The Washington Post, by Edward T. Folliard
Winning Work
A Confederate flag hangs outside the headquarters of the Columbians, Inc., located at 82 Bartow St. but it doesn't look right. Something alien-like has been woven in between the stars and bars. It is a jagged red streak and somehow it looks familiar.
That crazy red streak is the Columbians' insigne, a symbolic thunderbolt that proclaims the arrival of a new and spectacular hate organization in the Southland.
The motto of the Columbians is Race, Nation, Faith, but its wild-eyed orators put it more crudely.
"This is a white man’s country," they shout, and then go on to tell what they are going to do about it.
The Washington Post reporter has spent a week in Atlanta looking over the Columbians. He has talked to their leader (one of whom has a gorgeous shiner) and has listened to their tirades against Negroes, Jews, the Communists, the rich, and newspaper editors who don't share their views on "Anglo-Saxon culture." He has attended their mass meetings and has checked up on their vigilante tactics that have caused Atlanta police to arrest four of them on charges ranging from assault and battery to incitement to riot.
These impressions stand out:
1. The Columbians are not, as has been said, "juvenile delinquents of the Ku Klux Klan." The Klan doesn‘t like the Columbians, perhaps it’s because the kleagles are jealous and don't want these upstarts moving in on their side of Hate Street. Also it might be that the hood and sheet men are frightened. The word has gone out (although it’s probably just talk) that the Columbians are determined to be "40 times as bad as the Ku Klux Klan."
2 The whole aura of the Columbians is Nazi. This is not surprising because two of the leaders are known to have been admirers of Hitler and his racial phobias. The Columbians, all fanatic racists, dress and swagger in the manner of storm troopers. They wear khaki shirts without coats, and on their arms are the red thunderbolt patches suggestive of the Runic insignia of the late Heinrich Himmler’s SS bullies. It is a startling experience, the first time, to see them swinging down Bartow St. or Peachtree St.; something like seeing an old newsreel of Munich in the days of the Beer Hall Putsch. After seeing them a third or fourth time, of course, they cease to be exciting.
3 The oddest thing of all about the Columbians is that the movement has brought a new kind of Yankee carpetbagger to the South. From above the Mason-Dixon line has come Homer L. Loomis, Jr., not to allay race prejudice but to whip it up. A strange fellow of 32, given to nervous laughter and nonstop harangues, Loomis is a New Yorker with a Park Ave. background. He attended fashionable St. Paul's Prep School and studied at Princeton until, according to his own story, he flunked out in an alcoholic haze, after two years.
"I suppose it sounds funny to hear one crackpot talking against other crackpots," Loomis told me once, and gave his nervous laugh.
4. Atlanta is terribly embarrassed by the Munich atmosphere brought to it by the Columbians. Both of the city’s newspapers-the Constitution and the Journal-are crusading against them, after first maintaining a hush-hush policy for fear of giving them free advertising. Virtually all civic and patriotic organizations are fighting them. Protestant clergyman have denounced them as prototypes of Hitler and his Nazis. The official organ of the Catholic Laymen’s Association of Georgia, the Bulletin, has joined in the fight with a bitter editorial headed "Heil Columbians!"
In view of this, and in view of the fact that Atlanta’s police have gone all out to harass them, one would think that the Columbians are doomed. Certainly it seemed so to The Post reporter after watching a Columbians' rally, attended by only 290. What bothers newspaper editors and others here is a fear that they might underestimate the Ku Klux Klan, or, going farther afield, an Austrian with a funny little mustache.
The No. 1 man of the Columbians—nominally, at least—is Emory Burke, a scrawny, undersized Alabaman, who holds the title of president. Burke has figured in the news more than Homer Loomis, one reason being that Dan Duke, assistant attorney general of Georgia and a much bigger man physically, took a sock at him in court last week and opened a gash over his eye.
However, the Atlanta police regard Loomis as the "kingpin" of the outfit, although as secretary he rates as No. 2. They believe that he is smarter than Burke, more intense in his fanaticism, and less inhibited.
It was Loomis who thought up the name "Columbians."
It was Loomis, too, who conceived the idea of the red thunderbolt insignia. He says he got the idea from a shoulder patch worn by men in the Second Armored Division, with which he served in Europe.
