The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 17, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a Federal District Court judge this date had ordered a white high school in Arlington County, Va., to admit four black students the following semester. The Stratford Junior High School in Arlington County had been ordered by the District Court to receive the four black students, but the judge turned down applications of 26 others for transfers to various other white schools. The four students ordered to be admitted would not be transferred until January, because his order could not become a final decree until the following month and he said that it would be unwise to make the transfers that late in the term. Virginia law provided for immediate closure of schools which admitted black students. The judge did not rule on the state's pupil assignment law, commenting that assignment was not a concern of Federal courts, provided it was done irrespective of race. Two Charlottesville schools awaited a ruling on their plea for a delay in integration. If a delay was not granted in the case of the Charlottesville schools, they were expected to be closed.
As court action brought the threat of school closings in Virginia, Little Rock, Ark., prepared for a special election on September 27 regarding school integration, whether the four high schools closed by Governor Orval Faubus would remain closed, in which case the Governor would likely reopen them as private schools, or whether they would reopen with Central High School continuing to be integrated, pursuant to the order of the Supreme Court on September 12. The controversy had brought new criticism of the Eisenhower Administration from Governor Faubus, who said that the Federal Government hoped to avoid using troops again to enforce racial integration in schools because "they know it is illegal". The Governor referred to a statement issued after the previous day's conference at Newport, R.I., between Attorney General William Rogers and the President regarding continued Southern resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. Mr. Rogers had said that the Administration was delaying immediate action in the hope that public pressure would force the reopening of schools in Arkansas and Virginia. In Virginia, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., said that it was "the old familiar technique of divide and conquer," that "this is what they've been trying to do all the time."
In Madisonville, Ky., a 14-year old black boy had been given a five-day jail term and fined $25 after conviction for threatening a white woman with a knife during a disturbance at a newly integrated school. The woman had attempted to prevent four black students from entering the Pride Avenue Elementary School the prior Wednesday.
Adren Cooper and Clifton Wells of the Associated Press report from Little Rock that for the kids, it was no holiday, and certainly not for the parents, as most of the students remained at home, waiting and wondering about the closure of the four high schools. While it was an extension of summer vacation, the youngsters talked in terms of how soon they could resume their education, speaking in restrained, serious tones. Most of those out of school were students one or two years away from a diploma. The mother of one 17-year old senior at Central said that she could not believe what was happening. The majority of students and parents were opposed to racially integrated schools and the only choice seemed to be between integration and private schools at that point. The mother had said: "He did want to finish at Central, but he heard that the school might not be accredited and it has upset him quite a bit. He wants to go to college and he might have to go to Phoenix [Arizona] and live with my folks. Maybe I'll go with him and work out there—we've made no definite plans." Her son normally worked after school and during the summer at a grocery store and he was continuing at that job for the present. He had told his mother that he could go back to Central even if the black students and white students were in the same classrooms, that he could cope with the situation, although the crowds outside the school bothered him some the previous year. Only a small percentage of students had made definite plans for transfers. In most cases, there was no place for them to go. A few planned to attend private schools in other states, though it was a financial hardship for most parents, and a few talked of moving to other cities to live with relatives, while some rural students who paid tuition to attend Central would return to the rural schools. The school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, said that out of 2,071 students enrolled at Central, only 54 had requested transcripts of their grades, indicating a transfer, and only 44 had done so among the 731 enrolled at all-white Hall High School. There apparently had been no transfers from among the 175 at all-white Tech High or the 717 at the all-black school, Horace Mann High. Some students expressed confidence at Governor Faubus's ability to solve the dilemma. One female senior at Hall said that it was dull with no football, "no nothin'". She was the daughter of a Little Rock furrier and some of her classmates had been investigating an offer by Hendrix College of Conway, Ark., to admit some seniors whose grades were good and who had a few extra credits on their records. Her mother was pessimistic about the prospect and said that she was considering sending her daughter to live with relatives in Houston. She said that she had not gotten very worked up about the situation until the current week, as she had thought that they would open the schools by the current week. "But even if the schools open, there's going to be trouble. It can't be right." A 19-year old senior said that he had been working most of the time and planned to wait and see what the Governor would do, that he was with him. A female student at Central said that since there was no place else to go, she supposed she would return to Central. She was the daughter of a city detective and a junior at the school, indicating that she had found plenty to do playing the piano quite a bit of the time but wanted to return to school. A 17-year old junior at Central said that she would not return to the school if it remained integrated. "I wouldn't go through that again. Please say that I'm not against Negroes—just against the nine Central—and those others who are trying to interfere."
In Cleveland, it was reported that Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio this date had attacked the justices of the Supreme Court, saying that they had a "lust for power" which was delegated to the other branches of government. Whether he intended to say that the other two branches had a "lust for power" which was being usurped by the Court, was not exactly clear from the short piece. Perhaps, he was quoted out of context.
The Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of unions and management heard a Committee investigator, Pierre Salinger, future White House press secretary for President Kennedy and future California Senator, testify this date that more than half of the votes cast to elect Jimmy Hoffa as president of the Teamsters Union the previous October had been cast illegally. Mr. Salinger said that he could prove by the union's own constitution the illegality of 56.2 percent of the votes for Mr. Hoffa at an international convention in Miami the prior October. His testimony was made only a few hours after the Teamsters executive board had called for a new convention the following February in an admitted move to rid itself of Federal court-named supervising monitors. The monitors had announced that they would seek a court order to halt the move and to give them more authority to order what they considered to be needed reform in the scandal-ridden union. The monitors had been appointed pursuant to a compromise of a lawsuit filed by rank-and-file Teamsters members contesting the election of Mr. Hoffa as president. Mr. Salinger had based his charges of illegality on the union's constitutional provisions governing election of delegates, which required that the delegates be elected directly at membership meetings, or appointed by executive boards of union locals with prior approval of the membership. He had noted that the union's constitution also provided for selection of delegates after issuance of the convention call, but 30 days in advance of the convention. On the basis of those provisions, he said that only 4.8 percent of the votes for Mr. Hoffa were "definitely legal" and that 56.2 percent were "definitely illegal". The remaining 39 percent could not be determined one way or the other, were in the "twilight zone".
In Detroit, it was reported that rank-and-file members of the UAW had struck the Ford Motor Co. this date, walking out as company and union negotiators talked past the strike deadline of 10:00 a.m., with all reports indicating that a final agreement could be expected any minute. UAW president Walter Reuther had returned to the talks an hour after the deadline with the statement that he expected this "will be my last visit to the conference table. We are very near agreement." He had said earlier during the morning that Ford had improved its offer. Ford's vice-president for industrial relations, John Bugas, described the latest company move as "not a new offer" but rather a "refining and modifying process". The president of the 50,000-man Ford Local 600, the largest in the UAW, had left the bargaining table shortly before the strike deadline and told the 6,000 workers at the huge Rouge, Mich., plant that "the strike is on." Throughout the Ford empire, walkouts had begun from midnight on. By the time of the strike deadline, nine of 86 plants were closed and the remainder were affected by the deadline time moving westward across time zones. The president of the local 600 told newsmen that the company had proposed a settlement of the retroactive pay issue, one of the major points at issue in the long negotiations, by offering to make its contract effective as of July 1. Ford workers had been without a contract since the old one had expired on June 1 and the union had demanded that any new agreement would have to be retroactive to that date. He said that Ford had offered to increase its basic pensions to $2.35 from $2.25 for each year of service and had also offered to continue the annual improvement factor, which gave workers six cents per hour or 2.5 percent of their hourly wage, whichever was greater.
In Charlotte, 42 UAW members had walked off the job at the Ford plant as the strike deadline past. Those employees handled service stock shipments for Ford in the Carolinas at the Wilkinson Boulevard facility. Another 75 employees remained on the job, but the division head had told the newspaper that no shipments would be made during the strike.
In Havana, it was reported that rebel leader Fidel Castro's radio had announced this date that his forces had started a westward march from eastern Oriente Province to "liberate Cuba from the dictatorship" of El Presidente Fulgencio Batista.
In Paris, it was reported that four Algerian terrorists had tried to set off a major explosion in one of the capital's main gasworks the previous night. The explosion had ripped open a large pipe, but a resulting fire was promptly extinguished.
In Copenhagen, Denmark, it was reported by informed sources that the Danish Government had agreed this date to accept a British proposal for a compromise on a 122-mile fishing limit around Denmark's Faroe Islands in the Atlantic.
In New York, former President Truman said this date that "the myth of Democratic extravagance and Republican thrift would be exploded" if the press did a better job of informing the public about the budget.
On the editorial page, "Jacques Soustelle & His Main Chance" indicates that Premier Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Information, who had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by gunfire from Algerian rebels in Paris on Monday, was an exemplar of what made French politics as absorbing as a novel, "belief in the main chance."
M. Soustelle was a blend of humanity and power-madness, cynicism and idealism, embodying the same traits of men who had pulled the switches of French politics at least since Cardinal Richelieu in the Seventeenth Century. In the face of repudiation from General De Gaulle, he had led the Gaullist faction for several years in the National Assembly. As an idealistic young politics professor, he had gone to Algeria as Premier Guy Mollet's Governor General. Initially determined to clean up and concede to the rebels, he had completely converted to what he saw there and had become one of the more ardent "Algeria for France" supporters.
When, during the previous spring, the Army officers and French settlers had revolted in Algiers, the police had placed a guard around his house. He had escaped under a blanket in the back of a laundry truck by way of Geneva to Algeria. There, he began to lead the cheers which had brought General De Gaulle back to power in France.
