Churches: Reconciliation Through Anger

For the first time since the '30s, Negro field hands are striking on the cotton plantations of western Mississippi, where the pay is $3 a day and the hours are dawn to dusk. Ardently promoting the strike and helping to organize a union of the fieldworkers is the Delta Ministry, set up by the National Council of Churches last September to work for social and economic justice for Negroes and achieve a "reconciliation" of the races in Mississippi.

So far, the reconciling process has led only to bitter antagonism—at least in Greenville, center of the strike. There, a ministry preacher tells...