(Loomis’ service with that great outfit ought to be a proud and an honorable chapter in his life. However, his second wife, in a divorce proceeding, has clouded it somewhat by alleging that he joined the Army in 1944 to postpone a lawsuit brought against him by her. They were then living at Alberta, Va., near Richmond.)
Loomis was reminded by the reporter that the Columbians’ insignia had a Nazi suggestiveness about it. Of course it had, he said, and he proceeded to show why. He took a pencil and paper and drew a Runic S. There it was—the SS of Himmler’s men. It did not differ much from the Columbians’ jagged red streak.
Loomis chuckled and said this was a good thing.
I talked to Loomis and Burke in their Bartow St. headquarters in downtown Atlanta. Their three rooms, located on the second floor of a rundown office building, had a barracks atmosphere about them. All the rooms had cots. Over a washbowl in one room was a lithograph of Lee and his generals. On the wall opposite were the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars, with the Columbians’ banner in between.
A girl with pretty blonde hair, but not so pretty features, sat in one of the rooms the wall of which was adorned by a diatribe against Jews. I later saw her at a Columbians’ rally, keeping the minutes.
Young men, all wearing the storm-trooper regalia, pounded in and out of the headquarters. One of them, 17-year-old Ralph Childers, wore a medal suspended from a ribbon. It was a "medal of honor," conferred on him by President Burke, after he had been arrested and charged with assault and battery against a Negro youth—a charge he denied.
The contrast between Loomis and Burke, as they sat in the room, was striking.
"Handsome Homer," as Loomis has been dubbed by one of the newspapers, had a khaki shirt, dark gray trousers, and heavy GI boots. His hair was cut severely in crew fashion. Even so it was not hard to visualize him as he must have been 10 years ago, diked out in white tie and tails and cutting up in the Stork Club.
Burke, who is the same age as Loomis, 32, looked like a man who did not get the right food when he was a boy in Alabama. He had the po’ white or cracker look about him.
"My family wasn't rich like Homer's," he said. "I had to struggle up from the bottom."
Later, at a Columbians’ rally, I discovered that Loomis was trying to simulate a southern accent. He would say "Jaw-jaw" for Georgia, and talk about how "ah feel" and about "may contacts." However, it didn't seem to go over. It was like Jeeter Lester of Tobacco Road (or Burke himself) trying to imitate an English professor at Princeton.
For all their differences, Loomis and Burke showed that they had two things in common. One was a profound and searing hatred for Negroes and Jews. The other was an irresistible impulse to talk—to talk and talk until their words piled up into an ocean of hate and bigotry and insane economics. A listener could only wonder how they ever get along, or what would happen if they were marooned together on, say, the Dry Tortugas.
(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)
What leads men to form a hate organization like the Columbians, Inc.? How do men get that way?
The story, of Emory Burke and Homer Loomis, founders of the Columbians, gives one answer, and it may be that the answer comes close to being the definitive one.
Although they come from different social strata, one having been a "have" and the other a "have-not," Burke and Loomis both have behind them records of frustration and failure.
Burke, an Alabaman, was embittered because he wanted to go to college and couldn't.
Loomis, a New Yorker, revolted because his well-to-do family sent him to Princeton when he didn’t want to go.
Back in the 1930s, both of them fancied themselves as thinkers. Burke, wandering from one New Deal transient camp to another, got so he hated "commercialism"—the placing of a money value on men, as if they were cattle or slaves." ("It tore my soul to pieces—commercialism, commercialism!") Loomis, whose family wanted him to be a lawyer or a banker, became outraged by "man’s nastiness to man, by the fact that we hadn’t learned to get along with one another." He didn’t see why, in school, a professor had to give you a sharp answer instead of a soft one.
Both of them, so they told The Post reporter, were trying to work out some philosophy, some scheme whereby discord in American society could be done away with and life made more to their liking.
Loomis racked his brain in his two years at Princeton trying to figure the thing out. But he remained baffled.
"I didn’t know what I could do about it," he said. "That made me angry, so I just drank and forgot about it."
Burke probably didn’t have the price of a drink in the early 30s.
Like Loomis, however, he was doing a lot of thinking and talking and arguing. He considered himself a "liberal" and favored recognition of Russia. He argued with people about their racial phobias.
"In my day," he told me, "I’ve had Jewish friends, believe it or not."
