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Out of the U.S. South last week blew a chill and ominous wind, a wind that carried with it the echoes of half-forgotten battles and the seeds of conflict yet to come. In Montgomery, Ala., where the Confederacy was born, obdurate Negroes persisted in their 3½-month-old boycott of a bus company that apparently was prepared to go bankrupt rather than abandon Jim Crow. In Sumner, Miss., an all-white jury decided that a white cotton-gin operator was not guilty of murder when he fired two charges of buckshot and one of squirrel shot into the body of a Negro gas-station attendant with whom he had an argument. In Washington, Texan Lyndon Johnson, majority leader of the U.S. Senate, felt obliged to announce that he did not "anticipate" that irreconcilable views on racial segregation would split the Democratic Party in 1956. Elsewhere on Capitol Hill another U.S. lawmaker, an owlish, bespectacled man with a dead cigar in his mouth, stared unblinkingly at a visitor and said: "I can tell you that integration will never come to Mississippi. I say there is no basis for compromise."
For James Oliver Eastland, senior U.S. Senator from Mississippi, and spiritual leader of Southern resistance to school desegregation, this was a relatively restrained statement. In less temperate moments, Eastland has trumpeted the traditional Southern creed with a bluntness unsurpassed in the postwar U.S. From the floor of the U.S. Senate he has proclaimed his belief that "the Negro race is an inferior race," and has warned the nation that the white people of Mississippi will "maintain control of our own elections and . . . will protect and maintain white supremacy throughout eternity." He has denounced the Supreme Court decision banning racial segregation as "an illegal, immoral and sinful doctrine" and the court itself as "this crowd of racial politicians in judicial robes." He has called on Southerners to fight integration "every step of the way," and has assured them that "Southern people will not be violating the Constitution or the law when they defy this monstrous proposition."
Thanks to these and countless similar statements, Eastland is today one of the most widely disliked men in the U.S. New York's Senator Herbert Lehman has attacked him in the Senate as "a symbol of racism in America." Sermons have been preached against him in Northern churches and the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of New York has accused Eastland of "subversion just as real and, because it comes from a U.S. Senator, far more dangerous than any perpetrated by the Communist Party." The most frequent charge against him, one that is almost universal among Northern liberals, is that he is the latest in an unlovely line of Dixie demagogues who have deliberately fanned the flames of racial prejudice to serve their own political ends.