After meeting a pair of friends for lunch, the New Orleans lawyer ordered a Falstaff beer, touched a match to a Philip Morris cigarette, and settled comfortably back for a session of table talk. "Oh-oh," chided one of his friends, "I guess you drive a Ford, too." The remark had a point, and the lawyer caught it all too easily. He admitted that he did drive a Ford, but added: "I'm changing."
In parts of the Deep South, Ford, Falstaff and Philip Morris have been nicknamed "The Three Fs" and made the targets of an extraordinary whispering campaign and economic boycott. The charge: they have aided the cause of Negro equality. But the boycott movement goes far beyond the phonetic Fs and, as practiced by both whites and Negroes, has spread to nearly a score of other companies. Most of the affected companies are reluctant to discuss the subject. Says the general manager of the Coca-Cola bottling plant at Birmingham: "I could tell you a whole lot about it, but I'd just rather not say anything." Says an official of the Kraft Foods Co. (which was criticized for sponsoring a television showing of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones'): "If you start fighting, you just give these idiots a dignity they don't deserve."
Most of the boycotts are unorganized, word-of-mouth affairs. Some crop up overnight and wither as swiftly. Others last for weeks or months in the ebb and flow of their effectiveness.
The Knowing Smile. Of all the companies, Ford has probably been the most affected. It is blamed for the civil rights spending of the Fund for the Republic—over which the company has no control.
An Alabama dealer says his sales are off 50%, attributes part of that drop to the boycott. Says he: "If somebody says something about it—even a friend—and you deny it, they just smile at you." Adds W. M. Turner, a dealer in Selma, Ala.: "The criticism of the whites—and I'm sur prised at some of the intelligent people involved—hurts, and we haven't got the Negro trade, so you can see how it is." Ford efforts to combat the criticism have been less than successful. The Memphis assembly plant, for example, began pasting its car windows with stickers, reading: "Built in the South by Mid-Southerners." One result: the slogan led to such gutter parodies as: "Built in Africa by Apes."