The Charlotte News

Monday, October 4, 1954

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page indicates that in London, it was reported that Western Europe had generally welcomed the momentous decision by the U.S. and its allies to free and rearm 50 million West Germans and include them within the NATO alliance. Statesmen and newspapers voiced hopes that the historic agreement signed the previous day by the nine foreign ministers of the nine-power London conference would be put speedily into final treaty form and obtain quick ratification from the hesitant French National Assembly and other member parliaments. The French National Assembly had, on August 30, refused to ratify the European Defense Community treaty, the six nation proposed pact to form a unified army between France, Italy, West Germany and the Benelux countries. The new pact would add Britain to those six countries, with British assurances that they would maintain troops in Western Europe, while retaining the right to change positions in the event of a war, and U.S. assurances also having been given in like manner, necessary to achieve agreement with France. French Premier Pierre Mendes-France and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had hurried from the closing of the conference to Paris and Bonn, respectively, to begin organizing their campaigns to obtain ratification. Premier Mendes-France had called a National Assembly special session for Thursday afternoon to hear his report on the conference, and he was reported to be about 80 percent certain that the Chamber of Deputies would approve the new plan to rearm West Germany, with oversight of the rearmament to be shared between the new seven-nation pact countries and NATO, to ensure against runaway rearmament, crucial to French acceptance of rearming its old nemesis. A high French source said that the Premier would stake his Government on the outcome by asking for a vote of confidence, which he had refused to do regarding EDC. Chancellor Adenauer had scheduled to report to his Cabinet this date and to the West German parliament the following day. The formal treaties would probably not be drawn up until later in the month. It was anticipated that there would be no problem in ratifying them in the other conference nations, Britain, the U.S., Canada, Italy and the Benelux countries, as well as in the other six nations of NATO, Norway, Denmark, Turkey, Greece, Iceland and Portugal. The Communists, as anticipated, had heavily criticized the outcome of the conference, with the Government-controlled East German radio accusing Secretary of State Dulles of using pressure and blackmail on his allies to gain acceptance of the agreement. The Socialists in West Germany, chief opposition at home to Chancellor Adenauer's Government, maintained that Germany should be united before any alliance with the West was formed, and that nothing in the proposal was calculated to unify Germany.

At the U.N. in New York, British Minister of State Selwyn Lloyd had said to the General Assembly this date that Russia's latest disarmament proposals "hold out the possibility of progress in this all-important field." He said that Soviet delegate Andrei Vishinsky had left many questions unanswered, however, in the resolution he had submitted the previous Thursday and that there would have to be further clarification before the apparent policy shift of the Soviets could be determined. The Vishinski proposal had indicated an intent to adopt a French-British proposal put forward in London the previous June regarding control of nuclear weapons. Mr. Lloyd wanted to know, however, why it was necessary to have a temporary control agency and later a permanent one, as the Soviet proposal had indicated, and what the powers of the temporary body would be and whether its decisions would be subject to the five permanent member unilateral veto within the U.N. Security Council.

In Washington, hundreds of white students had demonstrated at two high schools this date, in protest of admission of black students. At one school, about a third of the 1,250 students had milled across the street from the school, jeering and booing at the pleas of their principal to attend classes, while 43 black students were booed as they entered the building, and more boos were issued when their fellow white students attended classes in orderly fashion. At another high school, a vocational school with about 400 black students and 650 white students, about 150 white boys and girls had staged a similar demonstration, but were persuaded to enter the building by the principal and stage their protest meeting within a classroom. That latter meeting, where there had been considerable stamping of feet and applause as each speaker criticized the integration policy, had eventually broken up in confusion, with some of the students apparently walking out on strike, while others agreed to let a committee discuss the situation with the principal. It was the first sign of trouble over integration in Washington, which had integrated its schools this school year for the first time in its history. One girl at the meeting had said that she was afraid to walk down the hall because "they walk right up behind me and say things I wouldn't repeat." A boy said: "I don't mean we don't like all of them. Some of them are all right. But we want to say what the kids said in Milford and Baltimore. We're just showing we don't like it." The President and other leaders had said that they hoped the District's plan for ending racial segregation would become a model for action under the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the prior May 17, holding that public school segregation was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

In Baltimore, both black and white students, for the most part, ignored mild demonstrations against integration and resumed classes this date, after a weekend lull had eased the strained racial tensions in that city following integration of the schools. Ministers and parents had escorted children to school. They just wanted a little more summer, just wanted an excuse not to go to school.

