Senator Bankhead of Alabama, in Charlotte Saturday, we see by The Charlotte News, "happily proclaims that the South is being made a different country."

The Senator, of course, was talking about economic and social conditions; and in those departments his happiness over the fact that "the South is being made a different country," is understandable. To say the truth, it isn't being made a different country fast enough to citizens in some respects--as for instance, in its unpleasant eminence in murder and crimes of violence. Last year the average for all towns in the South with more than 10,000 people was over 19 per 100,000 of population, whereas in New England for such towns it was barely more than one per 100,000!

And yet, while we are making our land over, let's not make it too different a country. With all its blurs and blots, the South still has its peculiar tradition--a tradition in which love of honor and courage and loyalty and belief that life can somehow be made a sort of stately processional wherein we march, not without gesturing and in the rustling of silken robes, to the sound of far-away trumpets forever heralding the charge--a tradition in which these things are the reality behind a hackneyed adjective, romantic. And it ought not to be abandoned in favor of some second-hand and second-rate version of the tradition of Yankeedom.

It's the Negroes who are responsible for the city's excessive murder rate, Chief of detectives Frank Liitlejohn said Friday. Of 34 murders in the last 14 months, 32 were of Negroes by Negroes. Only two white men were murdered, one by a Negro, and the mystery of the other death never has been solved.

Furthermore the Chief went on to remark, many of the Negroes killed are troublemakers and bad actors, and while he deprecates the low value Negroes place on life, his intimation is that some of these blackamoors have got exactly what they had coming to them.

With all due respect to a capable and earnest officer of the law, we can't wash our hands of the bloodiness so easily. Other cities have large Negro populations, larger than Charlotte's proportionately, and still manage to hold down the murder rate. Here, this table will show in a minute what we mean. It is of murders and also negligent homicides in 1937 as compiled by the FBI.

To say that it is Negroes who have brought us the inevitable distinction, over and above blacker towns, is to affirm either that our colored people are (1) worse than others, or (2) that the City is negligent in preserving order among them.

Chief Littlejohn, who has a wide acquaintance with these people and a remarkable understanding of their natures, is in better position than we to testify upon the causes of violent crime among them. We would suggest, however, that unlighted streets and alleys that serve as streets, courts that refuse to take their killings too seriously, and the inadequacy of policing in Negro districts--which are responsibilities of the City and the State rather than of the Negroes--have a great deal to do with it.

The Statesville Daily laments the lack of poetry in our native white Tar Heel nomenclature, as compared with such Indian names as Nantahala. And to tell the truth it is often a bit astounding. Up in Haywood, for instance, they have a burg named, simply and briefly, Joe. A woman did that, we suspect, as gallant gentlemen, in all probability, account for Grace and Clarissa and Amantha and Maggie, all of them Tar Heel boroughs. And was the gentleman who named Vixen in Yancy down with misogyny or did he think he could tame her?

In Madison, the embattled Democrats in that Republican stronghold have written the fact of their recalcitrance large in the name of a village. In Madison, too, stands the town with the charming name of Pump. Somebody had read his books once, as Faust and Valhalla and Othello testify. A man with a perverted sense of humor wished Goo-goo (or is that Indian, too) on a town. And some other people obviously thought less than nothing of the country they had got into, else how explain Weasel, Butch, Husk, Flinty, and Scaly? And was Poe or a bird responsible for Raven?

And as for Big Pine, Big Laurel, Bearwallow, Hurricane, Canebottom, Sandy Bottom, Bone Valley, Low Gap, Paint Gap, and Chunky Gal Creek--they're admittedly pretty homely. And yet the language we speak is a homely dialect of a homely root, and we aren't sure that there isn't a kind of rugged, crude poetry in some of these names, anyhow. On the whole, we think we prefer that kind of poetry to the conscious efforts of the lady--and undoubtedly she was very much a lady--who named Dewdrop.

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