The Charlotte News
Thursday, March 29, 1951
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that Australian and Canadian troops made substantial gains, the extent of which could not be disclosed, on the central front in Korea northwest of Kapyong, twelve miles south of the 38th parallel, while elsewhere in the central and western sectors, the enemy fought their stiffest defensive action in weeks, with between 7,000 and 10,000 enemy troops dug in about four miles south of the parallel. About 80,000 troops backed them up above the parallel.
Communist China rejected General MacArthur's controversial peace entreaties of the prior Friday to the Chinese commander in Korea. The Peiping radio broadcast described the offer as insulting and "worth only a laugh", vowing that the Chinese people would fight until the "aggressor" was completely driven from Korea.
MacArthur headquarters told of a massing of enemy troops which could suggest preparations for a spring offensive during the April rainy season.
The Defense Department disclosed that American casualties increased by 1,306 the prior week, to 57,120, representing those reported to next of kin through March 23. The total included 8,511 killed, 37,918 wounded and 10,691 missing, 1,063 of whom had returned to U.S. lines.
In New York, a Federal jury returned verdicts of guilty against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and co-defendant Morton Sobell, all accused of participation in a conspiracy to provide atomic secrets to the Russians. The jury deliberated for seven hours and twenty minutes. The convictions carried the potential for imposition of the death penalty and Judge Irving Kaufman set April 5 as the sentencing date, at which time, he stressed, he, alone, would determine the sentence. The Government's star witness, David Greenglass, brother of Mrs. Rosenberg, had already pleaded guilty to espionage and still awaited sentence. A fifth defendant in the case, Anatoli Yakolev, had not been apprehended and was believed to have fled to Russia.
Governor Thomas Dewey called for a grand jury investigation of gambling at the Saratoga Springs, N.Y., racetrack spa, coming on the heels of revelations about such gambling, during the Kefauver organized crime investigating committee hearings. The Governor also created a five-member commission to investigate the relationship between organized crime and government.
In New York City, the District Attorney's office said that they were looking for at least four more fixers of college basketball games. Seventeen players and two alleged fixers had been arrested in recent weeks on charges of rigging games.
A New York City police officer was arrested on a charge of perjury, accused of falsely testifying in the perjury trial of a former police officer convicted in the Brooklyn rackets probe.
The National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S. urged churches everywhere to help halt "the moral delinquency of society", as it condemned "so-called innocent forms of gambling", as legalized track wagers, lotteries, bingo and the like. The Council said that such forms of gambling patronized the crime syndicates and helped to corrupt government.
The British sent a sharp note of protest to Soviet authorities in Berlin regarding the shooting attack on four American sightseeing buses by the East German Communist Police, demanding that the culprits be brought to account. None of the 73 Americans aboard the buses had been injured.
The Committee for Economic Development proposed imposition of a five percent national retail sales tax and reduction of Government spending by six billion dollars to achieve a balanced fiscal program and produce a surplus of two to three billion dollars by the following fiscal year. Trustees of the organization included James Farley, FDR kingmaker who was now board chairman of the Coca Cola Export Corp., Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Senator William Benton and several heads of corporations.
The Office of Price Stabilization issued three orders the prior night which would place controls on prices of about 60 percent of food, by establishing fixed percentages of markup to be allowed against the prices in effect before the start of the Korean war the prior June 25. Grocers had until the end of April to complete the price changes. Some prices would rise under the formula while most would fall.
The Coast Guard reported that a fishing boat had made contact with a missing schooner and its eight-girl crew and male skipper off the Gulf coast of Florida, 60 miles southwest of Venice. One of the crew, 20, was from Iredell County in North Carolina and had become a fashion model in St. Petersburg.
In Raleigh, Governor Kerr Scott urged the Legislature to obtain an advisory opinion from the State Supreme Court in the dispute over proposals to transfer control of two big State funds, regarding whether it would violate the State Constitution by legislative usurpation of an executive function, as the funds in question were presently controlled by the Governor.
The State House Judiciary Committee approved legislation to allow cities of 25,000 or more population to receive Federal money for slum clearance and redevelopment.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of City and County officials killing the proposed merger of City and County services by silence and inaction on the matter. They had not asked the Mecklenburg delegation to the Legislature to enact any enabling legislation for such merger. It was thus certain that nothing would occur in the current biennial session, which would adjourn in about two weeks.
Not reported on the page, the
Academy Awards ceremony would take place in Hollywood this date,
with "All About Eve" winning for Best Picture
Jose Ferrer
"All About Eve" led the awards with six, out of 14 nominations, a record number of nominations at the time, including five acting nominations.
Best Song was "Mona Lisa"
And Sound Recording
On the editorial page, "The Shaky Foundation of Segregation" discusses the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, relying on Sweatt v. Painter, that the UNC Law School had to accept four qualified black applicants because the North Carolina College for Negroes Law School at Durham was not substantially equal to the UNC Law School.
The piece agrees with UNC president Gordon Gray that a petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court ought be filed because the State had spent a decade trying to build up the College Law School and because the Federal District Court had found it substantially equal to the UNC Law School. It thinks the Supreme Court ought review the Court of Appeals decision also because it views the opinion as having gone beyond the Sweatt decision, establishing a new standard which would make it nearly impossible to show that any segregated facilities were substantially equal, by holding that where an individual citizen sought equality of treatment, his suit had to prevail. While Sweatt had come close to overturning the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, this case, it finds, had virtually done so.
While, insofar as those graduate and professional schools with no black alternative program, there was no question that the executive committee of the UNC Board of Trustees had acted appropriately in recommending that admission to the University's graduate and professional schools be determined without reference to color or race, the law schools were different.
