Page:We Charge Genocide - 1951 - Patterson.djvu/20

Rh Negroes to live in the housing project. City and state courts, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, had upheld the right to evict these families.

In California, a national group known as “America Plus, Inc.” was organized to amend the state constitution to allow anti-Negro discrimination and destroy the 14th Amendment to the federal constitution. State Senator Jack B. Tenney, notorious for his inquisitorial “Un-American” investigations in California, is chairman of “America Plus, Inc.”

The Bonner Amendment was passed in Alabama to further deny and limit voting privileges of Negroes and poor whites. Among its provisions is that each prospective voter must take an “anti-Communist” oath.

Two Negro Air Force officers in Anchorage, Alaska,Capt. Silas Jenkins and Lt. Wilbur A. Dixon, who criticized their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Prentiss C. Jones, for anti-Negro discrimination, were recommended for discharge from the Army.

The Negro Community of Altamonte Spring, Florida, was ruled “out of town,” to prevent Negroes there from voting and from receiving fire, sanitary and public health services. 210 whites and 205 Negroes had been registered to vote, too close for comfort to the town’s racist white officials.

In Summerton, South Carolina, Rev. J. A. Delaine, who challenged the segregated school system of South Carolina in a court suit, had his house burned to the ground; was fired as a school teacher; was forced to leave his town and church; had his life threatened; was subjected to several law-suits tying up all his property and money; saw his relatives and friends who joined him in the court suit lose their jobs.

The body of Pfc. Thomas C. Reed, killed at the age of 19 in Korea, was refused burial for five weeks in a Phoenix, Arizona, cemetery because Reed was a Negro.

Judge Truman ]. Futch of Florida barred two Negro NAACP lawyers from representing Walter Lee Irvin in a retrial of a rape frameup ordered by the Supreme Court. Irvin had been critically wounded by Shen& Willis McCall, who murdered his co-defendant, Samuel Shepherd.

A white youth in Richmond, Virginia, who raped a 13-year-old Negro girl was freed by an all-white jury on December 20, 1951.

In Simpson county, Mississippi, James Brent Durr, poor Negro tenant farmer, was sentenced to die in the state’s portable electric chair. Durr was convicted of “murder” by an all-white jury for his self-defense slaying of a local constable. The constable had fired shots at him, his pregnant wife, and his young son. Mrs. Durr, who has since given birth to a second child, is scheduled to go on trial for “murder” during the March term of the Simpson county circuit court. xvi