Newspaper Page Text
Other ‘Social Circles’
Found Throughout Dixie
By IIENRYI P. LEIFERMANN
SOCIAL CIRCLE, G». (UPI)
— Federal orders to desegre
gate schools have barely
changed the dual school sys
tems in the bucolic little towns
like this one spread across the
Deep South.
No Rap Browns, no “kill the
hunkles” chants and no riots
are sweeping through this land
of the Wednesday night prayer
meetings. Instead, it remains
the scene of the “black and
white together” civil rights
movement, non-violent as it was
in the pre-Black Power days.
But civil rights workers are
convinced that literally hun
dreds of “Social Circle” dem
onstrations — parents and chil
dren lying in front of school
buses, singing the old “free
dom” songs and marching off
to jail with a smile — face the
Deep South’s country towns for
the next several years.
Proof that federal guidelines
and federal court orders have
failed when it comes to these
rural towns turns up in school
records. In Chickasaw County,
Miss., only three of the 1,255
Negro children go to white
schools.
In East Clarendon, S. C.,
there is an all-Negro high
f . a, oyppnt for 10 Negro
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students, an all-white high
school. Here in Social Circle,
45 miles east of Atlanta, 65 Ne
groes are in school with 580
White children. Another 434 Ne
groes attend an all-black school.
Despite this, civil rights work
ers say these same towns that
produced the Bilbos, Thur
monds, Maddoxes and Wallaces
of Dixie politics, could be the
first places in the nation to
achieve true school desegrega
tion.
They believe this to be so be
cause the Social Circles of
Dixie face a relatively uncom
plicated desegregation prob
lem: simply elimination of the
dual school system.
Most Whites live on the west
side of Main street here, and
the mostly-White school is in
their midst. Most Negroes live
on the east side, where the all-
Negro school is.
But it takes three minutes
driving or 15 minutes walking
to get from one school to the
other. Social Circle isn't big
enough for sophisticated prob
lems such as de facto segrega
tion existing in the cities of the
North and South.
Unknown to most of the 1,700
citizens of the small textile
last week, a remarkable confer
ence between Negro and White
leaders was on the verge of a
solution. It was a meeting of
the races that will be repeated
hundreds of times in rural
Dixie during the next few
years.
It was a tense night. Four
blocks down the street Negro
parents were holding a rally in
a church. For several weeks,
state police had noted a run on
guns by Whites at sporting
goods stores in the county.
Four Negro parents jailed
earlier in the week when they
flung themselves in front of
school buses leading to the all-
Negro school were quietly slip
ped out of the county jail in
Monroe 15 miles north.
Sped to the city hall here,
they joined Willie Bolden, a
field worker for Dr. Martin
Luther King’s Southern Chris
tian Leadership Conference and
an organizer in the parent’s pro
test.
On the other side of the table
were C. W. Wilson, the White
school superintendent for Wal
ton County, who lives in Mon
roe, C. C. Carr, the Negro prin
cipal at the all-Negro Social
Circle Training School, W. B.
Stevens, an oil distributor and
town. Social Circle almost
solved its problems, or at least
its Immediate problems of pro-
test demonstrations by Negro
parents and the encampment
of 50 state troopers.
For five hours Thursday night
mayor of Social Circle, and Roy
J. Malcolm, president of the
Social Circle bank.
In the middle was John L.
McCown, executive director of
the Georgia Human Relations
Commission, a Negro acting as
mediator. From 8 p.m. to 1
a.m., the conference edged
toward a settlement.
McCown says the White lead
ers agreed to meet one of the
Negroes’ demands, reinstate
ment of three teachers at the
Training School who were fired
for taking part in the demon
strations.
Bolden insisted on the im
mediate firing of principal
Carr, who has commuted here
from Atlanta 45 miles to the
west for nine years and is con
sidered by Negro parents as a
front man for White leaders.
McCown says he proposed a
biracial evaluating group from
outside the county to see if
Carr should be fired for in
competency. Bolden and the
four local Negro parents turned
it down.
The White leaders said no
purpose could be served by ne
gotiating if the Negro parents
refused any compromise. Mc-
Cown asked Bolden and super
intendent Wilson to leave the
room, letting only the town na
tives talk for a while. By 11
p.m. the Negroes had accepted
the compromise.
