The Charlotte News
Monday, September 29, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that the Supreme Court had issued this date its final,
detailed opinion in Cooper v. Aaron, the basic
ruling in which had been issued September 12 for expediency, before
the Little Rock schools were scheduled to open on September 15,
clarifying further this date that states could not resort to "evasive
schemes" to continue racial segregation in the schools, thus
nixing such plans as those calling for leasing public schools to
private groups, as had been proposed in Arkansas and Virginia. The
unanimous opinion was announced shortly after a plan to lease the
four closed high schools to a private organization in Little Rock,
where Governor Orval Faubus had been opposing immediate racial
integration at Central High School, as had been ordered continued by
the Court in its September 12 decision, affirming the Eighth Circuit
Court of Appeals decision which had reversed the U.S. District
Court's decision to allow Central to defer further desegregation
until the beginning of 1960, the latter having been based on ensuring
an undisturbed education for both white and black students. The final
opinion had gone further and taken aim at what it termed schemes to
get around its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education
that racial segregation in schools was per se unconstitutional under
the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. The opinion, delivered by
Chief Justice Earl Warren, said that the rights of children to be
free of discrimination in admission to schools "can neither be
nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive
or judicial officers, nor nullified indirectly by them through
evasive schemes for segregation whether attempted ingeniously or
ingenuously". It said that violence and disorder in the Little
Rock situation "followed upon the actions of the governor and
the legislature." But, "the command of the 14th amendment
is that no 'state' shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws." It had cited its earlier
opinion of 1879 in Ex Parte Virginia, holding that "no
agency of the State, or of the officers or agents by whom its powers
are exerted, shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws. Whoever, by virtue of public position
under a State government, ... denies or takes away the equal
protection of the laws violates the constitutional inhibition; and,
as he acts in the name and for the State, and is clothed with the
State's power, his act is that of the State. This must be so, or the
constitutional prohibition has no meaning." "Thus,
the prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment extend to all action of
the State denying equal protection of the laws; whatever the agency
of the State taking the action." The opinion said that the Court wished to answer "the premise of
the actions of the Governor and Legislature that they are not bound
by our holding in [Brown]." It also said
that the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution made the instrument the
supreme law of the land, citing to the 1803 decision of Marbury
v. Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall had
stated: "It is emphatically the province and the duty of the
judicial department to say what the law is." (This fundamental
notion, which any law student ought glean, if nothing else, in the
study of Constitutional law, that is unless they are out on the
Florida beaches soaking up rays, reliant on some other student to
take notes for them, when they should be in class studying the
Constitution, is something which the Trumpies seem uniformly to be
absent in their legal training, that is, those among them who have
any legal training, which one who does could easily be fooled into
believing that those who make claim to have do not—which, of course,
can happen when a lawyer becomes so wedded to political advancement
that they eschew their legal training, leaving it behind in the
hallway in favor of rationalization of their obeisance to a cult
leader and his propaganda minister, Herr Doktor Goebbels, not a
lawyer though trying his best to sound like a half-baked version of
one through issuance of his daily ukases which he thinks carry the
force of law from His Highness, the "Chief Magistrate",
in their confused conception of the "unitary executive",
i.e., their King, Manu, the Lawgiver. Hey, stupid, there are two other co-equal branches
and the judicial branch acts as arbiter in disputed interpretations
of the Constitution
In New Bedford, Mass., The Standard-Times reported this date that Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court had advised the NAACP on matters of policy for about a decade immediately before his appointment in 1939 to the Court by President Roosevelt. It does not point out that his primary responsibilities had been as a Harvard Law School professor since 1921 until his appointment to the Court. In that earlier capacity, he had become associated with a lot of liberal causes, including founding of the ACLU. Thus, just what the point was of the report is hard to assess.
The Associated Press reports that more than 16,000 students had been unable to attend public schools in Arkansas and Virginia this date, bringing home to parents and pupils alike the full impact of the troubled struggle over integration. The first wholesale closing of schools in Norfolk, Virginia's largest city, had prevented 10,000 children from attendance, and in Little Rock, an estimated 3,460 could not attend, while 2,750 had been affected by the earlier shutdown of the Front Royal, Va., high school and elementary school, and the closure of schools in Charlottesville, Va. In some instances, particularly in Virginia, makeshift classes had been held in homes and rented buildings, but the overall impact in the two states was grim in terms of receiving an adequate education and the acquisition of the necessary credits for entry to college. Elsewhere in the Deep South, hundreds of thousands of children continued to attend school in segregated classes while integrated classes were held in some border states. In Little Rock, prospects did not appear good for immediate reopening of the four closed high schools, despite the clear-cut results of the referendum held there on Saturday which provided a 3 to 1 majority victory for advocates of segregation, with the vote having been not to reopen the schools on an integrated basis, clearing the way for the Governor to reopen the schools based on private funding as segregated schools—nixed, obviously, by this date's ruling of the Supreme Court. The NAACP had sought an injunction to prevent the Little Rock School Board from leasing its public school facilities to a private corporation, and that was pending before a two-judge Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Omaha, obviously to be granted on the basis of the Supreme Court decision of this date. There had been speculation in Little Rock that the Board had deliberately delayed consummation of the buildings transfer to the private corporation until after the ruling in the matter. A source from the Board, who declined to be identified, said that if the court ordered the Board not to lease its facilities, that order would be followed. But without such an order, the Board appeared ready to comply with the public mandate of the referendum vote on Saturday.
