ustxtxb_obs_1963_11_15_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

A Poster in the Henry Campaign FREEDOM VOTE Elect AARON HENRY for Governor ED KING for Lt. Governor Nov. 2nd 3rd 4th at Committee to eicct Aa,on Henry / 1072 11010 S1.. 1.k.00. Miss. “Though we certainly can’t realize, history was being made all over this state this week,” Moses told an integrated “victory rally” and dance in Jackson. Campaigners for Henry went into towns all over the state, Moses said. “Even if they gathered one or two votes, and even if they didn’t get one, they went around telling the people there is a whisper of freedom. The Negroes do not intend to let another election be held in Mississippi without the Negroes being heard.” “This is the most significant fight for freedom in the entire United States,” Low enstein told a rally in Greenwood, “because when you get freedom in Mississippi, we’ll have freedom throughout the entire United States.” At a Jackson rally Lowenstein said, “This is the first time in America we had to understand what it was like for it to be necessary to campaign underground.” “In spite of harassments, beatings, shootings, confiscated ballots, and more than 100 arrests, the freedom vote total is expected to reach 80,000 ballots,” Rev. King said. If democracy was effective in Mississippi, he said, Henry would be “the next governor.” A history of this campaign should be written ; a few of its episodes are dealt with in an associated report this issue. ALL THIS TIME there was a regular election going on, too, and it had its historic undertones, its analogies to the Texas situation. Lt. Gov. Paul Johnson defeated two Democratic opponents in primaries last August, and in the one-party tradition he would have been a shoo-in this November. But just as the Republicans are challenging the one-party system in Texas and elsewhere in the South, they did so here in the candidacy of Rubel Phillips, a Jackson attorney. Johnson argued that a two-party system would divide “our white conservative majority” and turn over political control to the Negroes. He said it would lead to “more Negro participation in government.” Phillips’ running mate was quoted referring to the “black Democratic Party,” an interesting inversion of the campaign rhetoric against the “Black Republican” 103 years ago. Because of the widely publicized transcript of alleged conversations between Johnson, Gov. Ross Barnett, and Atty. Gen. Bobby Kennedy on integrating Ole Miss, Phillips sanctioned advertising calling Johnson an “integrationist” and a “doublecrosser” on this score. Johnson forces shot back that Phillips was a “moderate” on social legislation by his own admission. This accusation was based on a personal letter Phillips supposedly wrote, and the Johnson people somehow got hold of. The underlying fact is that in Mississippi politics it is an admission to be a moderate on race, an admission that is stamped on a man like a badge of dishonor, and avoided like one. Johnson, elected five to three, did not prevent the Republicans from getting their desired beachhead here for Sen. Goldwater, even though Johnson has elaborate plans to get Kennedy out of the White House, himself. The free elector plan to which the governor-elect is committed, he said in an interview after his election, entails as many states as can be induced to join the plot putting up favorite sons for president; electing presidential electors who are pledged to the favorite sons, not to the national nominees of their party; and then, depending on how the November, 1964, voting goes, holding back the electoral votes thus tied up to try to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where a conservative would have a better chance. Johnson visualizes presidential preferential primaries in the participating states after the national conventions, and 60 days before the national election, in which voters of states might be asked to express preferences between Kennedy and a conservative like Goldwater, whether Goldwater is the nominee of the Republicans or not. In a state where a governor does not cooperate, Johnson said, the free electors movement can work with the governor’s political enemies and possibly “take the state away from him.”