Dick Young of The News indicates that the local school board in Charlotte had put aside any consideration of desegregation of the City schools, that a petition sponsored by the Charlotte chapter of the NAACP, calling for immediate integration of the schools, had been received by the board as information, and appreciation was officially expressed for the offer of assistance by the local NAACP chapter and that conferences might be arranged between its local president, a few other leaders, and members of the City schools administrative staff. School superintendent, Dr. E. H. Garringer, had written the NAACP local president a reply to the filing of the petition, pointing out that any action by the local board would have to depend upon directives from the State Board of Education, and board members had agreed with that statement, saying that any public hearing or mass discussion of the request for desegregation would not at present be in order. Mr. Young also reports on other school board business.

In Denver, some Republican leaders, concerned over the party's chances for continued control of Congress after the midterm elections on November 2, called on the President to speak out vigorously and more often in the campaign. Representative Charles Halleck of Indiana, the House Republican leader, told a press conference the previous day that he did not think that they would otherwise be able to get across just how good the Republican program was. He said that he would like to see a repeat of the President's Los Angeles speech, occurring September 23 at the Hollywood Bowl, in which he had said that election of a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress would lead to a political "field day" in Washington and result in "stagnation" in government. He had made no political speeches since that time, and had planned only two more major campaign speeches, a nationwide radio-television address from Denver with Vice-President Nixon, on Friday night, and another nationwide appeal on the day before the elections. Mr. Halleck believed that the Republicans were in for a "tough fight" to maintain control of both houses. RNC chairman Leonard Hall had said the previous night, however, that reports reaching his headquarters indicated that Republicans were "firmly on the high road to win next month." He said that the reports were based primarily on local reaction to the speaking tour of Vice-President Nixon—reliance on whom, obviously, as they would find out four weeks hence, had been a major mistake.

Samuel Lubell, author and political analyst of national reputation, having predicted early the Eisenhower landslide of 1952, begins this date a series of articles on the midterm elections, indicating that at the present stage of the campaign, the Republican strategy of sweeping to victory behind President Eisenhower's personal popularity had to be considered pretty much a failure, as he had discovered in his talks with workers, farmers, businessmen, housewives and other voters in five key Midwestern states during the previous six weeks. As in the 1952 presidential contest, his grassroots survey was being directed to sensitive areas whose voting patterns typified shifts evident in recent elections, with many of the people to whom he talked being the same as he had interviewed two years earlier, some of whom he had visited every two years since 1948, greeting him now as an old friend. He had found some people who believed strongly that the President should not be hamstrung by a Democratic Congress. For example, a widow of a college professor in Minneapolis had said that she had lived on a pension and that since President Eisenhower had taken office, she could buy steak for 50 cents less, had voted for a Democrat for Congress in 1952, but now believed that President Eisenhower should "have his hands untied and be given a chance to show what he can do." For every such voter, however, there were scores of others who declared their intention to vote "for the best man", regardless of what "the main guy says", while others preferred a Congress of a different party from the President. He says that the preference for a "split house" was worth emphasizing, that it did not evidence a repudiation of either the President personally or even of many of his policies. When traveling, he had made a point to find persons who had voted for President Truman in 1948 and who had changed to support General Eisenhower in 1952, and had found that about 75 percent of such voters in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota said that they would vote for President Eisenhower again tomorrow. The heaviest turn against the President was among dairy and poultry farmers, but even among them, he was holding half of his gains over the 1948 Republican showing of Governor Dewey. In some cities which had suffered little unemployment, middle-class voters who had voted in 1952 for Adlai Stevenson, had told Mr. Lubell that they would switch to the President now. But even ardent Eisenhower enthusiasts appeared deaf to the Republican plea to back the President's exhortation to give him a Republican Congress again to carry out his policies.

In Atlanta, bargaining sessions between the Southern Bell Telephone Co. and the Communication Workers of America, which had been scheduled to resume this date, were postponed until Wednesday, according to Southern Bell officials. The spokesman said that the postponement had been requested by the Federal mediator, who advised that he could not be present prior to Wednesday. Workers in nine Southeastern states were continuing under the contract which had expired the previous week. A company spokesman had reported the previous week that the union appeared inclined to accept a proposed wage increase ranging up to $2.50 per week, that the remaining problem was over a "no-strike" clause within the new contract.

