Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Greenville, S.C., the judge in the trial of the remaining 28 defendants accused of murdering Willie Earle on February 17, after abducting him at gunpoint from the Pickens County jail following his arrest for the murder the night before of a Greenville cab driver, instructed the jury after the conclusion of final summations by the defense and prosecution. He specially instructed the jurors not to allow racial prejudice to enter their deliberations. All of the defendants were white. Mr. Earle was black. All of the jurors were white, consisting of eight textile workers, two salesmen, a mechanic and a farmer. He also instructed that the fact of Mr. Earle being charged with a crime could not be raised as any form of mitigation or justification for his murder.

Twenty-one of the defendants were charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and as accessories before and after the fact of the murder. The seven remaining defendants were charged with conspiracy and being accessories before the fact. The prosecutor had not sought the death penalty for any of the defendants. The jury, however, could render a verdict of guilty of murder without recommendation of mercy, making death a mandatory sentence.

In Chapel Hill, not reported on the front page, the four protesters, two white and two black, including civil rights advocate Bayard Rustin, who had sought to ride an intrastate bus to Greensboro in protest of Jim Crow laws, one white and one black sitting together at each of the front and back of the bus in contravention of the law, arrested for the conduct April 13, were found guilty of disorderly conduct the previous day in Recorder's Court and each sentenced to thirty days on the chain gang.

The V.F.W. of Winston-Salem had adopted a resolution to employ counsel to submit evidence that Communists were violating a newly enacted State law requiring registration of lobbyists and were advocating the overthrow of the Government by force. They were seeking a grand jury investigation. Both Senators Clyde Hoey and John Umstead of North Carolina as well as Congressman Robert Doughton and others within the Congressional delegation favored a Congressional investigation. One Representative, John Folger, stated that HUAC would be the logical committee to conduct such an investigation, but he had no confidence in that committee.

The charge was related to the information obtained by the Winston-Salem Journal, as reported Monday, that the striking Local 22 of the CIO United Tobacco Workers union was under the control of Communist leadership. Most of the striking members were black. Pursuant to the new labor law, being reconciled in conference as to the differing House and Senate versions, any union found to have Communists within its executive structure could be denied collective bargaining rights. Thus, it was reported, CIO was also considering its own investigation of the matter.

Near Ardmore, Oklahoma, an explosion blasted windows from a "Jim Crow" segregated Santa Fe passenger train coach, injuring two persons. The coach was partitioned into three sections. The blast originated aboard the train from within a water cooler in a toilet compartment. The train was en route to Dallas from Newton, Kansas. The motive for the explosion was not clear, but appeared to be effected by nitroglycerin. A special agent for the railroad theorized that it was left by safe-crackers—or perhaps just plain crackers.

In New York, the State Department of Social Welfare began investigating charges that the New York City Welfare Department was providing homes for some needy families and hotel suites at a cost to the City of $600 per month because of the housing shortage. The New York World Telegram reported that one family was being provided a midtown hotel suite at $136 weekly though the man earned $46 weekly.

At the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, 3,800 foremen walked off the job, but production continued normally. It was not known how long production could continue at a normal pace before being impacted by the strike.

The phone strike, ongoing since April 7, was all but over as 20,000 Western Electric workers returned to the job. At the height of the strike, 340,000 Bell System and Western Electric workers had been on the picket lines.

In the village of Taga in Palestine, five Arabs and one Jew were killed in a raid for which the Jewish underground organization Hagama claimed responsibility.

In Wroclaw, Poland, Karl Gallasch, commandant during the war of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and sentenced to death for war crimes, beat the hangman, hanging himself in his cell.

In Champaign, Ill., two top Army flying officers and five other soldiers were killed the previous night when an Army B-25 crashed into a cornfield during a thunderstorm. Two were colonels and one a brigadier general in the war.

In Brooklyn, a frail housewife shot five times and killed her friend, the mother of two children, and was then turned in by her husband who was named by the dead woman's husband as a co-respondent in his divorce suit. The woman stated that she was "now free and happy", that the woman who had an affair with her husband was dead. The victim's husband had been wounded in the war.

In Grandview, Mo., Martha Truman, the President's 94-year old mother, appeared to be improving during the previous 48 hours as the President remained at her bedside. If she continued to improve, it was possible that the President might be able to return to Washington within a couple of more days.

In Rome, Francesco Nitti announced that he had failed to form a new government following the resignation of Alcide De Gasperi as Premier eight days earlier. He was said to be consulting first with the spirit of Alfonso Capone.

