A Pleasing Accord

The heated racial unrest which has troubled the town of Cambridge, Maryland, for the past eighteen months was at last brought to a peaceful close this week. Both the municipal government and the Negro leaders granted concessions to the other side in an effort to reach a workable accord and in so doing exercised an encouraging amount of good sense; the violence has been put aside and the Eastern Shore community is evidently on its way to reshaping its backward civil rights posture.

The struggle in Cambridge, for all the tranquillity of this week's settlement, has been a long and unusually hard one for the civil rights movement in Maryland. The racial eruptions in that town were among the most violent of the past year and the opposition the Negroes faced was incredibly staunch.

In all, the summer of perspiration and change is going very nicely. The opposition has begun to yield, offering negotiations in place of jail sentences. If the Kennedy Administration and the Congress will provide some late but no less necessary assistance to the advancing civil rights movement, the United States should be a better place to live in by this Fall.