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Political Power Guyot & Thelwell

South. The largest single delegation at this carefully unpublicized meeting was from the state of Mississippi, and was comprised of the few figures in the Negro community who were not known to be active in or sympathetic to the MFDP. The group met with the highest level leadership of the party and the President, and the message was: Go home and organize your people into the Democratic party. They were also briefed on the War on Poverty, as though there was a relationship between organizing for the Democratic party and the Poverty Program. Nothing in the manner or speeches of any of the speakers indicated that they conceived of any role for their carefully chosen Negro "leaders" other than delivering the votes of the community and dispensing the patronage.
However, in Mississippi, it is a difficult task to organize Negroes into the party of Eastland and Ross Barnett, especially when this party maintains it doesn't want Negroes. So, when U.S. Attorney General Katzenbach is asked why there are only nineteen federal registrars in Mississippi, which has 84 counties, he is prone to mumble something about "giving the state time to reform." In the case of Mississippi and Alabama, the state means the local Democratic party. But, the fact is that there is a total absence of any element in the Mississippi Democratic party that can spearhead any kind of reform that the national party says it expects. And, ironically, so long as Washington holds the implementation of the Voting bill to a pace just short of scandalous so as to minimize the independent effectiveness of the Negro at the polls, any incipient "moderates" within the white party who might be inclined to ally with us will remain well hidden. On the surface, the group that seems to gain most from this stalemate would appear to be the old line racists that control the state Democratic party now.

deepening political consciousness
However, while waiting for the vote to become a reality, we can use the time to strengthen and deepen the level of organization across the state, and develop the political consciousness in the community. Mississippi is the only state in which there is a state-wide, active and viable framework of organization in the Negro community. Our job now is to establish and entrench every Negro community the tradition of active participation in politics, in which the people will understand that their involvement and control of their own political organization is their strongest weapon. By continuing to run candi-

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