ustxtxb_obs_1963_11_15_50_00005-00000_000.pdf

to get out of the car: Greene floorboarded the gas feedthree shots were fired after them, one going into a tire, another grazing off a fender, and a third entering the trunk near the tail-light. Again the whites gave chase, but, Payne says, Greene zig-zagged through Lafayette, Miss., at 60 miles an hour and turned off on a side road the other side of a hill, losing them. They changed the tire and went back to Jackson. In Jackson that night, Greene showed a bullet hole in the fender of the car, and another in the trunk. Soon thereafter, he and a white girl, \(who had, the night before, paid $12 for illegal parking during derground ballots” in cardboard boxes into the car, to take them down to the post office to mail out for return to Jackson. As for the wild chase and the shooting, Greene says, “All this is very unnecessary. The police should protect the people like they are supposed to. It’s not necessary to have to outrun a car to save your life.” Greene says he has had to outrun cars many times to stay alive, working for Snick in Natchez. In the spring, in Greenwood, “it happened almost every day” for three months after the February shooting in which Jimmy Travis, 20 then, was shot in the back of the head. Travis told about this in Jackson. He had seen a ’62 white Buick parked near the Greenwood office. He, Bob Moses, and Randolph Blackwell of the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project set off on the highway, only to find the Buick following. It pulled even with them, Travis says, and suddenly they were sprayed with bullets. Travis figures they must_ have had a submachine gun, it happened so fast. Travis says he felt the back of his head, said “I’m hit,” and fell over into Moses’ lap; Moses braked the car and steered it to a stop. They counted 13 bullet holes in the car, Travis says. Travis is 21 now. He continued working for Snick a while and is back in college. NICHOLAS BOSANQUET, a 21year-old Yale student, attending there on a Clare fellowship from Cambridge University, was a gracious, amusing Englishman when he arrived here, but when he left he was bitter. The last week of the Henry campaign, Bosanquet was arrested three times, once for vagrancy in Natchez, after he had proposed to the local radio station that they provide facilities for a debate on segregation; once for disturbing the peace in Jackson, by trying to attend, in company with a Negro music major from Tougaloo College, a segregated concert being given here by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, which is supported in part -by a stipend from the British government; and once on suspicion of auto theft, which police used occasionally as grounds for holding Henry workers who did not have the papers for the cars they were driving. Bosanquet was released from the first charge on condition he get out of Natchez, which he did; the second charge was dropped after the British consul in New Orleans had taken an interest; the suspicion was not made a charge. “That’s the trouble with the United Statesthe brain isn’t in touch with the hindquarters,” he says. “In any other country . . . if there was this sort of situation on the Isle of Wight, sort of rampant terrorism, the central government would devote every ounce of its energies, every minute of its time, trying to repair the situation. Here, the federal government spends very little time, considering the enormity the brutalities and indignities.” Wearing a dark coat of English cut, his hair long and flowing carelessly across his forehead, Bosanquet says that while he was in custody in Natchez, officers standing about him made “derisive remarks,” such as “lower than the niggers” and “bet a white woman wouldn’t have him.” “I was relieved of my money and personal effects, and somebody deposited a lighted cigarette in my coat pocket, which I removed with as much dignity as I could under the circumstances,” he says. In custody in Jackson, he says, he was told his countrymen were cowards in the war, and that he ought to take a bath, that he was dirty. White girls working in the Henry campaign reported similar experiences. Sandra Hayden, a Victoria, Texas, girl, and a University of Texas graduate, is one of the white Snick workers in the campaign ; Jane Stembridge, a native of Georgia, is another. Both have been picked up by police, and both say that they were questioned about their personal lives. Norman Thomas, the socialist, came to Mississippi the last week of the campaign to speak for Henry. He addressed a rally Hallowe’en night in Greenwood. A car leaving the church after the rallyit could easily have been the car Thomas left in, but did not happen to bewas followed out of town by a car driven by two whites and rammed twice from the rear on the highway. THE HENRY CAMPAIGN STAFF compiled reports of other incidents during the campaign; in the nature of the case they have not been confirmed by the Observer. When other such reports were compared with interviews with persons involved in the incidents, they were found to jibe generally, except for some of the details. According to the reports, these things happened to other workers in the Henry campaign: Twenty-two workers for Henry were fined in Indianola for distributing leaflets withodt. a permit. A rally in Yazoo City was cancelled after warnings from the police. Workers have been accused of violating a curfew, driving cars too heavy for their license plates, having improper tail-lights, running stop signs, and obstructing the flow of traffic. On occasion they were just taken into custody for questioning. Hugh Smith, Stanford student, had two shots fired over his head and one toward him into the ground as he drove off in Tate County. Four workers were interrogated, their hands flat on their car, for more than an hour by Jackson police. One officer rapped one of them on the knuckles with a gun twice and placed his pistol at the worker’s head and threatened to kill him. A Jackson Negro who was canvassing for “freedom votes” in Jackson was picked up by police for “purse-snatching” and put out in a white neighborhood. After walking three blocks, he saw the policeman who had let him out gathering a white crowd; a Negro gave him a lift. Police, according to these reports, told a worker to stop canvassing at a Jackson football game or be arrested; escorted three workers out of Rosedale; told the same three not to let the dust settle on them in and ordered two female CORE workers out of Morton. A harrowing time for two white Yale students and three Hattiesburg Negroes in Picayune, Mississippi, was reported. While they were being questioned by police, their car was put out of commission, and a white crowd gathered and followed them as they walked to the closed bus station, a truck stop, and then out of town. A Negro gave them a lift until two whites stopped them and dissuaded the Negro from driving them further. One of them started walking down the highway; the other four hailed a bus to New Orleans. After dodging in the shadows all night, the remaining worker was picked up by a campaign car from Hattiesburg that had been sent to find him. R.D. ill A Communication Nov. ., 1963 The anti-apartheid demonstration this afternoon was attended by thousands of people who jammed Trafalgar Square. The procession gathered at Marble Arch and marched the several blocks behind banners of the different groups participating. . . . There were groups from the labor and communist parties, university clubs, trade unions, Christian Socialists, Zionists, Arabs, Indians, Church officials, and others. Many of the marchers wore the Committee on Nuclear Disarmament badge. . . . One of the MP’s on the platform mentioned favorably the American embargo on arms to South Africa with the comment that he wished the British government would follow the same policy. This was greeted by applause. The whole demonstration was characterized by orderliness, cohesiveness, dedication to the business at hand, and a consideration for the speakers that recognized the wide diversity of the participating groups. . . . Tom Caldwell, 66a High Street, St. John’s Wood, London NW 8, England. \(The writer was president of the Denton November 15, 1963 5