Loomis, too, resented the talk against Negroes and Jews, which he said he heard at home and which he attributed to the fact that his family had a Southern background.
Ultimately, both Burke and Loomis came up with an idea that seemed to answer the question that had been tormenting them. Its arrival was such a relief to Loomis that he actually gave up drinking and decided to get married and get "stabilized." There was no longer any necessity for the two men to beat their brains out or to to figure out who was to blame for everything; it was only necessary to implement the solution that had come to them like a revelation.
The solution, of course, was to rid America of its 13 million Negroes and 4 1/2 million Jews.
Burke went north, for reasons that will be explained in a moment. Loomis went south, believing that Dixie offered the most fertile soil for his idea.
"I had been drinking for years and mulling things over in my mind," Loomis said. "Now I decided it was time to do something about it—and not depend on George doing it. I decided to go south because was the one place where the race question was not taboo. It seemed obvious to me that if you were going to build something, you had to have a common blood and a common past. Only in that way could America have a common future."
At this period in history—it was about the time of Roosevelt’s second term in the late 1930s—Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement were riding high, and Nazi propaganda was flooding the United States.
Were Burke and Loomis infected by it?
"I thought Hitler had some good ideas," Loomis told me frankly.
Burke, however, was more shifty.
Was it true, he was asked, that in 1936 his name appeared on the masthead of the American Bulletin, a New York publication put out by an organization calling itself the American National Socialists and set up in imitation of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of Germany?
Burke nervously adjusted'the plaster over his cut eye and refused to answer the question. He was reminded that he might have to answer if, as seemed possible, he should be called to Capitol Hill in Washington. He excused himself and went into another room with Loomis. When he came back, he said:
"It's true. but the inferences are wrong."
By inferences he meant the inferences that had been drawn from the fact that others connected with the American National Socialists included some rather notorious characters. Anne Tellian, who also wrote for Der Sturmer, the paper publlsned by Julius Streicher, and who lived in the home of an employe of the German consulate to New York, and Henry G. Curtiss, alias John Milton Gaede, editor . of the American Bulletin, who at a New York meeting in 1939 said of the Jews: "They must be driven out of this country.... We will drive them and if necessary massacre them."
"If she lived in the home of somebody in the German consulate," said Burke apropos Anne Tellian, "I didn’t know anything about it."
Once, when I was pressing Burke for some answers, he looked up suddenly as if he had been seized by a brilliant idea. He had been. His idea was to write a "Mein Kampf."
"I'll tell you what I'll do," he drawled. "I'll write the story of my life, and your paper can print it in installments. What do you think of that idea, Homer?"
Homer, the smarter of the two, just laughed.
I got the impression that the two of them were, in a way, happy. They were leaders; they were attracting attention, and there was nobody in their own camp to challenge or contradict what Burke frequently referred to as "my thinking." Very obviously they didn’t like perverse people who tried to contradict their thinking.
"The papers will have you believe that there are two sides to this question," Loomis shouted at one mass meeting. "We know there are not."
Loomis at one point told me about certain virtues that were being practiced by the Columbians. No drinking was allowed, he said, arid smoking was being discouraged. I asked him about the religious beliefs of the Columbians.
"They don’t have any religion," he snapped. "The only faith they have is Columbianism. That’s the biggest thing in their lives. We’re giving them something to believe in, live for, and even die for."
I talked to three of the young storm troopers at the Bartow St. headquarters: James Akin, 18; Ralph Childers, 17, and Lanier Waller, 21. All were arrayed in military shirts and wore a shoulder patch with the Columbians’ red thunderbolt on a white field.
Akin, a rosy-cheeked, clean-cut youngster, said that he was an orphan. He met Loomis when both were working at a hot-dog grill at the Varsity Restaurant. He agreed with Loomis "on everything he said," including his proposition that Negroes should be sent back to Africa and Jews banished to some place along the Mediterranean.
Young Childers, wearing the "medal of honor" presented to him biy the Columbians after being charged with assault and battery on a Negro youth, went to the eighth grade in school. He had been supporting himself, he said, since he was 13. He was working at an eating place called "Hamburger Heaven" when he got to talking to some of the Columbians and decided to enroll.
