centuries ago, we have an immutable written Constitution while England did not and had to rely on the wise and just judges who developed the common law to gradually modernize and humanize English law. Our Constitution so far as its construction is concerned, should be as immutable and changeless as the laws of the Medes and Persians. However, of course it can be amended by the submission of amendments by Congress to the States, which must then be ratified by three-fourths of the States; it can also of course, be changed in a convention but this has never been done and under modern conditions is not practical. If the Supreme Court would merely realize that the Constitution can only be changed by amendments, our troubles will be largely over. The people of the South generally feel that the U.S. Senate is the last bulwark of our liberties and they no longer look to the Supreme Court to protect our liberties. That is one reason why we look with such fear on the civil rights bills, whereby Congress would be engaging in the same practice of enlarging on the Constitution and misinterpreting and altering the Constitution by legislation.

I do not mean to critize the Supreme Court as an institution or to critize any particular Judge. However, I do not think it would be unfair or unkind with reference to a Supreme Court Judge who is southern born and who was in his early days a member of the iniquitous Ku Klux Klan, and of course I have always been opposed to the modern Ku Klux Klan, even though my grandfather in South Carolina headed the Ku Klux Klan in his county up until the day General Forest ordered it disbanded, and I will always consider the old Ku Klux Klan a patriotic and necessary organization up until General Forest disbanded it. This particular judge has a record that is 100-percent perfect in turning loose Communists and in favoring the Communists in every decision. Another Judge, a very learned man, who has repeatedly visited Russia, has a record that is almost as perfect. I do not know their reason or philosophy and I make no accusion against them but I would remind them of the wise words of the Master of all mankind, which were so frequently repeated by the late Senator Tom Heflin of Alabama, when He said "By their fruits ye shall know them."

The people of Mississippi are most earnest in their desire to improve themselves. Four or five years ago, I secured census records which I now have, showing that Mississippi ranked second among the States of the Union in the percentage of its white population who were attending college. The morals and education and the ethics of the people of the State constantly improve.

Our people are patriotic. In World War II, Mississippi furnished a larger percentage of volunteers than any State in the Union in proportion to its population. This may have been due in part to a low economic level in Mississippi, which I admit. Mississippi in proportion to its population had more winners of Medals of Honor in combat than any other State in the Union. Mississippi has the largest percentage of pure Anglo-Saxons of any State in the Union. Mississippi is conservative and law abiding. We have only one Communist member living in Mississippi, so the FBI says. The day will come, and it is not too far distant, when segregation followed by communism will have to be resisted in a battle to the death, according to our present trends in Government. The Solid South, especially the Deep South, in conjunction with the conservatives of the Middle West and of other States, will be eventually the people who will save this Nation, if it is saved. I pray that I will not live to see the day when this Nation becomes socialistic and later communistic. Civil Rights Acts of the nature proposed, I am sure, would be supported by every Communist in the United States because they want disharmony and confusion in racial relations and in every other field. We are playing into their hands with this type of intemperate and unconstitutional legislation. My family prays each night and at most of our meals for the preservation of the liberties which we enjoy. Every American citizen should do likewise, so that under God we may protect our freedom and liberties from the assaults of radicals in this country, which assaults are far more dangerous than the threats from the Communist countries abroad.

Gentlemen, I thank you for your indulgence and as you consider these bills, you will have my most fervent prayers that they be defeated, so that we may in the South attempt to remedy the breaches in racial relations which have already occurred.

Mr. Percy Greene of Jackson, Miss.?

Mr. Greene wrote to the chairman of the subcommittee expressing his wish and desire to appear in person to testify; we made arrangements with him, and he has come here today from Jackson, Miss. Will you proceed, Mr. Greene?

STATEMENT OF PERCY GREENE, JACKSON, MISS.

Mr. GREENE. Mr. Chairman, I wish to say at the outset that I realize that this is an occasion for me individually and personally that bears some extended implications. Before I proceed, however, I would like to say that when I came into this room this morning and saw Senator Langer presiding it was a pleasure to me to go back in my mind to around 1948 when I came to Washington to accept a plaque from the Washington Institute on Race Relations for the work that I had been doing in Mississippi on the subject of race relations, at which Senator Langer and Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University, were the speakers here in Washington.

(At this point, Senator Ervin returned to the hearing room.)

I am certain that you know that I must know the distinguished Mississippians who have appeared here today and who have come into this room today; Senator Stennis, Governor Coleman, Mr. Patterson, Mr. Pace, Mr. Shantz. All of them I am well acquainted with.

