Kate’s Notes: Though this transcription was made from an article published in The Hammond Times (Indiana), because they subject matter concerns Gadsen, Albama, I decided to place it in the news archives for Alabama.

From The Hammond Times (Hammond, Indiana)
August 23, 1963 

LED BY MARLON BRANDO

Mayor in Alabama Accuses Four Film Stars of Rabble-Rousing
By Rex Thomas

   GADSEN, Ala. (AP) -- Mayor Leslie Gilliland angrily accused four visiting movie stars today of rabble-rousing tactics in racially troubled Gadsen, and promised to jail them if they violated the law.
   One of the actors, Paul Newman, denied any attempt to cause trouble and said in fact that he and his collegues, including Marlon Brando, talked Gadsen Negroes out of staging another in a long series of street demonstrations.
   The visiting Hollywood celebrities had announced plans to seek conferences with city officials and industrial leaders in what they described as an attempt to establish communications between the races in this industrial city where hundreds were arrested in recent protest marches.
    The Mayor said he would not talk with the move stars because, he said, “I feel they are serving no purpose in Gadsen except to create trouble and chaos.”
   Gilliland accused them of making the trip to Gadsen for publicity.
   He added: “All of the trouble we’ve had in Gadsen has been caused by outside rabble-rousers coming in here and using our Negro people for their own gain. We have nothing but contempt for people such as these movie stars who are here, and the quicker they move and go back where they came from, the better off we’ll all be.”
   Brando, Newman and the other two actors, Anthony Franciosa and Virgil Frye, had already announced their plans to leave Gadsen tonight.
   Newman, answering the mayor’s statement, denied any publicity-seeking motive and said that he, Brando and Franciosa have become known in the past for efforts to avoid publicity.
   He said Southern people are willing to ask movie stars to help them raise funds for such things as hospitals “and they don’t call us agitators then.”
   He said he considered the Negroes’ fight for equality “just as moral a humanitarian issue as a hospital.”
   There was some talk that the movie stars might lead a protest march to dramatize the Negro’s struggle for racial equality.
   But the Academy Award-winning Brando said no march was planned today.
   He said he or other movie celebrities will return to Gadsen at an unspecified date to continue their work in behalf of the Negro community.
   The four entertainers spoke to a Negro church rally Thursday night, receiving wild acclaim from the overflow audience, then spent the night in a Negro apartment hotel.
   This morning they had breakfast in a Negro drugstore adjoining the aprtment building and were surrounded by newsmen and Negro well-wishers.
   He told the cheering, hymn-singing Negroes that the “vast reservoir of public opinion” is sympathetic with their fight against segregation.

-- transcription by Kate Maynard, 2010