Ignored in the initial Cabinet formed by Premier De Gaulle, he forced his way in within three weeks when it became apparent that he wielded enormous power with the Army and the colonial rebels.
Then on Monday, while driving his car near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, he was fired on by members of a group wanting independence for Algeria, and splintering glass had cut his forehead, as a subway attendant was killed. But within minutes, he was back at his ministry desk holding a press conference.
It finds that he might not be an orthodox liberal democrat, but that it was hard to deny that a man so persistent deserved whatever he was after.
Playwright Clifford Odets recalls, in a condensed article from the New York Times, Thomas Wolfe's burial in Asheville in 1938, wherein he had participated as an honorary pallbearer. He recounts that most of Mr. Wolfe's friends had said, when paying respects the night before at his family's house: "Only Tom himself could have written these scenes. They are right out of Look Homeward, Angel."
He had met Tom alive for the first
time standing in the back of the house at a New York performance of
Mr. Odets's play, "Paradise Lost"
They had met several more times in the few remaining years before his early death just a fortnight or so short of his 38th birthday. "The world was his garden and he liked conversation very much, so we talked, between us more drinks and more company-size olives. Most surprising was the regression in his speech after a few drinks: He would speak real hill-billy then. But if this added something grotesque to a man already inescapably burdened by his own bulk (and he would look quite like a dark, embattled bison), it also added the stinging moral fervor of a country preacher."
When he had read in the Times one late afternoon of his death, he had traveled all night by car, and the next morning was clasping hands with Mr. Green in Chapel Hill, knowing that he would go to Asheville for the funeral. He wanted to honor Mr. Wolfe, "to show in some small way the confraternity of writing brothers; and to speak by my presence for the unspeakable loneliness that most writers know, exactly as Hemingway had once driven up on a bicycle to a strange porch in Key West, calling with a brusque shyness to a writer he did not know, 'Hey, are you here alone?'"
He could see how alone he had been when Mr. Green, Mr. Koch, himself and a few other University men had arrived at Tom's mother's house in Asheville that night. "A barking, begrudging dog is tied to the sagging wooden porch: Above his noisy head a shingle reads, 'My Old Kentucky Home.'"
He recounts that inside the simply furnished home, except for the incredible souvenirs which all mothers collected, two front rooms opened into the small central hall and they had entered the left one to meet and shake hands with Mrs. Wolfe, "a dry, thin pioneer type of woman, slow moving but not weak." Mabel, Tom's sister, was built in the mold of her brother, and greeted them with more energy as she was happy that other writers had come "to see Tom". A little later, one of his brothers arrived, reminding Mr. Odets of Gary Cooper, humble and shy. He had painfully explained that writing was much beyond him and that he was in the ice cream business upstate. Mabel was energetically trying to herd them all into the coffin room, but in her quietly insistent way, Mrs. Wolfe had brought out two old photo albums and was showing them pictures of Tom as a baby and of two other babies who had died young, including snapshots of their well-tended graves.
He had lingered behind with Mrs. Wolfe so that when he crossed into the other room, he had been alone with Mabel and her vivacity. "Tom is lying in the biggest burnished metal coffin ever seen on land or sea; Mabel says that it took two days to find his size; the transparent pink cheese-cloth, she says, is to keep the flies away."
Tom was dressed like a meek confirmation boy, in a blue suit, red rose in the lapel. Mabel had giggled, "Tom would just kill me if he knew that I put that rose there." Then, as if reading the mind of Mr. Odets, she said, "That's a toupee Tom's wearing." His head had been shaved for a brain operation, as he had died of tuberculosis of the brain. In Wyoming, violent headaches had forced him to leave the train and soon after, in a coma, he had been rushed to Baltimore for examination by Dr. Dandy, a venerated brain surgeon. The doctor had said that he would die on the operating table if a mere exploratory operation were performed, but Mabel had insisted that he go ahead with the exploratory surgery anyway, which did result in Tom's death. "And then, do you know what I did?" said Mabel. "I bawled out that nice old man until he cried just like a little baby. I know I shouldn't have, but I just couldn't help myself."
The next morning, the honorary pallbearers had gathered in the house. They were waiting for the professionals to tell them when and how to move. "Waiting, brooding, Paul Green was moved to soft indignation: 'I swear, what's this world like if the governor of the state isn't here today. Not the senators either, I swear. Not being here today for a man like Tom Wolfe.'"
But once outside, it seemed that every mortal soul in town was on the sidewalk across the way and there had been not an empty seat in the old, roomy church. "The man on the platform, a gentle pastor out of an Ibsen play, said that Tom was a great and renowned writer. Tom, he said, had strayed, feeling that he could never get home again. Tom had somehow lost the past, perhaps even lost faith: But look, here was Tom amongst his family, with old friends, in his own town. Here today, as everyone could see, Tom had come home again."
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes regarding the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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