I know them, and I have known them all along. But I came here today after I read the testimony in the newspapers of another distinguished Mississippian, Mr. A. Boyd Campbell, a one-time president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who in his statement before the hearing I think of the House committee referred to an editorial published in the Jackson Advocate in which he pointed out that white people and Negroes of intelligence could get together to work out a solution to what is obviously their own problems, and that now there has developed a constantly widening gap between the responsible white people and the responsible Negro people at the local level because of the pressure of civil rights legislation and other influences. Senator ERVIN. I hate to leave but I have to run over to the Senate floor again for another vote. The counsel will continue the hearing in my absence.

(At this point, Senator Ervin left the hearing room.)

Mr. GREENE. That it is possible for the white people and Negroes to get together at the local level to me is just not a sentiment, something that can be pointed to as a plausible proposition.

But in support of that idea, I would like to briefly point to the period in Mississippi from 1940 until 1954 which I have repeatedly pointed to in speeches around the country, in editorials in my paper, the Jackson Advocate, as the brightest and most hopeful period in the history of Mississippi and in the rest of the South.

I say that because there were those at the beginning who pointed to me, Percy Greene, and the Jackson Advocate, my paper, as the sole architect of that period of the things that took place. In the month of September in 1939 I began the publication of the Jackson Advocate. It is now a small paper with about 5,000 or 6,000 circulation. In one of its first, in the first editorial in the paper, we said that we were going to use the paper first to try to establish an atmosphere in which the intelligent white people and Negroes could get together in

the State to find a solution to its problems, and that we were going to try to win for the Negroes in Mississippi the right to vote, while teaching him the value of intelligent political participation.

Now we southerners of intelligence, we know about the sentiments, the animosities, the ill will that developed in the Reconstruction and in here what is known as the post-Reconstruction period, which is understood by all intelligent southerners, Negro and white.

Therefore, as a citizen of Mississippi and as one who perhaps has done this, gone to some extent to understand the developments during the Reconstruction period, the post-Reconstruction period and those developments that led to the Hayes-Tilden deal and the unwritten compromise, I make no apologies for the conditions that existed as a result of the conditions that developed and took place during the Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction period.

Therefore, in 1940 when we had got our paper projected, we started on the proposition of working toward the day when white people and Negroes could get together then at the State and at the local level to find a solution to our problems.

We started working toward winning for the Negroes of Mississippi the right to vote and political participation, and to that end we made a preliminary survey of the number of Negro voters in the State, and the results showed from official and nonofficial sources that in 1940 there were less than 250 Negroes registered and qualified to vote in Mississippi, and it was directly the result of the sentiments, the animosities that had developed during the Reconstruction period when the troops were sent to the South, the post-Reconstruction agitation to take political advantage of the newly emancipated Negro slaves, and

so forth.

We started that against the background of that sentiment. Without any reflections, my effort here is to prove that we were on the road to a condition which would have made all things possible and necessary reflecting good for the Negroes and good for the country without the necessity of any kind of civil rights legislation. The efforts of the Jackson Advocate at first to encourage Negroes to vote and to win for them the right of political participation in Mississippi in 1941 was met with this editorial from the pen of Maj. Frederick Sullens, the dynamic and brilliant editor of the Jackson Daily News. It was a reflection of the sentiment that existed from 1878 up until the beginning of the 1940's. In that editorial he said that this little Negro newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, edited by that Percy Greene, is talking about Negro voting here in Mississippi.

There is going to be a lynching down there, and Percy Greene is going to be right in the middle of it.

That was in 1940. But we kept persistently after it, not only editorially but going about the State. I spoke in places where for 50 years before that time it was almost like committing suicide for a Negro to talk about voting.

But I said to the white people as they asked me, that the only reason we want to vote, and we ought to vote, the only reason that we want to vote is that we can be able to join with the best white people in the State to do with them what is best for all the people in the State and at the local levels. And soon, by 1946, even before the decision in the white primary cases, small white weekly newspapers were beginning to editorialize that the time had come for the Negro

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citizens to have the right to vote and political participation, and without the court by 1946 there were upward of 10,000 Negroes who had registered, paid their poll tax, and who qualified as electors. I say to you that history, when it is honestly written, will record that period as the first evidence of the fact that the animosities that existed between Negroes and white people as a result of the post-Civil War conditions in the South had actually burned themselves out.

And by 1954 we had some thirty-odd thousand Negroes registered and qualified to vote.

