Word: mcgill
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Still contentious in his gently astringent way, McGill revels in outflanking questioners who hesitate in pressing the Southerner too hard on race. Should blacks in the South as well as in the North be exposed to African history? "The white Southerner needs courses in African History and the achievement of the Negro in America just as much as the Negro does." And he chides some of the less militant civil rights organizations for becoming too middle class, losing their appeal for younger blacks...
...McGill points with particular pride to the changes which civil rights legislation and maturing black political power have wrought in the South. In the past six years alone, he points out, Georgia has freed herself of the blatantly undemocratic county-unit rule, has reapportioned her legislature, and has seen the voting rights act, in conjunction with voter registration projects, raise Negro voting levels throughout the state...
Georgia now has 11 Negro legislators, McGill notes, more than any other states except Michigan and Illinois. All but one of the eleven come from Atlanta, where the influx of blacks from rural areas and the exodus of middle class whites to the suburbs have left the city with a 43 per cent black population. McGill claims that within about four years Atlanta will very likely have a Negro mayor...
...rural South, McGill admits, has come along much more slowly. Coercion and overt oppression are still the rule in the rural Georgia which sent restaurant owner, axe-handle distributor, confused and frightened Lester Maddox to the statehouse in 1966. And the Wallace phenomenon, he concedes, is a very serious and dangerous malignancy. "Wallace speaks the new 'Magnolia Mouthwash.' He doesn't use the old words, just the new words, the code words," McGill explains...
Despite the threat of a possible Wallace sweep in the deep South this fall, McGill displays a degree of optmism and faith in the eventual efficacy of the political process that has become increasingly rare in discussions of the racial quagmire in the North...