LEADERS IN WEST BENGAL
CALCUTTA, Oct. 31 -- The West Bengal government suddenly swooped down on the Left Communist party [pro-Chinese] in the early morning hours yesterday and arrested nearly half the newly elected state committee, including its secretary, in an apparent attempt to disorganise the All-India Congress of the organisation which starts here today.
Those arrested, numbering more than 25, include the most important organisers and public figures of the party in this state, They also include nearly forty per cent of the West Bengal delegation to the party congress, It. is significant that almost all of them are spokesmen of the more radical’ wing of the party who had won a decisive victory over the moderates and the centrists at the recently held state conference. [See page 24.] Political circles here feel that the government's latest action is also aimed at weakening the voice of the “extremists" at the party congress. ray Criticising the arrests, a spokesman of the Central’ Executive Committee of the Left CPI said that these arrests reflected the . government's panic at the growing influence and strength of their party, particularly at a time when the bankruptcy of the govérnment's policy was being increasingly exposed. before the masses, He declared also that the party congress would be held as usual and "the congress would ocae the correct path to build up a Marxist- -Leninist party in- India
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NEGRO VOTE GOES TO JOHNSON
By Evelyn Sell.
- -« A recent survey by the New York Times indicated that a record Negro. vote in the South this year will be solidly for President. Lyndon: Johnson. One old Negro woman in South Carolina told a Times interviewer,:"Lordy, honey, I'm going to vote for L.B.J. Hets a Southerner’: just like us colored. folks, and the Good Lord must have sent him to tead us out of -bondage.'
The ‘massive Negro turnout expected at the polls on November 3 will be the result of intensive voter registration campaigns carried on by civil-rights organizations over the past year. The expected solid vote for Johnson is the result of intensive propaganda designed to give credit for all civil-rights progress to the incumbent president -- who has a twenty-year record of voting consistently with Dixiecrats to block all effective civil-rights legislation. But Johnson cast his eyes on the presidency in 1957 and has tailored his votes and speeches these past seven years to grab off the Negro votes necessary to get into the White House. Many Negroes have been fooled by his recent hypocritical performances. -
"This year the edge should go to President Johnson with our votes and the aid of a few white votes," confidently stated Hosea L. Williams, director of a registration drive that enrolled 10,000 new Negro voters in Chatham. County, Georgia. In 1960 the Republican candidate, Nixon, won more votes in Chatham County than the Democratic nominee, Kennedy. In. Tennessee, where the Republicans have been winning since 1956, a record registration of 200,000 Negroes is expected to bring the state back into the Democratic party control.
The price of voting or even registering to vote comes very high in the South. In Louisiana one frightened young Negro woman explained, "They said if I come back and try to register, they would get me and my mother. But I'm going anyway because all our men are scared and someone has to try." In Mississippi, Mrs. Alberta Kelly lost her job because she tried to register. "After 14 years I now find myself picking cotton for $2 a hundred. I only wanted to vote,"
It is courage such as this that has: won civil-rights gains for the Negro people -- but President