(2 of 2)
∙ALABAMA. Teen-aged toughs in Tuscaloosa mobbed an integrated movie theater. Whites slammed Negroes with toy baseball bats as they sat at a Bessemer lunch counter. State police kept a "subversives" file that included the names of out-of-state newsmen. Yet even volatile Birmingham opened its public accommodations to Negroes. Some schools were integrated in Montgomery and Gadsden and in Bullock County; desegregation continued slowly in Mobile and Birmingham. But, at best, only 10,000 more Negroes were permitted to register to vote.
∙MISSISSIPPI. Three civil rights workers were murdered, and eleven other unsolved murders had racial overtones. Four Negroes were wounded, 25 churches were bombed or burned to the ground, 400 people were arrested in civil rights disturbances. Still, four school districts were integrated, and some motels and restaurants were at least temporarily desegregated in Jackson. Only 1,000 Negroes joined voting rolls.
Throughout the South, much of the Negro progress, particularly in school integration, was still of the token variety. Yet last week Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division was rightly optimistic. Said he: "We have had more widespread compliance with the bill than any one of us expected. I don't know of a major city anywhere in the South where there isn't substantial compliance. It's just remarkable."