Protested Pro-Segregation Speech Draws Police Protection at Yale

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (Special to the CRIMSON)--With police guarding against a threat to break up the meeting, an overflow crowd of 800 heard Eugene Cook, attorney-general of Georgia, defend the "Southern View" of segregation, at the Yale Law School last night.

Cook called the Supreme Court's segregation decision "A flagrant example of usurpation of power," and served notice that "we Georgians intend to circumvent it."

The riot threat, made in an anonymous phone call to the Conservative Society, brought 16 New Haven plainclothesmen to the meeting.

It followed earlier protests from six Yale College student organizations, against allowing Cook to speak unopposed, rather than in a debate. Although the atmosphere of the meeting was tense throughout, the only outbreak occurred when Cook detailed the higher illegitimacy and venereal disease rates among Negroes, as compared with whites.

He was interrupted by a Negro spectator, who shouted "Mr. Cook, is God dead or still living?" Cook, facing his first nonsegregated audience, did not reply.

Cook, a leader in the fight to circumvent the decision, said that "in the Deep South, the overwhelming majority of both whites and Negroes agrees that segregation serves the best interest of both races." The minority, which he estimated at five per cent, consists, he said, of "paid agitators and known subversives, financed by the Ford Foundation's left-wing Fund for the Republic."

Cook also blasted the NAACP, which, he said, has "as it ultimate goal, intermarriage" and "was doing as much to damage race relations in the South as did the Ku Klux Klan."

This was the first northern speech for Cook. He was interrupted ten times by applause, twenty times by laughter, and three times by hisses.