The Charlotte News

Wednesday, August 27, 1958

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, at his press conference this date, said that he might have told friends that he believed that the rate of school integration ought be slowed, but denied that he had ever said that he wished the Supreme Court had not decided in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation in the public schools was per se unconstitutional. Shortly after he had said that, the Justice Department announced that it would take part in arguments before the Court the following day on the school integration crisis in Little Rock, Ark., with the Court determining whether to set aside a stay imposed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on its own decision, reversing a District Court determination to delay further integration in Little Rock for 2 1/2 years, to afford a "cooling-off period". The stay had been imposed pending the filing by the Little Rock School Board of its petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court—which would be granted and decided in late September, ultimately affirming the decision of the Circuit Court, premised on Brown. The Department had said that Solicitor General J. Lee Rankin would also file a legal brief in the case the following day in advance of the oral argument. The President had said that the consequences would be terrible if some states closed their public schools in an effort to block court-ordered integration, that closing the schools would result in a myriad of litigation. Governor Orval Faubus had called a special session of the Arkansas Legislature to consider three different bills, one of which would enable the Governor to close any schools rather than have them forcibly integrated, with a public referendum to be held within 30 days regarding any such closure. The President said that he had always contended that integration could be achieved only through education, reason and sense.

In Little Rock, the Arkansas Legislature, meeting in a special session called by Governor Faubus, was seeking to pass several anti-integration bills before the Supreme Court would meet the following day regarding whether to lift the stay at the request of the NAACP. A special House Education Committee the previous night had gone through and approved 12 measures aimed at blocking forced integration and crippling the effectiveness of the NAACP in bringing integration lawsuits. The primary measure placed before the Legislature by the Governor would provide him the power to close any school where forcible segregation by court order or otherwise was undertaken. A follow-up measure would permit students thus displaced to carry their State school funding to a school of their choice. One last-ditch measure provided for segregation of classes should a school be forced to admit students of another race to the building. Political observers expected the bills to be passed by the House and Senate this date and to be signed into law by the Governor the following day, in time to be used should the Court order the stay set aside. Another measure introduced this date would permit school districts to lease their buildings to individuals or groups for operation as private schools, presumably to admit students whose public schools had been closed. A Little Rock NAACP spokesman, Clarence Laws, assailed the anti-integration measures as evidence of an attempt to evade school desegregation forever. Meanwhile, school superintendent Virgil Blossom refused to enroll three black students in white schools, two of whom had sought entry to Central High School, which had been integrated the previous fall, and a third to all-white Hall High School. The House Committee had also approved six bills written by Arkansas Attorney General Bruce Bennett after revising one slightly, with approval of a seventh Bennett-bill having been delayed pending more study, the latter to have tightened state laws on soliciting lawsuits, aimed at the NAACP representing black students in integration matters.

John Sumner of the Associated Press reports from Raleigh that grim notes of opposition to even token integration had echoed across the state this date as it prepared for the second year of public school operation under its pupil assignment law. At Winston-Salem, the City School Board had faced a group of disgruntled white parents seeking transfer of their children in protest of the assignment of three black pupils to a previously all-white elementary school, Easton. A hearing was scheduled after 135 pupils at Easton applied for transfer to other white schools, based on integration or race. ("Why do we need to send our poor li'l chil'ren down 'ere with them?") City Schools superintendent Craig Phillips said that the Board would grant the requests under the Pearsall Plan of pupil assignment, requiring a local school board to assign to a segregated school any child whose parents objected to their child attending a mixed school. The admission of black students to Easton was the first instance of integration at an elementary school in Winston-Salem. The public school year was slated to start September 4, as were the private kindergartens, between the 3rd and 10th, our'n in the latter range, we trow. (Hell no, we won't go, not even for all the turkey at Thanksgiving or even Franksgiving, or all the sugar cane plantations in Cuba. They have strange rituals here, Devil-may-care rituals. Ah, well, at least, we suppose, it will get us out for about three hours each weekday of what our mama is starting to call, for strange reasons, "the dump", into which we have moved.) The Charlotte School Board had rejected further integration, rejecting the applications of 23 black students for admission to white schools. The result was that only two black students, who had first been admitted to white schools the previous year, would be able to attend white schools in the current fall. The school assignment law, however, permitted parents to appeal the Board action. Kelly Alexander, a leader of the NAACP from Charlotte, whose son had been among those rejected the previous day, said that he would "exhaust every constitutional remedy to see that my son will receive a desegregated education." In rural Anson County, officers indicated that "racial reasons" might have motivated the burning of two former white schools which had been turned over to black students. Consolidation rather than integration was apparently a factor in the school burnings. A four-room classroom and auditorium valued at $90,000 had been destroyed the prior Sunday night, and the following night, fire had erupted in a $150,000 classroom building. The County Schools superintendent said that "racial reasons appear to be the most likely cause of the arson". Both schools had been redesigned for black students in the current school year. (It is assumed that the "redesign" was to bring the schools up to standards equal to local white schools to which the white students had been reassigned.) Of the three North Carolina communities which had broken from traditional segregated schools the previous year, only Greensboro had increased the pace of token integration without drawing noticeable reaction. There, seven black students were deemed eligible to attend Gillespie Park Elementary School after five black pupils had been admitted to the previously all-white school the previous year. Black students in Durham and Raleigh awaited court rulings on suits seeking admission to white schools.

