were molesting two Negro girls. He was killed when he attempted to protect them.
Morris Scott was slain during the week of October %, 1950 in Linden, Alabama, by William R. Welch and George Baker. Welch admitted firing the shotgun blast that killed Scott. County Sheriff T. Wilmer Shields declined to disclose a motive for the killing.
Perhaps this fragmentary list may serve to indicate the extent of mass murder on the basis of “race.” Each slaying to no small degree terrifies entire Negro communities. For that is its purpose. It is not uncommon for the inhabitants of such communities to spend days and nights hiding in the woods and swamps after a slaying. These crimes are not unconnected with the Negro’s fight for the right to vote, as guaranteed him by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. If a Negro has no right to life, he clearly has no right to vote. If a Negro may die for asking for a bottle of beer, something similar may happen if he asks for a raise or back pay or tries to organize into trade unions or go on strike. In the South the Negro’s fight for the ballot is the central issue. Around it revolve most of the incitements to genocide and virtually all of the widespread terrorist activity of the Ku Klux Klan.
Incitement to Genocide
Incitement takes many forms but the common denominator of every form is the openly avowed determination that the Negro shall not have the rights guaranteed him under the Constitution of the United States, the United Nations Charter and the Genocide Convention. Thus, James E. Byrnes, Governor of South Carolina, former justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, former Secretary of State, former Senator, recently declared that South Carolina would abolish the state’s school system rather than abolish segregation in the schools. Openly flouting the basic law of the United States and the United Nations, he not only incited to genocide but reinforced a system which trains thousands of children in white supremacy, guaranteeing genocide and its protagonists in the future. When in another recent statement, the former Secretary of State—so solicitous while in that office for free elections everywhere save in his home—declared that South Carolina would “find a way” to retain its white primary elections, he incited genocide against any American Negro who tried to avail himself of his legal right to vote in South Carolina. That this is not rhetoric will be proven by numerous instances of Negroes killed or assaulted when they attempted to vote after white citizens had been incited to murder and other violence against the Negro people by such statements as those of Byrnes.
