ustxtxb_obs_1964_03_20_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

“It’s not enough to free the bodies of men,” the underdog liberal told the Negro organization. “You must free their minds, and unfreeze their imaginations. We must give all men an opportunity to have ve an understanding of one another. If we fail in this, we fail in democracy, itself.” His election, he indicated, would be evidence of “a new generation of Texans who will stand up for the right and take their stand with Texans who have been forgotten.” He said Connally’s recent visit to the White House reminded him of a happily married man who was telephoned by an old girl friend, who at once barged over to his home, stepped inside the door, and said, ” ‘Honey, I know you’ve got new friends, I know you’ve got a wife and familybut nothing has changed!’ ” In the evening of this same day, circulating among national reporters covering the Ruby trial who were relaxing at the Fort Worth Press Club, Don Yarborough said angrily, on the record, of President Johnson: “The question is whether or not he’s gonna keep hands off in the Democratic primary. Keeping hands off means not having any of his aides and assistants in the gubernatorial race. If they’re running around doing dirty work and trying to look like they’re not. . . . “The rumor is out now,” he said, “that Jack Valenti is out doing a very mean and vicious gut job. Of course, I don’t know whether there is any substance to the rumor or not, but we’ll find out, because we are taking steps to establish the facts.” Valenti is the President’s principal personal assistant. If Don Yarborough finds Mr. Johnson working against him, the candidate said, he will draw “the conclusion that any other thinking person of the country would draw.” \(Inez Robb interviewed Don Yarborough this same evening, and her column on the event was lightly derisive, quoting him, for instance, as having said: “I am going to emancipate this state.” Miss Robb, however, also said he told her: “This primary is going to be the test of LBJ’s intentions. He has to choose: Is he going to stay in bed with his past connections and with the Dallas group or is he going to face forward into a true Democratic future? . . . I’m 100% behind LBJ. I am totally committed to the complete civil rights bill .. . medicare and the President’s plan to war on HANK BROWN, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, made an important speech on labor’s position during the banquet of the Negroes’ convention. He reaffirmed his confidence in the Democratic Coalition as a realistic foundation for the accomplishment of social reforms in Texas, and he indicated there is nothing to prevent labor union members from working as hard for a candidate for governor as they want to. This year, he said, more than 300,000 Negroes, more than 400,000 MexicanAmericans, more than 300,000 union people, and indeterminate numbers of liberals who do not fit into these categories are registered to vote. In putting muscle in labor’s civil rights program, Brown said, “We realize the political facts of life. To get good labor legislation in Texasthis can only be done with the votes of the Negro, Latin-American, organized labor, and the liberals together.” In the Coalition, he said, they had been able to disagree but continue meeting and working together. “I know we disappointed you at Arlington,” he told the Negroes in a reference to labor’s not endorsing Don Yarborough. “Many of you were disappointed, and I might say I myself have moments of disappointment, about COPE’s meeting in Arlington. But in the making of the Coalition we have the foundation . . . that will lead our kind of people in the governor’s mansion, in the lieutenant governor’s seat . . .” In Texas, Brown said, there are 500,000 Negro and Latin-American workers earning less than 75 cents an hour. “You talk about civil rights. The right to have a union . . . the right to have decent wages,” those are civil rights also, he said. He announced he has hired a Negro labor worker in Tyler and will soon hire another in Lufkin. “For reasons best known to the labor movement, they chose not to endorse anybody for governor,” he said, deciding instead that labor’s No. 1 objective is the election of President Johnson, “and No. land that’ll make it No. 1 in Texas as far as we’re concerned,” the re-election of Sen. Yarborough. Brown added: “There’s not gonna be a lot of disagreement between most of the labor people and some of the people we’re going to be supporting. There’s going to be some.” A “reminder” in the AFL-CIO News recently stated that while COPE’s action means no local should endorse any stateoffice candidate, union members who want to work for candidates for state-wide offices “who are friendly to organized labor are encouraged to do so.” W. J. Durham, president of the Texas Council of Voters, said he wants a governor who will see him just as he would any other visitor when he doesn’t have other appointments. Durham was one of a group of Negroes Connally refused to see last year. Albert Pena, chairman of PASO, recalled that last fall Gov. Connally had attacked him as “Boss Pena.” He had done so, Pena said, “because I believe in the dignity of all men” and in their rights to “have a decent job at an adequate wage, to eat at the places they want to eat at, and go to the shows they want to see.” “Just the day before yesterday,” Pena said, “I was having lunch in one of San Antonio’s fancier restaurants that has desegregated. I thought about what a good feeling it was that I could eat and know that I would not be embarassed by this restaurant turning away any fellow American. “Then something struck me, and I looked around the dining room. . . . None of the 14 waitresses was a Mexican-American and, of course, none was a Negro. But the two bus boys were Negroes and the bus girl was of Mexican descent. Those waitresses make at least $100 a week on tips in a restaurant like this one. And those bus boys and girl probably are lucky if they make $20, period… . It must end.” Franklin Jones, Sr., of Marshall, chairman of the Texas Organization of Liberal Democrats, the new grouping of independent liberals who are not union people, Negroes, or Latin-Americans, told the delegates that “A system as deeply rooted as that of our racial injustices requires some legal impetus to awaken moral responsibilities” and to avoid the loss of business in a cross-fire of resentment. “We must force all office seekers to work the front doors of the colored voters, and not slink around to the back doors for political favors while assuring their white supporters that they share their racial prejudices,” Jones said. “We must become a bloc vote of coalesced minorities to the purpose of ending all justification or excuse for bloc voting; we must become a cathartic bloc to flush from our political system the injustices that have created minority blocs.” Jones expressed satisfaction as an attorney that the judicial conscience has been at the center of the social revolution at hand, and he hoped for the day when the legislative branch in Washington would, in making changes certain, relieve him of the unpleasant experience of seeing a billboard between Longview and Gladewater demanding the impeachment of Earl Warren. He said any attorney worth his salt has to know that Negroes’ constitutional rights are to be upheld from here on, if not by legislation then by judicial protection. He specified in point the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that laws preventing trespass or disturbance of the peace cannot be subverted and applied as instruments to perpetuate racial discrimination. Concluding, the Marshall attorney looked forward to the day when as great an orator as Martin Luther King, Jr., would be recognized, not as “your leader,” but as “our leader.” R.D.