The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 22, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page starts a series by Tim Pridgen of The News on black-white relations in the community, the enunciated object of the reports being to bring into the open rumors which had been circulating and determine their truth or falsity to the extent possible. He begins with the rumor which surfaced on the front page the previous week that "Eleanor Clubs" were forming in Charlotte and throughout the South, whereby domestic workers were binding together to demand increased wages from employers by threatening to quit by Christmas. It turned out that the local version of the rumor, traced down, came from a group of women on a bus and the plans therefore were not the result of any organized effort.

Did the seeds for the modern civil rights movement--albeit with recognition that the movement found the spirit of its origins during the latter years of slavery and the days of the Underground Railroad, or in the middle years of the route by the Drinking Gourd from Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831--come in part from meetings of domestic workers on a Charlotte bus?

The incident which gave rise nationally to the modern movement did occur on a bus in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks, stimulated by news of the brutal slaying of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, refused to surrender her chosen seat, otherwise than at the back, to a white passenger, and was thereupon arrested, prompting the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott which thrust Martin Luther King for the first time into the national spotlight.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson suggests a very different view of the war from that of Paul Mallon, a divergence of opinion reiterated during the previous several weeks. Mr. Mallon warrants that the Wehrmacht was down to 1.5 million men in Russia, only a third of whom were engaged in the Caucasus drive, and the Luftwaffe to 1,500 planes, asserts therefore that while matters looked bad for Russia, the cost to Germany for this prolonged offensive had been so exorbitant that it dimmed all prospects of a prolonged war in Europe. The best pilots, the best troops which Germany had to put forth were now all dead or captured.

Ms. Thompson, by contrast, warns that the reluctance of America and Great Britain to provide adequate support to its Russian ally might ultimately cost them the war, that the talk since May of a second offensive front followed by four months of apparent inaction toward bringing it about had depleted morale at home.

Raymond Clapper echoes Ms. Thompson's concerns, but with regard to domestic deployment of manpower evenly across vital sectors of production, farming and industrial, thus far failing in achievement because of the rush to obtain the higher paying jobs in war industries.

Would it all get sorted in time to save the world?

The editorial column, meanwhile, finds time from the world's morass to bemoan the postmaster general's decision to deny cheap bulk-mail postage rates to The Police Gazette for its too consistently profligate content, thus spelling its demise as a publication. A brief peek into the final issue found a fair amount of racy content, as descried by the editorial's inditer, as well as advertisements for "lonely people clubs".

Whether these lonely people clubs eventually got together with the Eleanor Clubs and the scrambled eggs of the Shaughnessy Playoffs described by John Lardner, put the Ring 'round it all, and suggested from it therefore, to commemorate all three at once, successively in summer 1965 and summer 1966, two songs with unlikely string arrangements, thus revolutionizing rock 'n' roll, we leave for the reader to consider.

But that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone, becoming thus today and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping in its petty pace--as surely as the recession of the 60,000 year old icepack covering Greenland has reduced its thickness by fully 45 feet in just the past decade.

In any event, the writers on The Police Gazette had to quit and obtain some steady jobs. For that streetwalker named Baby Lon or Rita Metermaid, Sweet Loretta Fat or Maggie Mae, or whatever alias she chose of the moment to label herself, could steal, but, they say, she could not rob.

Then, as we have pointed out, came the post-war and 1953...

Anyway, they had violins, too.

Framed Edition

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