On the editorial page, "The Communists in Winston-Salem" discusses the Winston-Salem Journal report that Communists were predominant in Local 22 of the CIO United Tobacco Workers union at Reynolds Tobacco Company, a union presently on strike. The evidence was provided by two former union officials who reported the matter first to CIO president Philip Murray and then, in frustration, to the Journal. They contended that the strike was designed to be in furtherance of the interests of the Communist Party and they had a signed statement of the former treasurer of the party to back up the claim.

"A Pension for the President" thinks it appropriate that two Missouri Congressmen, one Republican and one Democrat, had proposed a pension for the President amounting to two-thirds of the salary while in office, which would presently amount to $50,000. The President only had remaining $28,000 after taxes and expenses from his $75,000 annual salary, and White House living standards eroded $24,000 of that.

"The Great Bubble-Gum Crisis" comments on an epidemic of sore throats among children leading to an investigation of the local bubble-gum supply. But it was not clear whether it was a food, a drug, or some sort of toy, and thus who should be investigating.

A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, "On Dropping an Accent", tells of an English professor at Northwestern University predicting that the Midwestern accent would soon be replacing both the Southern and New England accents, as the Midwest, between the Appalachians and Rockies, held the largest segment of the population, a population greatly migratory and not adoptive of accents endemic to the areas to which they moved.

Drew Pearson tells of the startling revelations coming from the court martial of Lt. Commander Edward Little, who allegedly provided information to his Japanese captors in a prison camp, Camp 17 in Fukioka District in Japan, which led to the beating deaths of one U.S. enlisted man and the starvation to death of another, plus other beatings and punishments inflicted on other American prisoners of war in the camp. The other prisoners who testified stated that Lt. Commander Little sought to curry favor with the Japanese at the expense of his fellow prisoners. He had usurped the role of commander from his superior. A majority of the 1,700 prisoners filed complaints against him with the War Crimes Office.

Marquis Childs, still in Albany, N.Y., continues his discussion of Governor Thomas Dewey, focusing on his relationship politically with new Senator Irving Ives, a fellow Republican. Mr. Dewey had supported Mr. Ives in the campaign the previous fall and thought him one of the most well-qualified persons to enter the Senate in some time. Mr. Ives had a long background in the State Legislature, where he had been responsible for founding the Cornell School of Industrial Relations, of which he was the first head.

Samuel Grafton tells of growing up in a Republican family and voting for Herbert Hoover over Al Smith in 1928. He had been a fan of the late Wendell Willkie when he ran against FDR in 1940. But the Republicans had lost him. He explains why, and why he believes they had lost many like voters.

A letter writer tells of three prize winning poems in the contest of the North Carolina Poetry Society. The judges were professors at Sacred Heart and Belmont Abbey Colleges. She submits the poems for publication and they are published.

The first, titled "Like Pillars of the Temple", speaks of the solitude of life, coupled with the longing for pairing, while not wanting too much close affinity.

The second, titled "English Spring", recalls, in a Keatsian vein, reminiscent of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", English writers from Shakespeare to Emily Bronte, concluding: "The Spring makes all that ancient land young/ And promises great songs as yet unsung."

She was right.

The third, "To J. T. S.", is an elegy to a lost loved one, perhaps a soldier in the war.

The editors note that they were breaking their rule against inclusion of poetry in the "People's Platform" and inform that the winning entrant was a teacher at Burton Institute, the runner-up, a student at Queens College, and the third place winner, a teacher in Huntersville. All were female.

We note that our brief recollection related on April 21, in connection with the arrested bus riders in Chapel Hill, and the purchase by our papa of a Chapel Hill Weekly on November 24, 1963 as we visited Chapel Hill, is a bit misplaced. The memory is accurate, and the bus station in 1963 was where we stated, next to or nearby the Chapel Hill Weekly offices, on West Franklin Street. But, by 1963, it had been relocated apparently about five blocks west from its 1947 location, at the corner of Columbia and Rosemary Streets. The point, however, is the same. We hope that it is no more offensive than Shakespeare ascribing to Bohemia a coast in The Winter's Tale.

The beach in Chapel Hill, incidentally, last we heard, is in front of Connor Dormitory.

All of the recondite secrets of the universe, by the way, are contained within the tinsmith's Coffee Pot in Old Salem, also relocated a few blocks, in 1959.

A letter accuses Charlotte of "two-faced hypocrisy" on the issue of liquor, in that the drys were never to be heard from when enforcement was not taking place and liquor could be had easily from bootleggers, but were suddenly plentifully in evidence when the issue was a vote on legal controlled sale of liquor, curtailing the trade of the bootlegger.

Framed Edition

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