Lanier Waller was the most interesting of the lot. An orphan who had been raised in an orphans home in Sherman, Tex., he couldn’t get along with the "nigger lovers" there. When he was 14 he ran away and joined the Marines. He fought at Guadalcanal and Bougainville.
"Yankees and Jews call it Boo-gainville," he said, "but that’s wrong. It’s Bo-gainville."
The erstwhile Leatherneck came out of tne war with malaria and combat fatigue. He had a "nervous condition." For a time, when he was doing guard duty at the Washington Navy Yard, he had nightmares.
"The doctor would come over to help me," he said, "and I would try and knock hell out of him. I thought he was a Jap."
(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)
A mass meeting of the Columbians, Inc. starts off with martial music. Then comes the Lord’s Prayer, and after that a verbal flogging of Negroes, Jews, Communists and the rich.
At the end, of course, there is the appeal for money; for "quarters, half dollars, dollars—anything you can spare to help in our fight for the white race."
The rally Thanksgiving night was the last the Columbians will hold in the hall of the AFL Plumbers and Steamfitters, the union having notified the Nazi-like outfit that their rental cbntract has been canceled.
It was not very impressive, this particular rally. The music, Sousa’s "Washington Post March," "Stars and Stripes Forever," and other martial pieces—came from a cheap phonograph. The chaplain, a man with a hunched back, talked too long. Not content to intone the Lord’s Prayer, he went on to recite the Columbians’ creed and to elaborate on it with some hate talk of his own. After him came the orator of the evening—Homer Loomis, Jr., No. 2 man of the Columbians.
Approximately 200 persons made up the audience. They were of all ages, from a squalling baby in its mother’s arms to stooped old men leaning on canes. One woman, built like a barn, wore a sky-blue uniform and an overseas cap to match. On her arm was the thunderbolt insigne of the Columbians.
The men, except for the younger ones in storm-trooper attire, nearly all wore odd coats and trousers. Once during the proceedings a dirty-looking fellow got noisy and quarrelsome, and was dragged out by two Atlanta policemen. He was blind drunk. Another drunk, seeing this, wobbled out under his own steam.
Who were these people who were being asked to pay $3 to join the Columbians and $2 for "The Thunderbolt?"
Homer Loomis, in a hair-down talk with me earlier, had explained that the Columbians were out to enroll the "little people."
"Any mass movement has to use mass tactics," he said, his eyes afire. "Hitler appealed to the little people. The Communists appealed—no, no, strike that out ... Our movement appeals to the little people."
"Most of them lead dull lives—work, sleep, maybe an occasional beer. We’re giving them something new, something exciting. We’re satisfying their lust for power. We're building up their egos, making them feel that they will have a part in the victory if only they’re willing to sacrifice."
At one point in this particular interview, Loomis grew cynical. He said that the little people were at heart "animals and capitalists"—that they had no desire to share anything with anybody.
"Of course," he said, "we don’t say the same thing at our meetings that I’m saying to you here."
Atlanta's newspaper editors are not nearly as harsh as that in their judgment of Columbian audiences.
Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote a column the other day in which he asked: "Why do these things always come to roost in Georgia?" The inevitable answer was, he said, that the ringleaders thought they could succeed.
"Therein," wrote McGill, "have we all failed and therein are we all to blame.
"Their audiences arc almost entirely good, plain persons of little or no education, of little working skills, in a very low income group. The spellbinders, their fingers itching to get those $3 initiation fees, talk to them with a certain logic.
“They talk to people whose lives are dreary at best. They work on people in the poorest, most squalid slum areas and to a person unable to read or write, or to one with no more than a third- or fourth-grade education, the appeal has logic.
"No person likes to admit his own failure and this technique explains satisfactorily to a failure, why he or she is a failure. It removes any personal responsibility. It places the blame on someone else..."
To get back to the Thanksgiving night rally, it did not seem to be a howling success. Loomis, the Princeton-trained New Yorker, was not very good with his phony Southern accent. The whining Emory Burke, president of the Columbians and a born rabble-rouser, doubtless would have done better. It was explained, however, that he was tied up that night with the Columbians’ lawyers.
At any rate, only about a third of the audience moved forward to contribute money for the battle for "white supremacy."
It should be understood, however, that there is a good deal more to the Columbians than those mass meetings. They have set out, as Hitler did long ago, to organize people in neighborhoods or blocks. To get them interested they perform certain services.
