OCR Text |
Show FREEDOM No recent incident in American history so sharply points the contrast between the principles of democracy democ-racy and the methods of governments in which the state is superior to the individual as the unanimous action of the Supreme Court of the United States on Lincoln's birthday. Four penniless Negro tenant-farmers, tenant-farmers, who had been convicted of murder by a Florida Flor-ida court, were set free by the highest tribunal of the land because they had been convicted on confessions extorted from them under threats and torture, and unsupported by any other evidence. That sort of thing is so common in Russia, in Nazi Germany and in other dictatorships, that every citizen lives in terror of being arrested without warrant, imprisoned without access to counsel, subjected to physical maltreatment and mental pressure to confess to some offense of which he has not the least knowledge, and sent to his death without the right to appeal to a higher court. We do not sentence Americans to death because they have departed from their political party line, as they do in Russia, or because they are Jews, as they do in Germany. And the Supreme Court has reiterated, re-iterated, more vigorously than ever, the elemental American doctrine that even the lowliest Negro has the same rights to a fair trial and a full hearing as the most highly placed citizen of the land. We do not believe that Americans want to exchange ex-change our system for one in which human lives and liberties are held as privileges which rulers may destroy as they see fit. |