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Summer Session Kansan
Page 5
Friday, July 17, 1964
Mississippi Civil Rights Enterprise Finds Fewer Participants Than Expected in Winter
By Tom Coffman
GREENWOOD, Miss.—Judging by the projected standards of last winter the Mississippi Project of civil rights work is far from being a success, at least in terms of the number of participants.
In place of a large project in the Natehez area, several veteran organizers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) have been sent in to lay the groundwork. James Foreman, national director of SNCC, said the large-scale south delta program was canceled because of "terrorist activities" of segregation extremists.
The original plan set out by COFO the Council of Federated Organizations—called for 2,000 student volunteers to the integrationist project. The figure was lowered to 1,000 during the spring.
FOUR MAJOR work areas remain: Greenwood, on the northeast edge of the delta; Meridian, near the Alabama border (located near Philadelphia, where three civil rights workers are missing and are now feared dead); Hattiesburg, near the Gulf of Mexico, and Columbus, in the northeast corner of the state.
The final total of volunteers now in Mississippi comes to around 450, and COFO no longer is considering applicants for the summer work. In other words, it has as many volunteers as it wants—or, at least, as many as it thinks wise to bring into the state at this time.
IN ADDITION, the work area has been restricted to eliminate the southwestern part of the state along the delta in and around Natchez.
He probably was referring to the Ku Klux Klan and the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race—a newly formed semi-secret segregationist group which has flourished lately.
The project is sponsored by the National Council of Churches and a coalition of civil rights organizations —SNCC, Congress of Racial Equality, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (spearheaded by Dr Martin Luther King Jr.).
THE PROJECT design called for a three-part program—(1) a drive to urge Negroes to register to vote, (2) community centers for the teaching of home economics, and (3) Freedom Schools for seminars at an elementary level in history, politics, and current affairs.
current nature.
Here in Greenwood, after two and one-half weeks, part two and part three of the project—the community center and educational seminars — have not yet begun to function.
Although no accurate statistics are available, the number of Negroes who go to the courthouse to take the voter registration test has been less than a floodstream—5 to 10 a day on big days; Some days there have been none.
THE NAME of the voter applicant, under Mississippi law, must appear in the community newspaper three times during a two-week period. The editor of the Greenwood paper, the Greenwood Commonwealth, said that, if anything, the number of applicants has declined in recent weeks. One reason he gave for the decline is that to vote in the 1964 election, a citizen must have paid his poll tax and been accepted as a registrant by July 3.
One of the student volunteers assigned to voter registration, a junior from John Hopkins University, said that of the first 17 days he had been in Mississippi only four had been spent canvassing the Negro district for potential voters.
Hoover Sends Wire To Winning Candidate
NEW YORK — (UPI)— Former President Herbert Hoover, who was unable to attend the Republican National Convention this year, yesterday wired Sen. Barry Goldwater congratulations on winning the presidential nomination and urged party unity.
The telegram read:
"Congratulations on your nomination. My best wishes to you and our party for success in November. I know all loyal Republicans will unite behind you."
The rest of the time, he said, "we've been busy getting organized and promoting mass meetings." ("Mass meetings," as described in other parts of this series, are semireligious affairs to stimulate Negro interest in the cause of racial equality.)
"Added up," he said, "this means they will have trouble gaining the confidence of the Negro community, they won't have much comprehension of the actual situation down here, and they won't have the background necessary to carry them through a tight spot."
THE STUDENT has had only four persons whom he himself solicited go to the courthouse to take the voter test. A veteran SNCC organizer, who did not wish to be identified, said the volunteers have three factors working against them. One, they are generally inexperienced. Two, they are from the North. Three, they are white (only about 15 per cent of the volunteers are Negroes).
When this viewpoint was repeated in the form of a question to several of the Greenwood volunteers, they disagreed heatedly, saying they had
been well-accepted in the Negro community. The volunteers live in Negro homes which were secured in advance by the project planners. They receive no salary and generally are fed by local people.
"HEY!" a girl shouted up the office stairs one day, "a farmer just brought in a bucket of greens and some watermelons." Such kindnesses are frequent.
One point on which almost all Negro-movement people are agreed upon is that police protection has increased and police harassment has declined since the infusion of the volunteers. "It is sad, it is ironic," commented the Greenwood project director in a national television broadcast, "but we had to have outside white folks in here before anyone gave a damn about what happened to us."
So far, no one from the Greenwood project has been arrested—an about-face from the previous experiences of civil rights workers. This pattern has not held true in other parts of the state, particularly in the more rural areas.
Anthropology Gives Adventure Into Actual Ancient Replicas
By Paula Myers
An anthropology lab is an adventure in the feeling and the actual examining of ancient replicas of skulls, jaws, skeletons, and primitive tools.
These ancient replicas found in the laboratory are the real bone structures, plaster structures, or casts made of bronze. Two true fist axes—biface tools—also are examples shown in the laboratory. The laboratory is a teaching device to better acquaint anthropology campers with the actual seeing, believing, and understanding.
Charles E. Snow, visiting professor from the University of Kentucky, stands at the front of the laboratory discussing and showing the campers the main things to look for in each item that is passed.
He tells them to check the dental structure, whether there are canine teeth or not, if there is a projection of the jaw, whether there is a prominence of the cheek bone, and whether the head was carried erect or not.
In the beginning all the animals
were small creatures, he says, and we now have the larger beasts from the results of primate evolution. The Proconsul Africanist, found in the eastern part of Lake Victoria; Australopithecus (australo meaning south), found in 1924 in a limestone quarry near Taung, South Africa; Neandertal jaws, Howler monkey skull, and bronze casts of the Homo Neandertalensis were some of the relics shown in the laboratory. The Homo Neandertalensis were the first to burv their dead.
The best fossils are preserved best beneath the soil in dry areas -plains, deserts, and in the bottom of dry river beds, covered through the years by the fine silt left behind after the rains.
He says that today we have tremendous bone and skull structures of the Homo Neanderthalensis because its dead were buried, thus they were well preserved.
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