In Hakodate, Japan, a 28-year old woman, despondent over an unhappy love affair, had boarded a ferry on September 26, intending to commit suicide, according to police, having written a suicide note. But when the ferry had capsized in the recent typhoon before she could leap overboard, she had been among the more than 1,000 persons who had drowned, as her body had washed ashore this date, still carrying the legible suicide note. The owners of the ferry said that her intention to commit suicide would not interfere with payment of a $1,400 indemnity to her family.

In Charlotte, police said that a soldier stationed at Fort Bragg had shot a man, after calling him off a loading platform at a warehouse, hitting the man in the forehead, the bullet, however, traveling at an angle such that it missed his brain and came out the other side of his head. About 6 to 8 of the victim's fellow employees had witnessed the incident, telling a police detective that the warehouse worker had accused the soldier of going out with his wife, prompting the soldier to call the warehouse worker off the platform, at which point he suddenly whipped out a pistol and shot him. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. He had fled the scene prior to the arrival of police.

A bulletin from Hollywood indicates that actress Marilyn Monroe and former New York Yankees star hitter Joe DiMaggio had separated this date, and that she planned to file for divorce, as reported by Ms. Monroe's studio.

On the editorial page, "The Colonel and the Corporal" indicates that Lt. Colonel Harry Fleming, 46, who had been captured in Korea in 1951, had spent almost three years in prison camps, his fellow prisoners having elected him leader of Camp 12, an experimental propaganda camp, shortly after which he had repatriated to the U.S. and been court-martialed for having allegedly led Communist indoctrination classes, broadcast for the enemy, and informed against other prisoners, who, as a result, had been sent to caves where some of them had died. The court had acquitted him on the charge of informing but found him guilty of the collaboration charges, giving him an "involuntary discharge". He planned to appeal the verdict, while taking a rest with his family and intending to go into business.

In contrast, Corporal Claude Batchelor, 22, who had joined the Army at age 16, had been taken prisoner by the Communists in Korea at the age of 18, and spent over three year in the camps, had been one of 23 Americans who had refused repatriation at the end of the Korean War in late July, 1953. Eventually, he and another soldier changed their minds and repatriated. He also had been court-martialed, charged with accusing the U.S., in a letter to his hometown newspaper, of participating in germ warfare, having taken part in Communist study groups, circulating peace petitions and making propaganda broadcasts, plus having intended to head a Communist-inspired postwar ex-prisoner organization. He was found guilty of the collaboration charges while being acquitted of informing against two soldiers and convicted of informing against a private for possessing a camera, and for recommending that a master sergeant be shot, albeit not occurring. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. He also had the right to appeal.

It suggests that the American people had the right to ask what kind of military justice it was which rapped a field grade officer on the knuckles and locked up for life a kid who probably did no worse.

"Facts Don't Support Nixon's Claim"—which was nothing new and would prove even less remarkable as time passed—indicates that Vice-President Nixon, in at least three of his recent campaign speeches, had said the line, "We are kicking the Communists and fellow travelers and security risks out of the government, not by the hundreds but by the thousands." (Presumably, that is why he would later tell the press, in the immediate wake of his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, that they would not have Dick Nixon "to kick around anymore". Had there been a nuclear war a couple of weeks before that election, incidentally, the concatenation of events leading to the standoff having been in major part the result of the policies of the Eisenhower Administration, with particular emphasis on Mr. Nixon's role in planning the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1959-60, everyone would have been pretty much kicked and kicked out of the country, a distinct possibility had it not been for leadership rather than salesmanship.)

The piece indicates that it sounded like there was quite a lot of housecleaning going on, but under press questioning, heads of Government agencies indicated that the Eisenhower Administration had been responsible for no Communists being fired from the Government, while two former Communists, one of whom, according to Attorney General Herbert Brownell, had been dismissed from the Justice Department, and the other, from the Agriculture Department. It suggests that it left at least 1,997 persons to go before Mr. Nixon's claim of "thousands" of dismissed security risks could be considered true.

Mr. Nixon had apparently revived the claim made by several leading Administration spokesmen the previous winter that "2,200 security risks" had been removed from Government posts, including 306 from the State Department, 192 from the Navy Department, 253 from the Post Office Department and Veterans Administration. But those claims had not withstood scrutiny, with the Alsops reporting that only 29 persons had actually been dismissed from the State Department, most of whom had been dropped for being drunks, blabbermouths, or having financial problems, thus becoming a "security risk" under the new definition, with no case of actual subversion involved.

