Saturday, September 1, 1956
page 1

Not By Ranting Nor By Chanting

People at the opposite emotional extremes on questions involving racial matters apparently are trying to work up simultaneous outbursts here tonight.

The bus boycott was not mentioned at the Klan meeting.
Some splinter of the discredited Ku Klux Klan, through unsigned handbills and announcements from unidentified leaders, has announced a "white supremacy" meeting – and probably cross-burning – in a field west of the city.

Undoubtedly, the Tallahassee bus boycott will come in for a lot of wrathful talk from silly goons who would use such incidents to help attract a crowd and draw membership fees with the application blanks that are being scattered around town.

While the Klan members gathered outside the city limits, blacks held a prayer meeting.
Not to be outdone, the Negro Inter-Civic Council will gather a crowd in a Tallahassee church to pray and exhort – and probably pass the plate in support of the bus boycott.

Both gatherings, of course, will be valid demonstrations of the American rights of free speech and freedom of the people to assemble as long as they stay peaceable and act within the law.

We give both groups credit for a zealous sincerity, but we doubt that either one will solve any of our problems. They are likely to aggravate them. Each will use the other's activities to finance and build up a following for its own movement.

Our problems will be solved only by deliberate, earnest and congenial efforts of the great majority among both races who will be going about their normal business Saturday night while a few hundred extremists build first and tension – and provide dramatic stories and pictures to distort the world's impression of our community.

It would be best if they'd all stay home.



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