As previously indicated, in Montgomery, Ala., Governor Jim Folsom commuted the death sentence of Jimmy Wilson for a July, 1957 robbery of an 81-year old woman, taking between $2.95 and $3.95, to life imprisonment this date. The action followed a clemency hearing the prior Friday which had brought the 55-year old illiterate black handyman face to face with the Governor. Mr. Wilson would have to serve 15 years before becoming eligible for parole—which would occur in 1972. Recently, the State Supreme Court had denied his petition for rehearing on his appeal, which had affirmed the conviction. He had admitted to police his guilt in the matter, which had allegedly involved a threat to the woman's life and attempted rape inside her bedroom, the basis for the forcible taking element of the small sum of money, converting it to robbery and subjecting him to the death penalty. He had been scheduled to die in the electric chair on October 24. Under Alabama law, the Governor had no authority to reduce the sentence below life imprisonment.
Samuel Lubell, one of the country's foremost public pulse-takers and analysts, had been traveling around the country for the previous two months talking with people about the Congressional midterm elections, and in the first of a series of articles to be published five times per week between the present and the November elections, reports of a strong but uneven Democratic tide surging through the country, varying considerably with economic conditions in each of the 15 cities and 13 farm counties which he had visited. He had found one-time Eisenhower supporters planning to shift to Democratic Congressional candidates. By far the heaviest break was in working-class neighborhoods, particularly among younger workers. Of the Eisenhower voters who were under 35 whom he interviewed, nearly half said that they intended to vote Democratic in the fall, while many more remained "undecided". The rumored dramatic change among the younger generation was primarily in response to the recession. Overburdened with debt for new homes and automobiles, as many of the younger workers were, and with little seniority to hold onto their jobs, they had been perhaps the one element in the population hit hardest by the economic downturn. In contrast, the Republican appeal was holding fairly well among those unhurt by the recession. Among white-collar, pro-business voters, questions on the recession often brought the response: "What recession? There is none." Or, "There had to be leveling off sometime." In Dallas, Tex., and Charlotte, the middle-class solidarity might prove strong enough for the Republicans to hold the Congressional seats there, despite Little Rock. Among the farmers west of the Mississippi, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson remained a primary liability, although his unpopularity had been eased by good crops. Also, some Midwestern Republicans were showing themselves more popular politically than was the President because of their known opposition to his farm policies. Viewed across the country, the Democratic trend was heavy enough so that there appeared virtually no chance that the Republicans would recapture control of either the House or the Senate. He regards it as being still too early, however, to concede to the Democrats a landslide equal to the proportions of 1936, as some observers had predicted. On many important issues, the voters were almost evenly divided between conflicting emotions. Effective campaigning could produce a fairly close election. Mr. Lubell indicates that it was his fourth effort to report on an election campaign in true "grass-roots" manner, ignoring what the politicians were saying and going directly to the people themselves. As in 1952, 1954 and 1956, he had searched out the most sensitive voting areas in the country, rural and urban precincts where shifts typified the voting changes which had settled previous elections. He had visited some of those areas up to four times before and was often greeted in such places by a remark wondering when he would show up again. He had always sought to learn not only for whom people were voting but why. Thus far, his interviews indicated that the issues winning votes for the Democrats were mainly economic, with the recession having given razor sharpness to the old anti-business hostilities which had been dulled in the earlier years of the Eisenhower Administration.
In Paris, it was reported that Premier Charles de Gaulle had won his fight to have a new constitution granting him broad new powers. Returns from the most sweeping referendum in French history this date gave him a resounding personal triumph and a strong Constitution for the Fifth Republic, which would be proclaimed in the official journal the following Sunday. France would enter into a new, more powerful system of government so daring that many Frenchmen gasped at the conception while they voted their approval by a 4 to 1 landslide on Sunday. There had been a record turnout of 84.9 percent of the registered voters, with the new Constitution approved by 78.5 percent. With one exception, French Guinea in West Africa, the overseas lands of the erstwhile French empire had also supported the new Constitution. That set them up with France on the world political stage as a "French community", a kind of global confederation with commonwealth status and even independence waiting in the wings.
Also in Paris, it was reported that France had announced this date that it was cutting off economic aid to French Guinea.