For example:
One day recently a Negro couple, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Jones, arrived in Garibaldi St. with a truck loaded down with bedding and furniture. They had bought a house there after being told that it was a Negro neighborhood.
They found a Columbian placard tacked to the door. On it was the red thunderbolt insigne and the words "White Community Only." (Actually it was a mixed neighborhood.)
A number of Columbians, in storm-trooper outfits, paraded up and down in front of the house. One of them was the block leader for that neighborhood, R. L. Whitman. He had with him his 16-month-old daughter, Marian Helen, and she, too, had a thunderbolt patch on her shoulder.
The Columbians warned Mr. and Mrs. Jones not to go in their new house.
Jones later told this story:
"I was living in two rooms on Davis St. My son, Eddie, came home from the Army and he moved his wife and baby in with me. I had to have more room and the real estate people told me this house was all right and we wouldn’t be bothered here."
Mrs. Jones agreed with her husband, saying that they never would have bought the house if "the real estate man hadn’t told us all these houses were colored."
Police Chief M. A. Hornsby and Captain of Detectives Buck Weaver, having received a tip. arrived in Garibaldi St. just as the Columbians were badgering the Negro couple.
Chief Hornsby spoke to one of the uniformed Columbians, Jack Price.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"Protecting white families," said Price.
"What business is that of yours?"
"We got some phone calls."
Chief Hornsby turned to Captain Weaver and said:
"Lock 'em up."
Thereupon four of the Columbians were taken in on a charge of inciting to riot.
The Negro, Jones, said tentatively:
"Well, if I don’t bother nobody around here..."
Chief Hornsby told him to go ahead and move in. He reserved his opinion of the real estate man.
(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)
What can be done about a hate organization like the Columbians, Inc.?
The answer, as it appears here, is in two parts: First, a short-range campaign of harassment by police and prosecutors; second, and most important, a long-range program that involves education, economics, and religion.
Gov. Ellis Arnall, who soon will be making way for Gene Talmadge, gave orders recently for revoking the charter of the Columbians. He confessed, however, that this was an empty gesture except that it "takes away the sanction of the State."
What was needed, Arnall said, was a program to hit at the breeding ground of bitterness, tension and hate organizations. He outlined one as follows:
1. A good dose of education.
2. Better health conditions.
3. Perfection of an economic system to enable all men by their own efforts to have higher standards of living.
4. Start in the hearts of men a new indoctrination of religion and love to replace hatred.
The demagogues who are running the Columbians, Inc., have thick skins, naturally, but it is very doubtful if they arc impervious to the blast that is now coming their way.
They are beginning to complain about invasion of their "rights." Also they are moaning over the piling up of law suits and bail-bond fees. There are other worries, too, such as finding a new hall for their mass meetings.
Meantime, the Columbians are under a fierce barrage of criticism, particularly from the clergy and from civic and patriotic organizations.
Homer Loomis and Emory Burke have gone out of their way to say that they have nothing against Catholics. They praise the atholic Church's fight against Communism and against indecency from Hollywood. But Hugh Kinchley, editor of The Bulletin, official organ of the Catholic Laymen's Association of Georgia, has excoriated the Columbians. He is particularly angry over the name they have chosen.
"Columbus," Kinchley wrote, "was a devout Catholic ... The pilot of the Nina, one of the ships which made up the three-vessel fleet which sailed on the voyage of discovery, was Alonzo Pietro, 'Il Negro,' and there is good reason to believe that Columbus’ crossing of the ocean in 1492 was financed in good measure by the Jews of Spain..."
Publicity of certain kinds, and up to a point, might be helpful to the Columbians.
This was clearly recognized by Atlanta editors at the outset. Their first thought was to give the Columbians the silent treatment, and for several weeks that was the rule. The time came, however, when they could no longer ignore the organization’s rough-house tactics.
Loomis told me that the biggest break his outfit got came from a demonstration by Jewish war veterans. Some 250 of these invaded a Columbians’ rally the night that Ralph Childers was given his "medal of honor" for allegedly assaulting a Negro youth. The Jewish veterans listened while Loomis and Burke poured vituperation on their race.
