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Civil Rights Groups Curtail Demonstrations, Unite to Oppose Goldwater

July 29, 1964 - The leaders of the six major Negro organizations in the United States, after a summit meeting to “democratically iron out differences of opinion,” announced today that civil rights demonstrations would be curtailed nationwide until after Election Day, Nov. 3, to enable the groups to fight Senator Barry Goldwater in his drive for the Presidency.

Said a joint statement issued at New York headquarters for NAACP, 40 W. 40th St.: “We call upon our members and supporters to utilize the months ahead to enlist voters, to expand the enforcement of the new Civil Rights Act, and to win new friends and new supporters for the civil rights cause, which is not our cause alone but the cause of America.”

The statement called for “a broad curtailment, if not total moratorium, on all mass marches, mass picketing, and mass demonstrations until after Election Day, next Nov. 3.”

“The platform adopted under the Goldwater forces at the Republican convention in San Francisco is a state’s rights platform, chosen at the very time Mississippi was exhibiting to a shocked nation the callous repression, the violence and death which mark the operation of the state’s rights theory in the human relations field,” the statement said.

The statement, read by Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, was signed by four men — Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, chairman of the Negro-American Labor Council; the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the Urban League.

James Farmer, national director of CORE, and John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, said they agreed with the statement individually but were required to submit policy issues to their national boards. Their national boards will meet Aug. 7 to 9.

All six leaders endorsed a second statement expressing opposition to rioting, calling for establishment of civilian review boards to deal with charges of police brutality, and disavowing “extremist groups such as Communist.”

After the meeting, Dr. King told newsmen he had told Mayor Robert Wagner that the slums would have to be destroyed and that new and integrated housing was vital.

“What happens here,” said Dr. King, “affects the whole country, from the sharecroppers of Mississippi longing for freedom to the followers of Barry Goldwater hoping to discredit liberalism.

“I told the Mayor that Negroes, North and South, demand that biased behavior and attitudes too often characteristic of ghetto police must be thoroughly abandoned; that unless the police treat Negroes with courtesy, dignity, and respect, we cannot, in a peaceful atmosphere, get on to solving the basic economic issues which beset us.”

He ticked off those problems as jobs, housing, and quality integrated schools.

In Cairo, Egypt, Malcolm X, Black Nationalist leader, said the moderates who called for the truce on demonstrations had “sold themselves out and became campaign managers in the Negro community for Lyndon B. Johnson.”


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