The Washington Star had reported that of the 192 employees dismissed from the Navy, only eight had been fired and 12 had been suspended as "security risks".

The Washington Post had reported that some of the persons dismissed from the Post Office Department and the VA had been separated under normal service provisions, not as security risks.

The Civil Service Commission chairman, Philip Young, had testified that he was aware of no dismissal of Communists or fellow travelers.

It concludes, therefore, that Mr. Nixon should revise his claim to something like: "We've looked hard, but we simply haven't found a single Communist in government. However, we have dismissed hundreds of persons who we didn't trust because of their associations, habits or character."

"The Meaning of the Mergers" indicates that according to headlines, Nash and Hudson had merged to become American Motors, that Hilton Hotels had taken over Statler, that Textron, American Woolen and Robbins had been considering a merger, and that the President Lines had bought a controlling interest in the American Mail Line. Advertising sections of trade magazines displayed headlines such as, "Merger Invited" and "Textile Mill Wanted".

The previous week, Attorney General Brownell had advised against the proposed merger of Bethlehem Steel and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Corporation, on the grounds that it would be in violation of the Clayton antitrust law.

It indicates that there had been three eras of merger during the country's history, the first having been at the turn of the Twentieth Century, the second during the Twenties, after the Supreme Court had decided in the U.S. Steel case that the company, formed from 174 independent firms, was not acting in violation of the Sherman Act, with the current wave having begun just prior to World War II.

The reasons for the popularity of mergers varied, with some companies wanting particular parts of another organization, for instance its sales force or its top executives, while other mergers offered tax advantages. Oil multimillionaire Clint Murchison of Texas had been interested in one company primarily because it had a listing on the New York Stock Exchange, difficult to acquire. Major motivational factors had been the desire to reach new markets, to diversify and to purchase industries which produced goods needed for the parent company.

In about six weeks, a report would be made by a committee which had been studying antitrust laws for more than a year, and, according to Mr. Brownell, the Justice Department planned to devote the following year to antitrust problems. Thus, planning of mergers which possibly would violate the laws was left in uncertain status. It suggests that whatever recommendations were made, it should be remembered that the other side of the merger picture was that the number of U.S. companies with a net worth of a half a million dollars or more had increased from 8,000 to 14,000 between 1947 and 1953, and that it was not only the large corporations which were growing from mergers, but also farm cooperatives and other such organizations. The number of competitors in some fields, however, was becoming very small, while most of the mergers appeared to have helped rather than hindered the growth of the U.S. economy.

A piece from the Durham Morning Herald, titled "Ten Cents an Hour", indicates that a Michigan school superintendent had calculated that if teachers were paid at the same rate per pupil as babysitters, 50 cents per hour, the teacher with 35 pupils in a classroom would earn $20,475 per year for the 6 1/2 hour school day, 180-day school term. But if they were paid at the rate of a dime per pupil per hour, the teacher with 35 pupils would only receive $4,095 per term, a salary, the superintendent had said, which would be the envy of thousands of teachers. He used the figures to demonstrate the bargain which students were obtaining in instructional programs within the schools, less than a dime per hour per pupil.

Drew Pearson, in La Paz, Bolivia, indicates that every schoolboy knew that Christopher Columbus had discovered America by mistake when he had really been looking for the vast wealth of the Orient, but that many adults did not know that those who followed him to North America had carried his mistake much farther, continuing to bet economic and political chips on the Orient, when a much wealthier and more friendly area lay in Latin America. He posits that most of the politicians in Washington did not realize that the chief reason that the Orient was becoming Communist was because the white man was taking a leaf from Columbus's notebook and exploiting the Orient at the expense of the New World. Most of the products the U.S. bought from the Orient were stolen from Latin America and transplanted to the Orient because slave labor there was dirt cheap. The social revolution had come earlier in Latin America, where labor cost more, but it had now caught up with the Orient, presently in rebellion against slave labor wages, which had brought them to Communism.

