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With Sunday Morning Edition Publis ed by THE EVENING STAR NEWSPAPER CO., Washington, D. C. SAMUEL H. KAUFFMANN, . Chairman of th e Board CROSBY N. BOYD, President NEWBOLD NOYES, Editor BENJAMIN M. McKELWAY, Editorial Chairman A-12 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1966

Rioting In Atlanta The most surprising thing about t he riot in Atlanta is that it should have happened there. For Atlant a, by general agreement , h as been a model for southern cities in its race relations. Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. h as walked the · last m ile in search of r acial peace. He had almost solid Negro support when elected. He was one of the few southerners to testify in support of the 1964 civil rights bill. He has added Negroes t o the police force. Atlanta's schools and city facilit ies a re totally integrated. Many Negroes are employed by business establishments and th e city h as sen t eight Negroes to the state legislature. All of this counted for n othing, h owever, when a suspected Negro car t hief was wounded while trying to escape from arresting police offic ers. When some 500 or more Negroes t ook t o the streets the mayor climbed on top of an automobile and tried t o reason with them. He was shouted down. Taunts of "white devil" and "black power" greeted him. Finally th e mob surged around the car and the mayor was jarred loose from his perch and fell to the street . No, this didn't happen in a Birm- ingharn or a Selma. It happened in Atlanta. -Little wonder that the Rev. M·a r tin Luther King Sr., who lives in Atlanta, was heard to ask: "What do they want? The mayor came down. He tried· to speak to them and they wouldn't listen. What do they want?" It was a good question, but hard to answer. For most of the members of the mob may no~ have known themselves what they wanted-unless it was an excuse t o throw rocks and rant about police brutality. The mayor says the riot was deliberately caused by some of Stokely Carmichael's SNCC henchmen , a nd he may be right. For t h e mob began shouting "klll the white cops" after SNCC repr esentat ives, according to the police, spread the false word that the suspected car thief "had been shot while h andcuffed and that h e was m urdered." Whatever may h ave been the case with the rioters, it seems clear that what the SNCC people want ts trouble, trouble, trouble. And that ts what they are going to get,, though not in t h e form they want, if this sort of madness keeps up. ~- __ _ _..,._ �