The Charlotte News
Friday, October 24, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Birmingham, Ala., that 14 black citizens, ten men and four women, were arrested and convicted for misdemeanors stemming from a demonstration against a new City ordinance which sought to make the Birmingham Transit Co., the bus company serving the city, responsible for maintaining segregation, rather than under the old ordinance which had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in late 1956, making the City responsible for segregation. The City Recorder said that he would sentence the group on Monday night and, in the meantime, ordered them held in the City jail without bond. Those convicted including the Reverend F. L. Shuttlesworth, a Baptist minister and integration leader who had led a similar demonstration against the bus segregation law in December, 1956, in the wake of the successful conclusion of the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., following the subsequent Supreme Court affirmance of the decision of the U.S. District Court in Browder v. Gayle. The new ordinance had been passed by the City Commission the previous week, repealing the old ordinance, apparently similar to the ordinance which had been struck down as unconstitutional in the Montgomery case. The arrested group was deliberately testing the constitutionality of the new ordinance and, obviously, the convictions would be appealed. One of these days, these idiots are going to learn to read. The case just decided by the Supreme Court on September 29, Cooper v. Aaron, regarding Little Rock school desegregation, had clearly indicated that such subterfuge to try to get around official responsibility in an effort to maintain unconstitutional segregation nevertheless was still state action such that the 14th Amendment remained implicated. The Court had previously ruled a decade earlier that such schemes, in the specific context of racially restrictive covenants in housing, in Shelley v. Kramer, still involved state action by the fact of the necessity of the courts to become involved for enforcement, regardless, in that case, of the private contractual nature of the covenant, itself. Without the courts involved in enforcement, the covenant was meaningless. Similarly, the situation in the bootless attempt in Birmingham to circumvent the laws against segregation in public transportation facilities, as the ordinance had to be enforced, as in this case, criminally by the courts. These witless fools are quite remindful of Trump, and his brilliant legal midgets, who insist on batting their heads against the wall, despite plain black-letter law being against what they intend to do, that is, either in furtherance of the Project 2025 agenda or its corollary, the vindictive prosecution of deemed political enemies. But anything for the Dictator.
Vice-President Nixon and Nelson
Rockefeller, potential Republican presidential rivals in 1960, had
breakfast together this date and both had insisted that they were not
even thinking about things on the other side of the year's elections.
The demonstration of harmony had been set up in New York City
following an episode Thursday night in which Mr. Rockefeller, the
Republican nominee for governor, running against Governor Averell
Harriman, had not attended a dinner for Mr. Nixon. Afterward, the
Vice-President hurried away to catch a plane for Wisconsin to
continue his "slambang campaigning"—a real swinger having
been that Mr. Nixon, like, daddio
In Warsaw, the U.S. and Communist China this date postponed their negotiations on the Formosa Strait crisis until the following day.
At the Atomic Test Site in Yucca Flat, Nev., unfavorable weather conditions caused the postponement of an atomic weapons test set for the morning of this date.
In Nicosia, Cyprus, a British merchant had been shot dead in a crowded street of the city this date and a curfew was immediately imposed. In another incident later, a British soldier was seriously wounded in an ambush in East Cyprus.
In New York, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal business news service, said this date that Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks had resigned or would resign shortly and that Admiral Lewis Strauss, who had recently resigned as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had been chosen as his successor.
In St. Petersburg, Fla., a fisherman reached safety this date after five days afloat on a yellow life raft, the last 24 hours of which had been with his dead captain, after their fishing vessel had broken apart and sunk on Saturday night during a storm. The raft had no food or water aboard and they had subsisted by catching fish with their hands. The man was reported in generally good condition at a hospital where he was taken for observation. A picture appears on the page.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
We have more questions. Why is there so much cross-over between tv and the movies these days in 1958, even if the tv people, with short shooting schedules, quite obviously in some cases, have shorter times to rehearse their lines and the scenes in which they recite them, so that it is not always very polished in final delivery, and, insofar as some of the hour-long episodes, without pointing fingers, are considerably stretched sometimes by various fillers substituting for any real movement of the storyline, affording the viewer, we suppose, extra time, in between commercials, to do whatever it was they needed to do or afford the less than attentive student, trying to do homework while watching, some interim problem-solving, without missing anything of consequence, able to rely on others in the room of more dedicated concentration on the script to fill them in. "What just happened? What did I miss?" These might become portentous questions, which could cost someone their life if not properly attuned to that which others might be conceiving to undermine their very existence by nefariously obtaining ideas, whether exactly framed in the same mode or by analogy, out of the tv stories—which becomes painfully evident, especially among young or particularly dumb perpetrators, when reading the crime stories of the day on the front page, as the young or dumb seem to believe that no one else had seen the same program or, at least, would conceive of the possibility that the perpetrator got the idea for their little caper from one or more of the programs.
Maybe the duplication of ideas and scenes suggests the presence of spies afoot between sets at Warner Brothers, or on other studio lots wherein there seems to be borrowing from one script to the next, or just through the grapevine, but they would not stoop to plagiarizing ideas for scenes and mcguffins and such, would they? just to try to beat the movie release and appear original when not. Who do they think we are as viewers, pigeons?
Incidentally, it occurs to us, as having been a practitioner of the art, that doing homework while watching tv, at least in the early years of school, is probably a good exercise for becoming a courtroom attorney, learning how to focus on multiple things at once in one's surroundings, able thus to listen to testimony as an active listener, ready, when necessary and prudent, to interpose an appropriate objection with the reason stated for it, even if, as in an attorney's notes taken during testimony, the sense of the homework, when read uninterrupted, might tax the teacher's ability to comprehend broken and unmended thought patterns.
Framed Edition
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