He offers as example a Briton, who, in 1876, had smuggled the first rubber seeds out of Brazil and taken them to Ceylon, the Malays and Indonesia, and, eventually, the rubber which had provided a great many riches to South America was supplanted by the British exploitation of cheap labor in Asia, resulting in the rubber plantations of South America falling into rot and ruin. In consequence, the U.S. had to spend a billion dollars building a synthetic rubber industry in the country after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, plus another quarter billion trying to encourage natural rubber development in South America. He posits that the country could be in the same trouble again from the Communists seeking to take over the Asiatic rubber plantations. The same thing had happened with cocoa, with the British having transplanted it from Latin America to the African Gold Coast, which now, because of cheap labor, outproduced Latin America. The Dutch had taken quinine trees from Peru in 1854 and transplanted them to the Dutch East Indies, where the Dutch, until World War II, had a near monopoly on quinine, which as a result of the Japanese invasion of that region, left the U.S. without quinine, necessary for the warding off of malaria during the war in the Pacific campaign. The country had sought in 1942 to plant in Latin America the cinchona trees which produced quinine, just as it had sought to encourage hemp production and to persuade the Libyan tin miners to produce more tin, the former necessary for production of rope and the latter for production of steel. The Nelson Rockefeller Cultural Relations Office had enlisted Karl Bickel, former head of the United Press, to speed sisal production in Central America to replace hemp, and the U.S. had demanded that the Chilean Government sell all of its copper to the U.S. and that Cuba give all of its sugar to the U.S.

Then, as the war ended, the country diminished its purchases, dropped its prices, and in many cases, went back to purchasing from the Orient, with the result of depression, unemployment and the danger of Communism spreading within Latin America.

He indicates that to create a two-way trade process in tropical products which the U.S. could not produce in exchange for U.S. manufactured products which Latin America could not produce, the U.S. would have to do much more careful planning than had gone into its rather "haphazard, hit-and-miss Good Neighbor Policy today."

Joseph & Stewart Alsop, again, as on Saturday, write of the book, The Hydrogen Bomb, by James Shepley and Clay Blair, Jr., which they characterize as an extraordinary attack on the American scientific community and which had been published in a national magazine, set to have wide readership. They caution the reader, before accepting their premise that American scientists were soft on Communism, to give a few minutes of thought to several contrasts, quoting first from the book at page 26, that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, for a man who had once claimed to be politically naïve, had managed to obtain 50 or more political jobs, when the special board, chaired by Gordon Gray, UNC president, appointed to assess whether suspension of Dr. Oppenheimer's Atomic Energy Commission security clearance was warranted, found that he had "served his country because it sought him."

At page 40, the authors had contended that because Dr. Oppenheimer did not like Dr. Edward Teller personally, the latter had been denied a specific job in connection with development of the atomic bomb, while the fact was that Dr. Teller had served in the Theoretical Division under the respected Dr. Hans Bethe, and, according to the latter's testimony to the special board, Dr. Teller had arbitrarily refused to work on the mainline of wartime atomic research, and that Dr. Bethe had therefore been forced to give Dr. Teller another assignment.

At page 51, the authors had asserted that Dr. Oppenheimer had been the dominant author of the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Plan for international atomic control and that, as originally written, the plan had not denied the Soviets veto power. The fact had been that the plan contained no provisions which would have given the Soviets veto power, and Dr. Oppenheimer had, in fact, publicly suggested adding a specific provision to guard against any Soviet attempt to create a veto where none existed. General Frederick Osborne, with whom Dr. Oppenheimer had closely worked, testified that Dr. Oppenheimer had taken a hard approach to the Soviets. Bernard Baruch, with whom Dr. Oppenheimer also worked closely, offered to testify to the same effect.

The Alsops indicate that the excerpts had been deliberately selected from statements about a single individual within the space of 25 pages of the book, because they were a representative sample of the "untruths" in the book, listing of which "would make another book", according to Dr. Bethe.

They indicate that the most false theme or thesis of the book was that there was a sinister and evil plot behind the old debates about the hydrogen bomb, the tactical use of atomic weapons, and continental air defense.

They conclude that it was not enough to say that the sort of thing the book purveyed was silly, as the presentation of such a thesis by two experienced Washington correspondents was a grave warning signal that "a slow poison endangers our society", a poison which was universal, "know-nothing suspicion and distrust", and that if society did not soon take an antidote, "our once generous and vigorous freedom will end by freezing into a sort of mindless catalepsy and impotent conformity."

Bob Considine writes, in a piece which had first appeared in International News Service newspapers on July 14, 1953 and had been widely reprinted since, that one morning he picked up a sheaf of papers at his feet at his front door which opened up before him "a world of war and peace, high resolve and despair, love and hate, tears and laughter."

After explaining some of the process of how a newspaper came to be made each day and how some of the stories came to be reported, he concludes, explaining some of the stories he read:

"I was with Adlai Stevenson in Vienna, and Dwight Eisenhower in drought-stricken Texas, and with Cambodian Premier Penn Nouth in Saigon. And Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood.

