and U.P.O.’s directors again, “most of whom I know quite well,” and complimented the group’s honorees, “all of whom are friends of mine.” He said he knew three of the honorees “in the Connally campaign,” and that his high regard for Thomas J. Stones was shown by the fact that he has been appointed one of three field organizers for the state Democratic committee. The U.P.O. honorees, in addition to Stones and Crawford, were these Negro appointees; to the board of Texas Southern University, Dr. J. A. Chatman, Lubbock, the Rev. Marvin C. Griffin, Waco, Joe Scott, San Antonio, and George L. Allen, who is also a new member of the Dallas planning commission; to the Texas board of corrections, the Rev. C. A. Holliday, Fort Worth; and to the 25-member governor’s committee on education beyond the high school, Dr. Vernon McDaniel, Austin, executive secretary of the Negro state teachers’ association. Connally’s entire top-level staff, including assistants Howard Rose, Frank Miskell, and Scott Sayers, attended the U.P.O. banquet to hear their boss. Connally opened his speech with a word on his pleasure at meeting again “so many old friends from campaign days” and said he was “extremely proud of U.P.O.,” which, he said, in less than a year had accomplished more than any other Texas political organization in such a short time. The governor paid particular compliments to Anderson. “I think he’s a great citizen,” he said. ANTI-UNION attitudes hovered near the surface of the convention and once or twice broke into the open. Joe Scott, one of the three honorees Locke said he had known in the Connally campaign \(the other two were Rev. Griftion in the press reports on the convention for the afternoon papers when he laid into Negroes for backing labor-supported candidates. “The Negro vote in Texas cannot be bought, it cannot be sold, and it cannot be courted for prestige or position,” he said. “Organized labor has courted the Negro vote for the last thirty years. You look around in your trade unions and you find no Negroes in the apprenticeship courses and no Negroes to amount to anything across the country. . . . Organized labor has used the Negro vote to gain strength. “It’s been said in the past that Negroes should vote for liberal candidates. And then after we use our vote to put this socalled liberal in office, what did the liberal do in return for the use of our vote? Nothin’. “I’m not against organized labor. We must organize the Negro vote. What have we got? No jobs, no participation in government. We say the devil with the state, the national, and the local coalitions, we will have the organized Negro. Unified, we can be our own power. We can outvote all organized labor and have some votes left for ourselves.” This speech, a demand for a coalition of Negro voters and political conservatism, must have reached the ears or eyes of the labor boys downtown, for by late afternoon Texas A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s secretary-treasurer, Roy Evans, and legislative director, Sherman Miles, turned up at the meeting, although they had not been invited, to hear, as Miles said, what was being said about labor. Evans got a ticket for the evening banquet from Anderson, but was not invited to sit at the head table. That night, in the course of his speech advocating equal job opportunities for Negroes, Gov. Connally cut loose against craft unions that segregate or exclude Negroes. If those Negroes honored that night could qualify for the jobs to which he had appointed them, Connally exclaimed with ringing emphasis, “I say to you there is no reason on the face of this earth why members of the Negro race should not be permitted to carry a pipefitter’s wrench or wear a carpenter’s apron!” This was strongly applauded. After the speech Evans stood in the lobby of the college dining hall where the banquet had been held and spoke very harshly of the governor’s reference to craft union segregation. “It was a pretty low appeal,” Evans said. “We have been doing this as a matter of course so longalong with the N.A.A.C.P. and other organizations. What he said was very favorably put, but the implication was there, and it goes along with what Scott says. It’s an attempt of the conservatives to prejudice the Negroes against organized labor. “In the first place,” Evans said, “he [Connally] doesn’t want the Negroes to form a coalition with Latinos and labor and elect truly liberal candidates. Secondly, they just don’t want the Negro to organize. If he [the Negro] doesn’t have any faith in organized labor, well, then, they can maintain a low wage. “I think what the governor did outside of that was a hell of a contribution,” Evans said. “We have commended his appointments, and his forthright stand on the Negro subject per se. There hasn’t been any governor take that stand before, as far as I know. “They may be trying this as a political device, but I think it’s just as much economics as it is politics. They don’t want labor to be strong for one reason, and that is, labor will be able to raise wages not only of Anglos, but also the Negroes and Latin-Americans.” Evans emphasized that he and state president Hank Brown threw Texas labor