118

Nov 16-14

INGTON HERALD. MC

NEGROES JEER
WILSON'S NAME

W. M. Trotter Causes Riteous
Scene, Describing White
House Interview.

DENOUNCE SEGREGATION

Speaker at Mass Meeting Says He
Hoped President's View Is Not Due
to His Southern Birth.

Cheers for speakers, jeers for the Presi-
dent, and murmurs of discontent and
agitation were loud and insistent yes-
erday when negroes of Washington met
at Second Baptist Church to hear W. M.
Trotter's version of his interview at the
White House last week—at which he was
charged with insolence—and to protest
against segregation in government de-
partments.

Trotter was the Principal speaker. In
gesture, tone, word, and manner he
aroused his audience, which crowded the
church, to cries against segregation and
cat-calls when the President was men-
tioned.

Denies He Was Insulting.

In opening, Trotter looked impressively
down at reporters who had been placed
in the front row, and watched while they
Wrote down:

"I emphatically deny that in language,
manner, tone in any respect or to the
slightest degree I was impudent, insolent
or insulting to the President."

The visit to the White House by Trot-
ter and his delegation, by the way, was
to ask the President to end, by executive
order, the segregation of races in the
Postoffice and Treasury Departments.
This, it was claimed, the President prom-
ised not to countenance when he was a
candidate for President.

"We carried out our mission," said
Trotter. "The main issue for us was to
force from the President, after two
years' effort, an expression of his views."
"The President," Trotter said, "declared
in favor of race segregation as beneficial
to both whites and negroes."

Cries Against President.

Trotter had been cheered for five min-
utes when he took the platform to begin
his address. The early part of his speech
was interspersed with cries for Trotter
and against the President.

"Put him out," was the cry of the
negroes when Trotter mentioned the
President during a part of his intro-
duction. Laughter and hooting were
indulged in freely by the audience, and
the hall was seldom without subdued
—in some cases—cries from Trotter's
aroused auditors.

Trotter looked out, eventually, and
said:

"Don't show any disrespect for the of-
fice of the President; I respect the office."

Trotter, with a wealth of gesture and
insinuation, "hoped that the view of the
President is not due to his Southern
birth." He was confident, he said, that
the Governor of Massachusetts would
not have deemed him insolent.

The President, Trotter said, told him
that he had not heard such insolence
from any other citizen. Although he
denied being insolent, Trotter said he
was sure that no other citizen had been
doomed to the "limbo of inferiority of
status."

85015

Segregation is Pronounced

A resolution adopted protesting against
segregation was given the form of a
statement to the American people. It
contained this sentence:

"We believe that the nation is pass-
ing through a physical and spiritual
crisis, and that the issues of life and
death will be decided ultimately when
the people of the nation shall be called
upon in the usual way to pronounce judg-
ment for or against the responsible gov-
ernment at Washington in its unrightous
policy of discriminating against the cit-
izenship of the country on account of
race and color; a policy of discrimina-
tion that can, and will be, if adopted, ex-
tended indefinately to the 101 race groups
that compose the national population."

Thomas Walkins, chairman of the Dis-
trict branch of the Equal Rights League,
which Trotter represents, presided. Other
speakers were Maurice W. Spencer,
Judge E. M. Hewlett, Rev. W. Johnson,
pastor of the church, F. Morris Murray,
T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the Wash-
ington Sun, and Arnold Scott.