The Augusta Courier

A Lesson For The Moderates

Little Rock has fought the Southern race mixers another lesson.
The good people of Little Rock did this in the November 4th election.
They defeated Brooks Hays for Congress in a write-in campaign.

A Little Rock eye doctor ran against Hays in the General Election. He couldn't even get his name on the ballot and he conducted only a week's campaign.
In disgust with Brooks Hays, the people of that Congressional District wrote in the name of Dr. Dale Alford and he defeated Hays by a two thousand-vote majority.
Dr. Alford is an outspoken segregationist and the only one on the Little Rock School board. He has supported Governor Faubus in his militant stand against the orders of the federal government to integrate.
Hays has been in Congress for sixteen or eighteen years. He is President of the Southern Baptist Convention and has been a prominent lay leader in the Baptist Church in Arkansas for many years.
Yet, he is one of the Ralph McGill-type of moderate on the question of race mixing.
In 1938 he attended the Southern Conference for Human Welfare meeting in Birmingham, Alabama and was Vice Chairman at one time of this organization which later was declared to be subversive.
He attended this meeting along with Lester Granger, President of the Urban League, another race mixing outfit.
Brooks Hays was a charter member of the Urban League in Little Rock and was one of its directors until recently.
He tried to act as an intermediary between President Eisenhower and Governor Faubus in an effort to get Faubus to agree to the Ralph McGill-moderate approach to race mixing, and that is, to accept a little bit of integration at the time until you are fully race-mixed.
Brooks Hays had opposition in the primary this summer and for some reason was nominated by the Democratic Party in Arkansas. In Arkansas heretofore this has amounted to an election and the contest in the General Election has been just a formality.
This time it was different. The people of that Congressional District decided they wanted Dr. Alford and they went to the polls and wrote his name in on the ballots. They did it because they wanted to let the world know that they didn't want a Ralph McGill-moderate for a Congressman.
So, after sixteen years in the Congress of the United States, they retired Mr. Hays.
This should be a lesson for all the Southern moderates. The people of the South are going to eliminate them just as fast as they can get to them.
Now the National Democratic Party came to Hays' rescue. They did everything they could to elect him, but the people of Arkansas would have none of him.
The National Democratic Party even went so far as to have a film made of a speech by Governor J. P. Coleman, of Mississippi, urging the people of Little Rock to re-elect Brooks Hays. This was run on both television stations in Little Rock on the night before the election.
However, the people of Little Rock turned a deaf ear to the Governor of Mississippi. They don't like the Governor of Mississippi any more than they like Brooks Hays.
The Governor of Mississippi is going to find out that the people of Mississippi entertain no higher opinion of him than do the people of Little Rock and Arkansas. The first time they get a chance at him, they are going to teach him a lesson.
The echoes of the battle of Little Rock will never die.