In Taipei, Formosa, Chinese Communist artillery had hit Quemoy and its satellite islands this date, while Nationalist and Communist Chinese warships exchanged fire nearby in Amoy Bay. The Nationalist Defense Ministry said that two Nationalist warships had sighted two Communist craft off Nationalist-held Tungting Island, 17 miles south of Quemoy, and had damaged one of the vessels heavily in the ensuing exchange. The Nationalists said that the Communists had sought to invade Quemoy during the current week. Communist artillery had hit the island again this night after hitting the Tan islets between Quemoy and Tungting in the worst pounding received yet in the "long vest pocket war". The Defense Ministry said that the shelling had commenced at 9:17 p.m. and had been answered by Nationalist guns on Quemoy, with one Communist artillery position reported to be destroyed. The Ministry said that the new Communist fire had come from Weitou on the mainland, 7.5 miles northeast of Quemoy. No other details had been provided regarding the shelling. It had followed daytime gun duels in which the Communists had fired more than 8,600 rounds on the area of Quemoy. Admiral Liu Hoh-Tu, spokesman for the Nationalist Defense Ministry, said that there had been a gradual movement southward along the Communist Chinese coast of a fleet of about 5,000 small craft, including motorized junks, from the Chuhan Islands about 300 miles north of Formosa. He said that those craft could be used for amphibious purposes but that he would not indicate whether they were converging for any invasion of Formosa. A spokesman for the U.S. Formosa Defense Command said that there was absolutely nothing to indicate that an invasion fleet was heading for Formosa.

In New York, Time Magazine had reported this date that an American, Charles Hormel, had been flying arms to Cuban rebels under Fidel Castro since the previous October, usually utilizing planes rented at Miami International Airport, that he had made 27 such trips with arms for the rebels in Cuba's Oriente Province.

In Washington, it was reported that Robert Baker, an aide to top Teamster officials, had been rushed to a hospital this date only minutes before he was scheduled to testify again before the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of unions and management. Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa said that Mr. Baker, his right-hand man, had been stricken by a heart attack in his hotel room as he prepared to attend the Senate hearings, where he had been a key witness in recent days. Mr. Hoffa said that he was taken to the Washington Hospital Center and was placed on the critical list. Chairman of the Committee John McClellan of Arkansas and counsel Robert F. Kennedy said that they had received the same report on Mr. Baker's condition and had gone ahead with the hearings, calling other witnesses. Mr. Baker, the son-in-law of former Iowa Democratic state chairman Jake More, had been scheduled for testimony regarding an envelope full of $100 bills and who had received it and why, at a meeting at the Rambler Hotel in Des Moines, Ia., a year earlier. He had sworn on Thursday that he never was paid $1,000 as the price of labor peace for a Pennsylvania firm. He had told the Committee the previous week of spending thousands of dollars on reducing courses at hospitals, as he weighed 300 pounds and was a prolific eater. He told reporters that his weight had varied between 420 and 285, testifying about one reduction course which had taken four or five inches of fat from his heart. The Committee placed in evidence hospital records that Mr. Baker had told his doctors of eating as much as seven quarts of spaghetti or 38 pounds of meat at a single meal. He had been an obscure New York waterfront tough man until he joined with the Teamsters and became the right-hand man to Mr. Hoffa and Harold Gibbons, an executive vice-president of the Teamsters. His former wife the previous week had linked his name with the stolen $300,000 ransom in the kidnaping and murder of a child, Bobby Greenlease, in 1953. She had also described him as an intimate friend of Governor Averell Harriman of New York, which Mr. Harriman had denied and which Mr. Baker had also testified was untrue, that he had only met the Governor casually as a campaign operative in his 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, but did not know him well.

In Pontiac, Mich., it was reported that a divorcee's implication of her former husband, a Teamsters official, had put the investigation of the burning death of Frank Kierdorf three weeks earlier on a new track this date. Authorities, claiming a "major break", also held a second woman in custody after re-arresting Herman Kierdorf, uncle of the victim. The divorcee's story attributed foreknowledge to her former husband of the burns which ultimately had taken Frank Kierdorf's life. Michigan Attorney General Paul Adams said that the story was that of Mrs. Iris Harrelson, former wife of Leaun Harrelson, president of Pontiac Teamsters Local 614 and former Democratic State legislator. Mr. Adams said that Mrs. Harrelson, a waitress, had voluntarily told police on Monday that her former husband had been called from home by Herman Kierdorf at 12:30 a.m. on August 4, the same night the nephew had suffered his fatal burns, which he had ascribed before his death to an attempt to set on fire a dry-cleaning establishment in Flint, having first told authorities, at the urging of his uncle, that he had been burned deliberately by two unidentified men who poured gasoline over him, presumably in connection with union activities. He changed that story the day before his death. The State Attorney General said that Mrs. Harrelson had declared that her former husband, upon returning home some 4 1/2 hours later, at 5:00 a.m., had told her that Frank had been burned and was "all messed up". The uncle, a former Teamsters business agent, had been released under a $15,000 bond in another part of the case and was picked up the previous night for further questioning. The nephew, also having been a Teamsters business agent and ex-convict, like his uncle, had died on August 7 of burns from head to foot, which police had concluded came from the arson attempt, having disproved the other version. The State Attorney General said that Mrs. Harrelson's story had provided possible grounds for calling a grand jury investigation of the matter.

On the editorial page, "School Board Makes a Sound Decision" praises the Charlotte School Board for not assigning more black students to white or predominately white schools for the coming school year, after having undertaken limited desegregation the previous fall, primarily motivated by the desire to preserve the public schools and their local control. Although the decisions had been different, both had resulted, it finds, from a consistent application of the same principle, through earnest and studious concern which had been evident in its deliberations of a year earlier.