• U.S.

Civil Rights: End of the Facade

2 minute read
TIME

The Alabama pea-and-cotton-belt town of Tuskegee, where 75% of the 7,000 population is Negro, has for some time enjoyed a reputation as one of the Deep South’s harmonious havens of racial progress. Two members of the five-man city council are Negroes, and the town has long been influenced toward liberalism by the presence of a community of Negro scholars and students at Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington. Last week Tuskegee’s self-satisfied image received a mortal blow. One of Tuskegee Institute’s 2,751 students, Freshman Sammy Younge, 21, was shot to death in downtown Tuskegee by a white service-station attendant.

An ex-Navy enlisted man and the son of a local schoolteacher, Younge was a so-so student who preferred to make his mark as an energetic civil rights organizer. He helped run a Negro boycott of local markets, led a group that attempted to integrate the municipal swimming pool and Tuskegee’s all-white First Methodist Church. Last week, just before his death, he spent hours in the downtown Macon County Courthouse helping some 40 Negro would-be voters to register. That night, when he went to nearby Wilson’s Standard Oil service station to buy gas and use the men’s room, he got into an argument with Attendant Marvin Segrest, 67, with whom he had quarreled several times previously. Segrest went to a desk drawer, pulled out a gun, and fired twice. Younge fell dead with a .38 slug near his left eye.

Segrest was arrested, and District Attorney Tom Young described him as a “very quiet type of man” who had no record of Negro baiting. Young insisted that the murder was “not a civil rights homicide,” pointed out that Younge was holding a golf club in his hand when shot. Tuskegee students noisily disagreed; groups as large as 1,500 marched through Tuskegee singing freedom songs and demanding the death penalty for Segrest. Civil rights leaders asked Lyndon Johnson to send federal marshals to protect Negro lives and rights, and Mayor Charles M. Keever, calling the situation “very dangerous,” said that he might ask for federal troops. “The murder shows,” said Tuskegee Institute Instructor Jean Wiley, “that the image of Tuskegee as the ideal integrated Southern community was only a facade.”

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