Weaver: Miss. Negroes Could Revolt

Claude L. Weaver '65 said very quietly last night that the Negroes might start killing the white people in Mississippi pretty soon.

"Yes," he said, "if we wanted to get a small Mau Mau going it wouldn't be difficult." He smiled; "Might be a nice summer project."

He went on to explain that in Mississippi the fight for Negro rights is "not a question of a little unpleasantness, but a question of people dying for the right to vote."

"Negroes in Mississippi," he said, "don't even have the right to say they don't have any rights. If you're a Negro down there, and a white man comes up to you and says, 'Boy, are you happy? you better say, 'yeah,' 'cause if you don't you'll be dead -- or at least bruised."

Weaver noted that the Ku Klux Klan seems to have been revived in the southern part of the state. "Five Negroes have been killed in the last two weeks. We don't know that it was the Klan, but it was Klan style," he said. "People don't ordinarily get killed the way these people were."

No "Moderate" Solutions

The situation in Mississippi, Weaver said, "is not our for moderate solutions." There will be "no deals, no compromises. Nothing is going to be accomplished within the framework of government as it exists in the state."

For this reason he remarked. "Integration is not a real live issue." The Congress of Federated Organizations (COFO) is mainly concerned with voter registration. "We are talking in terms of the franchise, political rights."

At the same time, "law doesn't mean very much in Mississippi," Weaver said, Without ever raising his voice, the Dunster House junior, now on a leave of absence, told enough stories of beatings, shootings and burnings to convince his audience.

"There aren't any constitutional issues in Mississippi. From the way the officials act there isn't any constitution. There aren't any civil processes, there is only power.

"The city of Jackson is the most cosmopolitan city in the state." (Laughter.) "They have a task It is baby blue. And another new thing: all the cops is Mississippi have battle dress now. And maybe pretty soon we'll be giving those cops a battle."