Reprint from Saturday Evening Post
The
Saturday
Post
FOCNDKU IV 1728 111
Demonstrating for
civil rights, youthful
Negroes kneel and
pray before the City
Hall in Albany, Ga.
They were arrested
by police when they
refused to disperse.
Negro Youth's
New March on Dixie
A new generation of Negro leaders is pressing home the bitter
battle against segregation in the Deep South. • By ben h. bagdikian
Robert Parris Moses is a twenty-seven-year-
. old Negro of soft voice and hesitant manner
whose life up to February of 1960 was focused on
his native New York City, scholarly work in the
Ivy League and teaching in an expensive private
school. He had never been in the South and had
never wanted to go. But he did go, at last.
On the morning of August 29,1961, Moses was
walking in khaki chinos and a T shirt down the
dusty main street of Liberty, Mississippi (population, 642). There he was struck down by a
cousin of the local sheriff and beaten on the head
until his face and clothes were covered with blood.
Considering where he was and what he was up
to, the violence is not surprising. Moses—A.B.
Hamilton College, M.A. Harvard, Ph.D. candidate—was trying to upset the social structure of
the Deep South and change party politics in the
United States. His method: helping rural Negroes
register to vote.
"One day at home in New York," Moses told
me, "I saw a picture in The New York Times of
Negro college students 'sitting in' at a lunch
counter in North Carolina. That was in February,
1960. The students in that picture had a certain
look on their faces—sort of sullen, angry, determined. Before, the Negro in the South had al
ways looked on the defensive, cringing. This time
they were taking the initiative. They were kids my
age, and I knew this had something to do with
my own life. It made me realize that for a long
time I had been troubled by the problem of being
a Negro and at the same time being an American.
This was the answer."
Robert Moses and his project are significant,
but more significant still is the new generation of
American Negro that he typifies. It is a body of
young men and women who will make an impression on the history of their country. It is the first
generation of American Negroes to grow up with
the assumption, "Segregation is dead." It has
transformed integration from a legal contest to a
mass movement, fighting not for future change
but for results here and now. Sensitive to the
emergence of colored men all over the world,
conscious that there is a time bomb ticking in the
crowded Negro slums of the United States, the
Negro college students of 1962 are welded into
one of the most fiercely united, dynamic and
optimistic social movements of our time.
Characteristically, they seek out the toughest
problems in the toughest places. Liberty, Mississippi, is the county seat of Amite County,
where 54 percent of the population is Negro. Of
the 5000 voting-age Negroes, one is registered to
vote. Moses and his friends were—and are—conducting semisecret schools to coach local Negroes
how to pass registration tests. What happened to
Moses is not unique; a week later a colleague was
kicked to semiconsciousness, a month later another was shot dead. Much is at stake, for Amite
is one of 137 counties in the South where Negroes
are a majority but have few votes. Such counties
are the backbone of a powerful conservative
white force in American politics. When Negroes
begin voting in these counties there will be profound changes in Southern and national politics.
Nonviolent themselves, the students appear unmoved by the violence of others. In 1960 their
battleground was the lunch counters. In 1961 it
was Freedom Rides on buses. From 1962 onward
it will be the ballot box, and in this they march
with a massive army. With them are all major
Negro civil-rights groups, strengthened by $325,-
000 in cash from the Field Foundation in Chicago
and the Taconic Foundation in New York. Backing the vast drive to register Southern Negroes to
vote is the United States Department of Justice,
which gives the movement moral support and
intervenes with lawsuits and court orders to strike
down barriers.