It also views the effort of the former State Senator from Warrenton, who had recommended to the Legislature that it bar State funding to any institution which failed to uphold segregation, to have been misplaced. North Carolina had to abide by the law as to do otherwise would be "unthinkable".
The Supreme Court would decline to review the case, and the black applicants, including future CORE director, Floyd McKissick, would be accepted for admission to the UNC Law School. The UNC case is not regarded as having established any new standard in the law, rather followed Sweatt. The trend had been for several years toward integration, with it becoming increasingly difficult for any state to show that segregated graduate and professional schools were substantially equal. The N.A.A.C.P., which brought these cases, had followed a planned strategy first to attack segregation in the graduate and professional schools as they were the easiest targets, most Southern states having not established separate professional and graduate level programs for black students or, if so, only on a de minimis basis. Having established the precedents, the next step was to attack "separate-but-equal" public undergraduate programs and then public education in general.
It should be noted that a poll of the UNC law students taken around 1938 had shown the overwhelming majority in favor of integration of the Law School.
"Politicians First, Councilmen Second" discusses the decision of the City Council to replace the Park & Recreation Commission members after the prior year's failure by the Council to halt the construction of a recreation center at Latta Park, opposed by neighborhood residents because of its promise of increased noise and traffic. It finds the effort by the Council spiteful and playing politics with a Commission which, by the Legislature's action, was supposed to be independent and had functioned well in that vein. The result was that four inexperienced men were now on the Commission, along with three who had only a year of experience. While the Council had done many good things in its two-year term, this action was not one of them.
Dick Young, Jr., City Editor of The News, provides the third in a three-part series of articles on the Rowan County program of education to combat alcohol abuse, paid for from profits from State ABC-controlled sale of liquor.
He stresses in the final entry the
need for treatment of existing alcoholics to supplement the
educational effort at prevention. Treatment was being accomplished by
referral through the educational program of alcoholics to various
programs, either Alcoholics Anonymous, which had a good success rate,
or the new Camp Butner State facility, or other local programs. Mr.
Young provides various anecdotal accounts of those who had been
helped by these programs
Drew Pearson discusses the hard life of Virginia Hill as a mob moll, which had not come forth in her testimony before the Kefauver committee. She had first become involved with the mob through Joe Epstein, whom she met while he was studying accounting. He later became an accountant for the mob and induced Ms. Hill to become a courier, carrying money back and forth between mob operatives. She had survived only by keeping careful accounts of the money, from whom it had come and to whom it was going, maintained in a safe with instructions to open it in the event of her death. She had been the constant object of scrutiny by mob members who wanted to rob her as they knew she could not report any theft to the police. She had been beaten up and her apartment ransacked more than once. So, her life had not been so glamorous as it might have seemed to television viewers.
The railroad strike remained at an impasse because the railroads wanted to retain White House adviser John Steelman as the mediator while the railroad brotherhoods wanted to get rid of him as they believed he was sympathetic only to the railroads.
The Defense Department had been urged to release the secret diary of deceased former Defense Secretary James Forrestal, who had committed suicide in May, 1949. But after the Joint Chiefs had examined the diary, they decided to keep it under wraps as it contained such items as Mr. Forrestal having come close to firing Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington because he made an unauthorized, pro-Air Force speech, Secretary Forrestal's complaint of the three branches being unable to agree on war strategy and a defense budget, and his having written bitterly of his distrust of the British and the French.
Britain's new Foreign Minister Herbert Morrison had complained to the U.S. Embassy that U.S. shipments of arms had been slow in arriving in Britain, jeopardizing plans to expand the army and contribute to NATO.
Marquis Childs discusses the negative implications for Democratic prospects in 1952 resulting from the Kefauver hearings on organized crime. He finds that because the Democrats' power resided in the big cities, the expose of graft and corruption with respect to gambling and organized crime in the boss-run cities would alienate voters to the Democrats. That process had already begun with the revelations of Communists within the Government, especially among Roman Catholics, who were especially sensitive to the Communist issue.
A secondary effect would be manifested among independent voters who constituted between 20 and 30 percent of the electorate.
In earlier times, the independents who paid attention to politics only when something became apparent which needed immediate redress were known as "goo-goos". The shocked citizen, seeing the drama played out on television, could not ignore the fact that racketeers had grown wealthy in the big cities or avoid the conclusion that they had to be helped in doing so by politicians. The summation of the thing was the old political axiom: throw the rascals out.
Joseph Alsop, in Bonn, finds the West German capital much different from a year earlier when he had visited. Then, the experiment in democratic government appeared doomed to early failure. Now, those predictions had been disproved, though things were far from ideal. West German youth had found no place in political life and lacked faith. Millions of refugees from the East had found no housing or jobs, giving rise among them to a party which was extremist and irredentist. Moreover, the general economic outlook was unbalanced, with industrialists making big money while the average citizen was suffering from a 13 percent higher cost of living without commensurate wage increases.
Yet, overall, the prospects appeared good for the Bonn Government. The West German Communist Party was small and a ruthless purge had nearly eliminated its existence. The right-wing nationalists formed from a core of former Nazis, who a year earlier had appeared to be gaining strength, were now in decline. Meanwhile, the centrist parties, the Christian Democrats, the Socialists and others, were making gains. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Socialist leader, Dr. Schumacher, were considered two German leaders of stature in Europe. The younger members of the parties were also gaining experience and making headway. And the party organizations were forming roots. The Bundestag had transformed itself into a respectable European parliament. The defense forces of the future were being planned by an improbable coalition between the mineworkers' union leader and survivors of the July 20, 1944 general staff plot to assassinate Hitler.
Some of it would endure while other parts were transitory. While the Bonn Government had acquired authority, it did not enjoy much prestige among the West Germans.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.