At that point, McCown says,
Bolden and Wilson returned to
the meeting, the school superin-
Thursday, Feb. 22, 1968
Griffin Daily News
tendent voicing second
thoughts, and the fragile agree
ment began shattering.
“The White business people
really wanted this thing to
stop,” McCown says. “They
kept mentioning the Klan might
come in and make the demon
strations violent. But they were
willing to make some conces
sions.”
Then, according to McCown,
superintendent Wilson broke the
agreement by saying he wanted
to talk to his full county board
first. He also said if the three
fired teachers returned to class
es, their presence would disrupt
the school.
“The whole thing was a
breakdown in communications,”
McCown said. He accused su
perintendent Wilson of being
more concerned about “what he
looked like the voters” than
with settling the problem.
There is no doubt that Wilson
would face stiff pressures from
many White voters in Walton
County if he yielded at all to
Negro demands in the school
crisis. This is Ku Klux Klan
country and the modern ver
sion of the Klan is concentrat
ing more than ever on voter
registration and elections.
The meeting broke up at that
point. A sheriff’s car outside
took the four Negro parents
back to jail. Social Circle, like
its sister towns across the
South, remains with its school
desegregation problems un
solved.
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16
In recognition of his more than 25 years as an Oldsmobile dealer, Troy J. Smith,
Sr. (1) of Spalding Motor Co. has been presented a special commemorative plaque
by Oldsmobile Division of General Motors Corp. It was 27 years ago, in 1941 that
Mr. Smith first became associated with Oldsmobile as a dealer. The presentation
was made today by Oldsmobile’s Atlanta zone manager, R. P. Seibel (r), who ex*
plained that Mr. Smith is one of 570 Oldsmobile dealers across the country to be
so recognized this month.
Man Arrested
For Draft Skip
To Canada
By PHIL NEWSOM
UPI Foreign News Analyst
In West Bengal last summer
a member of India’s Congress
party was stripped and forced
to walk naked through the
streets of a town where he had
addressed a political meeting.
Earlier, in March, had come
the emergence of a form of
labor coercion called “ghaero.”
In this the workers would
surround their employer and
deny him food and free
Commentary
movement until he bowed to
their demands. Police were
forbidden to interfere.
In so-called “peasant re
volts,” landless laborers occu
pied private property and
murdered the owners.
This was the situation deve
loping in West Bengal with the
decay of the Congress party of
Jawaharlal Nehru and Ghandl
and the takeover by United
Front state governments, in this
case dominated by the Commu
nists aligned either with Peking
or Moscow.
The Peking radio of Commu
nist China delightedly hailed
each act of violence and each
step toward anarchy.
Into this state of affairs, the
central government in New
Delhi finally moved last Novem
ber, forcing dismissal of West
Bengal's chief minister and the
appointment of a new one who
would rule in coalition with the
Congress party.
What followed was a wave of
violence throughout West Ben
gal and Calcutta, its chief city.
This week the central govern
ment moved again, this time
proclaiming the state under
direct federal rule as it has the
right to do under the Indian
constitution.
As a result of the central
government takeover, elections
now must be held in West
Bengal and the belief is widely
held that the Communists and
their extremist allies can be the
only winners.
Reds Expected
To Win In
West Bengal
ATLANTA (UPI) — The FBI
Wednesday arrested a man who
went to Canada instead of his
draft board but later moved
back to the United States.
Thomas Glenn Jolley, 24, of
Greensboro, N. C., was arrested
on charges of violating the Se
lective Service Act. FBI agents
arrested him in Atlanta, where
he moved with his wife last De
cember.
Frank V. Hitt, special agent
in charge of the Atlanta FBI of
five, said Jolley was ordered to
report for military service last
Aug. 7 but mailed his draft card
to his local board and moved to
Canada. He later wrote a letter
renouncing U. S. citizenship and
saying he had “terminated all
his obligations to the United
States,” Hitt said.
Jolley was released on SI,OOO
bond after arraignment Wednes
day before a U. S. Commis
sioner.
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