"I left London with the Queen of Tonga, and helped lasso a Hereford bull in the streets of Charlotte, N.C. I went to a stylish first night on Broadway, and to a couturier's opening in Paris. Mr. Truman told me why his side had lost last November. 'People let demagoguery get the best of them,' he snapped at me.

"My ball club won, my comic hero was saved in the nick of time, my wife learned how to cook and make over the entire house, my two shares of stock would stand the impact of peace, my fear of polio dispelled by gamma globulin, my golf slice could be cured by a change of grip.

"All this, through the miracle I held in my hand (and had come to accept as routine)—my newspaper."

A letter writer suggests to the newspaper that, instead of printing gruesome stories such as the one about the dog shot and run over in Gastonia, headlined, "Every Dog Has His Day, but This One Had One Too Many", it print articles about the proper way to feed and care for dogs or how to use one's influence to set up free clinics so that all dogs could be vaccinated against rabies each summer, that there would be in consequence no fear of madness. She says, "I cannot for the life of me see why anyone but a moron would care for this other type of news." She finds that other newspapers and magazines did not use space for such terrible news stories.

Hang those dogs for human slaughter. Hang 'em high in the trees, for all other dogs to see, that they may not roam so free as they please in the breeze.

A letter writer indicates confusion and being flabbergasted at the behavior and actions of certain conferences and assemblies of certain denominations, which were supposed to represent many church members. They had denounced and condemned segregation of blacks in the churches and public schools, and by their action, had "denounced, disgraced, and condemned themselves, and have caused an irreparable division in the membership of their churches."

A letter writer says that he was against fluoridation of the public water supplies, explains that it was only his opinion, and not the usual organized attack on fluoridation, that his only qualification was that he drank fluoridated water every day and wondered what lawful right the City Council had to fluoridate the public water supply, what statutory authority existed to enable them to add "this toxic element" to the drinking water as a medication, regardless of who prescribed it. He believes that each individual had the right and privilege to determine their own personal health and hygiene. Whereas chlorination of water killed bacteria, especially typhoid, the fever from which was contagious, dental caries were not contagious, and thus while chlorine made the water purer, fluorine made it a medication. He indicates that research had shown that the addition of one part of fluorine to one million parts of water reduced dental caries in children by 25 percent or more, but that there were also reports from leading authorities that fluorine in small amounts could cause detrimental effects on adults and also on undernourished children. He says that his argument was posited on individual rights to drink unmedicated water, not based on the dangers or benefits of fluoridation.

A letter writer, a medical doctor, offers a plan for solution to integration problems, to divide the state into school districts with two schools in each district, one with only white teachers and the other with only black teachers, permitting pupils to go to the school of their choice. He predicts that under such a program, black students would attend the schools with black teachers and white students, the one with white teachers, finding that there would be no coercion.

But is it safe?

A letter writer indicates that when the Supreme Court had made the decision on segregation, it had not only played havoc with the schools, but also with the church, that "children's minds are torn to pieces", that some of the children would never attend school, regardless of what their parents did or said, if the schools "are of a mixed race." He suggests that it would be just as hard for blacks as it would be for whites. (All the parents would need to do would be to say, "Hugo to school, Whizzer," and the young Whizzer would go, with his football underneath his arm.) He favors that North Carolina adopt the private school system, even if it cost more money, as it would be worth it to have peace in the schools. (We want war!) There were many people in Charlotte, he says, and elsewhere, who had been members of some religious organizations for years but would withdraw their membership when the doors were opened to all races. (Keep those NASCAR people out!) He says that he had been a Methodist all of his life, but when both doors were open, he would travel alone, and "by God's help, I believe I can make it."

A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., indicates that he had been hearing what some of the "preachers" had to say on the "mixing of the races in schools and otherwise", and that, with due respect for preachers who used common sense, he would hesitate to accept the conclusions of many of them, even regarding the Scriptures. He had a clipping from a newspaper with the headline, "Methodist Group Hits Segregation", from September 24, 1954, indicating that a proposed Methodist statement on public school segregation had broadened at the group's meeting in Asheville into "a general reaffirmation of belief that racial discrimination was un-Christian in all phases of life." He finds that to mean that it was "Christian to mix the races in marriage and be social in all their ways", meaning social equality. He finds that there was no better solution than that which had been followed for many years in "the American way of life", "separated races as much as possible in all social phases of life."

Herblock.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date Links-Subj.