Finally, as the rally was coming to a close, one unidentified veteran stepped forward and shouted: "Just a minute, half the things you've been saying are lies."
There were cries of "Throw him out!" from the Columbians, and for a time it seemed that there might be violence, but four Atlanta detectives moved into the picture and kept order.
"That clinched it," Loomis told me. "We had known that it was only a question of time before the Jews jumped on us. When they did the fight was on. In a fight, people take sides. It was just what we wanted."
Without arguing the point of whether this was or was not helpful publicity, there have been a lot of other things printed about the Columbians that have clearly got under their hides.
This publicity at the same/time has brought about such a revulsion of feeling against the Columbians that newspaper editors and others are gratified that the business is finally out in the open. The abhorrence shown by so many citizens goes a long way toward tempering Atlanta's first feeling of humilation.
Wright Bryan, editor of the Atlanta Journal, was in a barber’s chair one day when he heard a man nearby say apropos the Columbians: "It sounds too much like Hitler's doings to suit me."
Bryan, writing about it later, said that he immediately felt beter.
"I thought to myself, we can take care of ourselves all right if the idea has percolated through to our people that hatred and strife and violence are the stuff which creates little Hitlers and, if allowed to go unchecked long enough, big Hitlers."
Bryan noted that the man in the next barber chair was shocked that such a thing could "have grown up in our own midst." Apparently, he said, the man hadn't heard of the Columbians before.
"That in itself," he wrote, "is the perfect answer to those who argue you should keep silent about such gangsterism. If more decent people had heard about it sooner, Columbians, Inc., might never have gained a foothold."
Ralph McGill editor of the Atlanta Constitution, received a telephone call from a woman who urged him just to ignore the Columbians. She told him that "the better people, the worthwhile people, won't bo influenced by them." Writing about it. McGill said:
"It was by no means the best people who joined with Hitler. And while this organization is no more to be compared with Hitler's crowd than one compares the illuminated end of a lightning bug with a Kleig light, the idea is the same. The so-called 'best' people of Germany joined up with the Hitler gang only after he had grown in strength and they feared him.
"This little gang of cruckpots ... in Atlanta cannot get far for the simple reason they are not smart enough and there is not field enough for them in which to work."
But Georgia. McGill said, had to make an examination and find put why she attracted such hate organizations.
"Some of the blame, assuredly, should be placed on our whole society," he wrote. "We have gone along, and we go along, with a large number of people whose preparation for being a first-rate citizen is inadequate. They are to be found in every city and community and as long as we do not do a better job they will provide material for the promoters of hates and prejudices who make a good thing financially for themselves out of the discontent of others."
The conduct of the Columbians has brought a torrent of "letters to the editor" into the newspaper offices. And no one thing has brought more favorable letters than a column written by Harold Martin, a big Georgian who used to be a combat correspondent with the Marines.
Martin forsaw trouble unless something is done to head off a collision between "the black man's anger and the white man's prejudice."
"If the really troubled time ever comes," he continued, "the fault will not lie alone with the Kluxers and the Columbians who fanned the flames. It will be with those of us who did nothing to help put out the fire. There are a great many god and solid folk in this town who are the friends of the Negro because their spirit is the basic Christian spirit of compassion, tolerance and good will.
"It would help a lot if they would say publicly what they privately believe, instead of permitting the Negro to find his vocal champions among the crackpots and the Communists.
"It would require no startling profession of faith. It would require only that it be said that the Negro is a citizen of the United States. As such he is entitled to the equal protection of its laws. He is entitled to the opportunity to be educated to the limit of his capabilities, and once trained he is entitled to security in his property and in his person. He is entitled to receive a wage commensurate with his service, and he is entitled to the same gratuities in the form of public housing, public health, and welfare grants any other citizen receives.
"If the folk who feel that way would back up their beliefs to see that they come to pass, the hate groups, driving us fast toward bitter racial strife, would see that mas opinion was against them. Now they are under the delusion that their only opposition comes from the newspapers; from a few leaders like Ellis Arnall; from a lew church groups.
"If those who believe those things would say them, and practice them, the Negro could take heart. He could see some hope for the future of his race. And with hope would come a subsiding of his anger. Things could be worked out in a spirit of good will.
"And the hate organizations could howl their heads off in a vacuum abhorred by white people, ignored by the Negro."
(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)