Even in personal contacts with some of the hard-shelled places as president of the Mississippi Negro Voters, Mississippi Negro Democrats Association, I had been given the assurance by responsible people in county after county that Negroes would be given the right to vote, and they would be called upon to pay their poll tax.

I would like to give you this example. We got around and organized the Quitman County Democrats Association. The first meeting was to be held at Falcon, Quitman County, which is in the heart of the delta, and no Negro for 50 years outside of the Republican Negroes who get together down in Jackson every 4 years had ever said anything about voting out there.

They asked me to come up there, a group of Negro leaders, to talk about voting. On the appointed day I left Jackson by car in the afternoon to get to Falcon, and in that route I had to pass through a much larger town, Marks, Miss., and a group of Negro leaders of high responsibility met me and said, "Percy, look, I don't believe you ought to go over there to Marks. All them white folks are going to be out there tonight. We done heard that the district attorney and the banker and the sheriff and the constables, they are all going to be there."

But I was already there, and I was determined to go because my heart was right. And sure enough when I got down to that meeting it was a great concourse of people comparatively with the instrumentalities that were available to them, the small school.

It was filled up to overflowing. As I approached it, I couldn't see anything but white people. And having something of the background and the tradition in my mind, I said to myself, "It looks like this is it."

But when I got nearer, I could see a large group of Negroes, and when I went in the Negroes were all seated. The white people were all round the wall, and on the rostrum were the prominent white people, the sheriff, the district attorney, the county attorney, a prominent banker, a plantation owner. And I proceeded after the preliminaries and the introduction to make this speech again reiterating that our only need, our only desire for the right to vote was so that we could join with the best white people to work out a solution to our own problems and to help in bringing about the best condition for the State.

(At this point, Senator Ervin returned to the hearing room.)

Mr. GREENE. And to my surprise, as soon as I had finished speaking the sheriff got up and endorsed what I had said and called the most prominent Negro in the county, whose name is Percy Nelson, and said "Percy, tomorrow I want you to get every responsible Negro in Marks and in this county and have him come up and register."

And until 1954 the Quitman County registration among Negroes in the delta, and especially at Marks, was the largest in the State.

I came here to speak to you, I said, because I wanted to endorse, what Mr. Boyd Campbell said in this statement before the House committee and then subsequently before this committee.

I recall having read in the paper that Mr. Campbell said that his immediate ancestors fought in the Civil War, and two of them came back crippled for life, but that he held no bitterness, that he knew that ultimately the intelligent white people and Negroes together can work out the solution to their problems in the South.

Your call came to me in such a time that I had no time to make a preparation for this. I am trying to do this purely extemporaneousÎy. But I came up here also to testify that my father was born in slavery, and that he repeatedly told me about the things that happened between white people and Negroes during the Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction periods, how the efforts, the sending of the Federal troops to the South and certain other efforts had given the people, who had not had a sufficient amount of experience with that kind of thing, a sort of arrogance, a forwardness, a something that made them lose sight of the value of relationships between white people and Negroes at the local level, and that had led to these things.

My father told me also about the Negroes who were members of the Reconstruction State legislatures, and I come from Mississippi, as I say again, where we had during the Reconstruction period two U.S. Senators, Branch K. Bruce and Hiram R. Revels, and in the House of Representatives, Jim Hill and John R. Lynch.

My father used to say: "Son, you may have the responsibility of leadership and I want to tell you a story. Up in the legislature during Reconstruction there were Negroes there; some there because of ability and some for other reasons. And I used to watch and go see the sessions during that time, and invariably no matter what a former slaveholder had to say, no matter how good his intentions, no matter how sincere in his convictions about a thing, no matter how worthy the proposition, the Negro members of the legislature at that time thought it was their responsibility to vote 'No' every time a former slaveholder voted 'Yes,' and to vote 'Yea' every time a former slaveholder voted 'No.'""

I come before this committee today with no bitterness, Senator, nothing, by having had the experience that there are thousands of intelligent Negroes in the South who have come to the understanding that they do not necessarily, are not required to say no to everything every time a southern white man say yes, but how we can work out this situation down in Mississippi. In 1950, having gotten some public notice about because of my activities in the area of race relations in Mississippi, and having become a confidant and an acquaintance of Walter White, then secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, I recall the occasion of their 1950 civil rights mobilization held in the Department of Labor auditorium here in Washington.

And Walter White of the NAACP invited me to attend that convention and be one of its principal speakers, giving the southern point of view on the situation.

But a few months before that, a thing that I have already referred to, I came to Washington to accept the plaque from the Washington Committee on Race Relations. And while there I got an invitation to