SNCC Workers Discuss Dangers Of Voter Registration Campaign

Mississippi Negroes who live in depressed counties are more likely to support voter registration campaigns than are those who live in more prosperous areas, Curtis Hayes, a Mississippi Negro who is a member of the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, said last night to an audience at Two Divinity Avenue.

"Many rural Negroes earn only $7 a week, with a wife and three or four children to support," he explained. "If they register to vote, the sharecroppers may be deprived of their land but they have very little to start with, and are constantly in debt. Their standard of living is terrible. They have nothing to lose."

"There is no way we can communicate with the white people in Mississippi," Hollis Watkins, another SNCC worker, added. Since SNCC began its latest registration campaign in Green wood, Miss., there have been two shootings and a number of burnings in reprisal. One SNCC worker, James Travis, was shot through the spine and nearly killed. "That was the only time when the Negro community talked of violence," said Hayes.

It is the full state machinery, not only local authorities, who oppose registration campaigns, Watkins emphasised. If a Negro attempts to register, state officials administer the test and then decide whether he has passing or failed in private. Despite an intense five month campaign-including door-to-door visits, mass meetings, speeches in church, and voter education schools-only 10 Green wood Negroes have been permitted to register.

There is no way that SNCC workers can plan anything beyond the registration campaign. "It would be suicide to try anything more," Hayes explained in response to a questioner who suggested that they organize wide-scale strikes. "Even if the Negro community could be organized, "a lot of people would probably be killed."

Though Hayes and Watkins are native Mississippi Negroes, both have frequently been called 'outside agitators. "Once the term was used when I was working in a town only two miles from my home," Watkins said.