The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 29, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that South Korean troops moved forward about twelve miles this date against little or no enemy opposition and seized the important port of Kansong, 26 miles above the 38th parallel. Other U.N. forces gained control of an important ridge overlooking an escape route for the enemy at the eastern end of the Hwachon Reservoir. The allies had reached to within four miles of Yanggu.

On the central front, the enemy fought hard to delay the allied advance, but tank and artillery-supported allies moved forward nearly three miles.

Two Chinese divisions were wiped out on the central front, south of the parallel, costing the Chinese 18,000 men in a single four-day battle.

Allied casualties had been heavy in captured Inje, as the enemy fired from surrounding hills into the town.

General Hoyt Vandenberg, chief of staff of the Air Force, again testified before the joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, saying that the U.S. had to maintain an Air Force capable of destroying Russia's air power promptly, that it was the "big stick" guarding against a third world war. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa said that General Vandenberg had been just as critical of the U.N. policy in Korea as had been General MacArthur, raising the question whether General Vandenberg ought also resign. The General denied ever so disagreeing with U.N. policy. He told Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming that he would regard it as a complete victory in the war if Korea were unified under a democratic government pursuant to a Korean-Chinese treaty with the U.N.

In Tehran, a demonstration of 50,000 persons opened a Communist-front effort against the Americans and British regarding the oil issue. It was the largest such demonstration yet held, one called and planned by the Communist Tudeh Party.

U.S. Ambassador to Iran, Henry Grady, had indicated a willingness to mediate a meeting between British Ambassador Sir Francis Shepherd and Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, lending an air of optimism that the talks could result in formal negotiations. In London, Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison said that Britain would accept some form of nationalization of British oil holdings under certain unspecified conditions.

In municipal elections in a third of Italy, an anti-Communist coalition had broken the hold of the extreme left wing on Italy's northern section. Incomplete returns showed Premier Alcide de Gasperi's NATO front had given the Communists their worst beating in five years in provincial elections. The De Gasperi forces took a heavy majority of council seats in the elections which had ended the prior day. The other two-thirds of the country would vote later.

In Washington, a Federal District Court dismissed the latest plea for clemency from seven convicted Nazi war criminals condemned to hang. Their latest plea was based on the fact that the new West German constitution forbade capital punishment. They were granted a stay by the Court so that they could appeal the denial.

In Charleston, S.C., a three-judge Federal panel, in a hearing in the case of Briggs v. Elliott out of Clarendon County, S.C., to determine whether public schools in the South should be desegregated, heard a Harvard psychologist testify for the N.A.A.C.P., representing the plaintiffs, that white people had just cause to believe that black people were inferior because whites had made them so. He said that racial segregation was both an effect and a cause of racial prejudice. He and the witness who followed him, a lecturer at Vassar College, both admitted that they had not studied segregation in states where it was required by law.

The Vassar lecturer said that she had studied schools in Philadelphia, where there were all-black, all-white and some mixed schools. Her study showed that at age five, children began to realize racial differences and that both black and white children perceived being black as a disadvantage, that the black children came to expect rejection. Such perceptions, she said, were shown to develop out of the home, the playground, and the bus, and from hearing about places where their fathers could not work. She said that mixed schools were the best place for re-educating the children.

Witnesses presented the previous day by the defendants in the civil suit testified that South Carolinians would not accept integrated schools and that a Federal Court order to that effect would cause the State to abandon public school education. The defense had admitted the previous day that the black schools were inferior to white schools in the county and sought reasonable time from the Court to develop a plan for ending the inequalities.

Lead counsel for the plaintiffs, Thurgood Marshall, to become in 1967 the first black Justice of the Supreme Court, said that merely conceding the fact of inequality was not enough, that segregation in itself was a form of discrimination.

Ultimately, Briggs would be joined with the other cases out of Kansas, Virginia, and Delaware seeking the same relief, under the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, which would hold three years hence that segregation per se in the public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and that Plessy v. Ferguson's 1896 separate-but-equal doctrine had failed to accord equal protection for want of realization through time of substantially equal separate facilities and thus had to be overruled.

In Easington, England, a violent explosion at a coal pit trapped 79 miners this date deep in the ground. Eight bodies were recovered hours later and one injured miner was brought to the surface. Rescue efforts continued. The cause of the disaster was not yet known.

In Oslo, Captain Charles Blair began a non-stop solo flight over the North Pole to Fairbanks, Alaska, in a converted P-51 Mustang fighter, in which he had set the non-stop New York-to-London record the prior January 31. He was carrying 3,000 letters which would later be auctioned off for the benefit of the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund.

In Hollywood, comedienne Fanny Brice died five days after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.

In New York, columnist Earl Wilson of the New York Post reported that singer Frank Sinatra would obtain a divorce from wife Nancy so that he could marry Ava Gardner. Mrs. Sinatra had agreed to the divorce. They had separated in February, 1950 after eleven years of marriage. Mr. Sinatra had pursued Ms. Gardner, according to Hollywood scuttlebutt, for the prior 18 months.

The boots are made for walkin'.

Emery Wister of The News tells of a 19-year old being examined for induction into the Army and being nervous that he would fail because of an occasional heart murmur. He passed and was glad that he could join his twin brother, both of Gaston County. Both had been trying to enter the Army since the prior January. His brother had done alright but the subject of the piece had failed the mental exam. They came back in March and he failed again, but this time only the physical. They gave him a third chance and he passed in April.

How many apples are there in forty miles of road on a rainy Saturday if the rain stops at 4:00 p.m. before the oranges come into view in the sunshine? What temperature would it be?

In Charlotte, the City Council was considering a proposed ordinance under which the taxis would be able to choose between metered fares and flat-rate fares during the bus drivers' strike against Duke Power Co. The Council was going to meet in executive session during the afternoon to try to develop a new emergency ordinance after repealing the ordinance passed the prior week, requiring taxis to charge a 25-cent per passenger flat-rate fare.

Councilman Basil Boyd said that he would propose an end to executive sessions preceding public sessions of the Council.

On the editorial page, "Pulling the Public's Leg" finds the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, representing the bus drivers, not to have made a valid point in justifying its demand for a ten percent wage increase by adverting to the high overall Duke Power Co. profits, as virtually all of that profit was in the electric and gas utilities divisions, not in transportation. It would be unfair to impose an inevitable rate increase for gas and electric service to pay for an increase in wages for bus drivers and mechanics in nine cities served by the Duke Power buses when the electric and gas services were provided by Duke to over 200 cities and towns. Consistently, administrative agencies and courts had determined that companies which served multiple utilities should not have their profits from one branch determine the wages of another branch, that they should remain segregated for such purposes.