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In several states, conspiring Dixiecrat officials have abandoned all pretense of law and order and have openly turned over their official responsibilities to the Klan, the White Citizens Councils and to the howling armed hoodlums. Meanwhile, the President travels the length and breadth of the globe speaking in the name of democracy, yet he and vice-President Nixon are strangely silent about the terrible, shocking crimes against democracy in their own country.

Meanwhile, in the halls of Congress there is taking place the obscenity of the age. Both the Senate and the House reek with underhanded deals, skullduggery and rottenness aimed at selling out civil rights legislation. A handful of Dixiecrat senators have been conducting a filibuster to block the majority will of the Senate and the American people, and to prevent the passage of any meaningful civil rights law.

This filibuster has been conducted under circumstances giving every appearance of a sham battle. Not a single voice in the Senate has been raised to condemn it.

Neither the President nor the vice-President has uttered a public word against the racist shame of this degrading spectacle. Open maneuvering is taking place behind the scenes to betray the struggle for civil rights legislation in this session of Congress. Democratic Presidential aspirants seem to treasure their relationship with the Dixiecrats, who should be driven out of the Democratic Party and out of Congress, more highly than they do the elementary rights of Negro citizens. In fact, there are strong indications that the whole so-called battle in the Senate is just another jockeying for demagogic advantage in the 1960 elections, with the burning issue of Negro rights being made a mere political football.

In addition to the unbridled Dixiecrat terror against the southern Negro students and the criminal filibuster in the U.S. Senate, the foulest means are being used to behead the Negro people's movement, North and South. The whole country is revolted by the lasted income tax frame-up against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., instigated by the Ku Klux Governor Patterson of Alabama, and by the income tax persecution of the Federal government against Representative Adam Clayton Powell. All decent people are outraged by the Government's inhuman treatment of the Negro Communist leader Henry Winston.

These "legal" lynchings follow the illegal terror and murder of Negro leaders, the scandalous unpunished lynching of Mack Parker, the forced suspension of the militant newspaper of Mrs. Daisy Bates in Little Rock, the expulsions and the arrests of Negro students in the South. Jail, threats of jail, and all sorts of trumped-up legal technicalities are being used against militant Negro leaders to intimidate the right-to-vote movement, to wreck the students' anti-segregation struggle--in short, to smash the whole Negro people's march toward freedom. Which militant Negro spokesman will be next? First, it was the Communists; now it's any Negro who dares to speak up for his people!
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This monopoly-inspired offensive against the Negro people, with the Dixiecrat racists playing the leading role in the U.S. Senate and in the deep South, is aimed not alone against the Negro people but against labor, the Puerto Rican and Mexican-American people, the Jewish people -- against all minority groups and against the whole American people. It is part of the cold war policies of the State Department -- part of the resistance to peaceful co-existence, of the continued nuclear testing and the amassing of nuclear weapons, of the insane armaments race which deprives the people of schools, hospitals, housing and elementary liberties.

But irrespective of difference of viewpoint on these issues, the present powerful anti-Negro offensive can command the united resistance of all decent Americas. Through unity in action of all the democratic forces, this scandalous attack against the Negro people can be hurled back.

Gains have been made in recent years, but the basic oppression of the Negro remains unshaken. Yet this is not 1920; it's 1960! The Negro people are united as never before. They have allies in the triumphant colonial liberation movements of Asia, Latin-America and Africa. They have allies in the unselfish aid to these countries and to all peoples struggling for freedom by the whole socialist camp, led by the Soviet Union, along with People's China and the flourishing people's democracies. The struggles of the Negro people today meet the first requirement in the battle for freedom laid down by Frederick Douglass, the great Negro statesman of the Civil War period: He would be free, must strike the first blow! The Negro people are striking not alone the first blow, but the second and third!