In Havana, it was reported that Cuban rebels under Fidel Castro had said this date that they had killed 25 soldiers and captured an Army commander in a clash near Maffo, about 20 miles northwest of Santiago.
In Scarborough, England, the annual convention of Britain's Labor Party this date had called for the cession of Nationalist China's offshore islands to Communist China.
At the Atomic Test Site in Yucca Flat, Nev., a nuclear weapon had been detonated this date, packing half the power of the atomic bomb which had leveled Hiroshima. The detonation had occurred while the bomb hung from a balloon anchored 1,500 feet in the air.
In Rome, the Food and Agriculture Organization reported this date that Russia was speeding toward its goal of topping the U.S. in production of milk, meat and butter.
In Athens, Greece, Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis had stated this date that Cyprus independence would be acceptable to Greece as a solution to the problem which had caused bloodshed to the island for three years.
In Washington, it was reported that Martin O'Donoghue was considering this date resigning as the chief court-appointed monitor over the Teamsters Union unless given more power to enforce reforms. He had been appointed pursuant to a settlement of a rank-and-file member lawsuit filed the previous year to try to block the election of Jimmy Hoffa as president of the union because of violations of the union's constitution in the process of seating delegates to the Miami Beach convention which had elected him in the summer of 1957.
In Detroit, UAW president Walter Reuther resumed his efforts this date to obtain a quick contract settlement with Chrysler Corp., as a follow-up to the back-to-work order he had issued to wildcat strikers at Chrysler and General Motors the previous day. He moved back a strike deadline against G.M. from Tuesday to Thursday to get back on the job thousands of premature strikers at G.M. plants. His order to the 250,000 UAW members at G.M. came after a week in which the company reported its attempt to move at full speed on production of 1959 models had been hampered by the strikes and some resultant plant shutdowns. G.M. on Saturday had said that 45,000 workers were idle at 20 plants across the country. The UAW order had been made public within minutes after Mr. Reuther had gone into an unusual Sunday morning bargaining session with G.M., while another UAW team and negotiators met at the same time with Chrysler. Louis Seaton, G.M. vice-president, said that it was good that the union was going to make an effort to cut off the "hit-and-run tactics" which had cost thousands of G.M. workers millions of dollars in wages. He told newsmen that G.M. had no intention of sweetening the contract offer it had made to the union on September 20, three days after Ford and the UAW had reached an agreement after a strike of about seven hours involving 98,000 Ford workers.
Julian Scheer of The News reports from Wilmington that while Hurricane Helene had caused significant property damage along the coastal areas, it could have been "pure, living hell" but was not. The coast of South Carolina had braced for its worst storm in 60 years, but was mopping up this date from only moderate damage. The North Carolina coast, while suffering multi-million-dollar damage, suffered far less than anticipated. Navy hurricane hunters, flying over the hurricane on Friday, had noted that it was headed for Charleston, but late on Friday afternoon, it had turned northward and to the west, apparently headed toward Georgetown, S.C. Then confusion followed, and under cover of darkness, the hurricane continued to turn and made little progress until 5:00 a.m. Saturday, with its change in course causing it to aim toward Myrtle Beach, Ocean Drive and the Little River-Shallotte area. But then the eye of the hurricane headed north toward Cape Fear, far east of the track of Hurricane Hazel in October, 1954. The change of course had been a blessing, as high tide along the North and South Carolina coasts was between 6:50 and 7:04 a.m., and it was evident that the hurricane would ride in on low tide, sometime after 10:00. Winds from the hurricane had been strongest in its western quadrant, blowing offshore on an ebbing tide. In the Wilmington, Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, and Wrightsville Beach areas, at high tide, the hurricane wound up southeast of the locations, and since winds travel in a counterclockwise direction from the eye of a hurricane, the first and more gentle winds had blown from the east on the high tide. By 11:00, with the tide running out, the winds had come from the east and northeast at 52 mph with gusts up to 99. By noon, the winds had shifted to the northeast, with the tide fairly low, at a speed of 61 mph with gusts to 103. The result was that the seas had remained relatively calm for such tremendous winds, and a Wilmington weatherman commented that they had been lucky, preventing the damage occasioned by Hazel, despite Helene's winds having been stronger. Hazel had resulted in 21 deaths and damage in North and South Carolina amounting to 145 million dollars, whereas damage from Helene was estimated to be ten million dollars. Myrtle Beach alone had suffered 7 million dollars in damage from Hazel.
In South St. Paul, Minn., it was reported that a sniper on the ground had fired at two balloonists as they drifted over Iowa on Saturday in a low-altitude flight to qualify one of the men for a trip to the edge of space.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page for this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
Incidentally, the question of the day, for all aspiring eyewitnesses, is who was the actor who played Martin Swift in that new detective series airing its second episode this night. Was it an actor
Framed Edition
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