Page:We Charge Genocide - 1951 - Patterson.djvu/36

16 We shall prove, moreover, that such incitements by high government officials are the rule rather than the exception in many parts of the South. We shall show Governor Herman Talmadge of the State of Georgia inciting genocide over the radio on October 22, 1949 when he said, speaking of Negro efforts to enforce the Constitution, “We will fight them in the counties and the cities...We intend to fight hand to hand with all our weapons, and we will never submit to one inch of encroachment on our traditional pattern of segregation.” We shall show numerous other such instances on the part of Governor Talmadge and other officials of the State of Georgia, submitting in the Appendix a detailed case history revealing how genocide is used in Georgia to deprive American Negroes of their right to vote. The Georgia case history is typical of the record of such violence throughout the South.

We shall submit for your attention incitements to genocide, sometimes delicately phrased but always unmistakable in their meaning and tragic in their result, by former Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Governor Fielding M. Wright of Mississippi, and former Governor Dixon of Alabama. We shall show how these officials and others formed a conspiracy in 1948 to deprive the Negro people of their vote through violence. Its guise was a political party, the so-called States Rights or Dixiecrat movement. Its successful purpose was the liquidation of President Truman’s demagogic appeal for civil rights. We shall submit excerpts from the official speakers’ handbook of the States Rights movement, approved by Governors Thurmond, Wright and Dixon and punctuated throughout with incitements to violence. Typical of the incitements is that on page 52 which reads:

"“In many countries throughout the South a few thousand whites operate farms, business and industry and furnish employment to hundreds of thousands of negroes. If these negroes voted and elected their kind of officials, which would happen if they voted, there would not be a business or industry operating in the county 12 months after they took over—unless violence was resorted to for the of business and industry and farming against the improvident acts of incompetent and corrupt administration. no right thinking American wants to wreck any section of our country.” (Italics ours.)"

Not even the highest tribunals of the American state, the Senate and the House of Representatives, are exempt, as we shall show, from these incitements to genocide. For example, in June of 1948 Senator Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana, told the Senate of the United States: “The more freedom and the more privilege a Negro is given, the more he will abuse that privilege. He will run wild and do violence to the society in which he moves.” It is manifest, we submit, that after hearing Senator Ellender some white Americans might think it their duty to prevent Negroes from