The Charlotte News

Friday, May 5, 1950

ONE EDITORIAL

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the State Department charged that Russia had flouted its international obligations in its response to shooting down an unarmed U.S. Navy plane over the Baltic on April 8. It rejected again a second claim by the Soviets that the plane, which they had claimed was a B-29, had violated Soviet airspace over Latvia with the intention of photographing defense installations. The text of the formal note is included in the report. The State Department had earlier demanded recompense for the plane and the lives of the ten lost crewmen.

Britain had reportedly proposed to provide FBI agents with limited access to Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who had pleaded guilty to violation of the official secrets act and was sentenced to 14 years in prison for providing the Russians secret documents while a nuclear physicist with the American and British nuclear programs between 1943 and 1947. The U.S. had sought unrestricted access to him to try to discover information regarding his operations and connections. The British had been reluctant, however, to provide such access.

Marvin L. Arrowsmith reports that sources had informed that former Communist Louis Budenz had suggested that the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, by questioning Robert William Weiner, a former Communist Party treasurer, might develop a tie between the Communist Party and the Amerasia Magazine case, in which six persons had been arrested for providing Government documents to the publication, though only two had been found guilty and fined. The Justice Department at the time had found no evidence of disloyalty and that the documents in question contained, for the most part, information already published. Mr. Budenz claimed that Mr. Wiener was involved in financing the defense of the defendants in the case.

Senator Joseph McCarthy now claimed that Amerasia had been collecting atomic bomb secrets for transmission to the Russians in 1945. Former OSS agent Frank Bielacki, who Senator McCarthy claimed would support the claim of Amerasia involvement in supplying atomic bomb data, had testified in executive session the previous day that while there was some substance to the charge, he could not agree fully with the Senator.

Reversing his earlier position, the President had agreed the previous day to allow the subcommittee to examine the State Department loyalty files on 81 persons named by Senator McCarthy as Communists in the State Department.

In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, speaking before the West German Parliament in response to a Soviet claim that German repatriation had been completed, charged that 1.5 million Germans were still missing in the Soviet Union and demanded that the Soviets account for them.

The Senate voted 62 to 17 not to cut Marshall Plan aid by a billion dollars below the 3.1 billion sought by the President for the coming fiscal year. To that amount would possibly be added 350 million dollars for air power, as recommended by the Appropriations Committee.

The House was pushing to pass the 29 billion dollar omnibus appropriation bill financing more than 40 agencies, including 5.8 billion for the Veterans Administration. The bill had been pending for about a month. It would be followed by the rivers and harbors bill, and then the 14 billion dollar defense appropriations bill.

Kays Gary reports from Shelby, N.C., that a six-year old girl could not go home again in Cleveland County, was instead staying with her maternal grandparents in Gastonia. Two months earlier, a lightning bolt had struck the home and burned the child and her mother, hurled her baby sister from her mother's lap into a wall of the room, burned and smashed the inside of the house into rubble, killed two cows in the barn. No one, however, was injured beyond burns and shock. But the child was left believing that a giant dragon had attacked the house and so would not go near it again.

In Baltimore, the president of Goucher College was sold into bondage for $180 and a male professor was forced to be housemother for a day for the all-girl student body. Other professors were auctioned into servitude on various projects on campus. The object of the auction was to raise money for the college building fund.

On the editorial page, "Smith or Graham or Reynolds" assesses the three principal candidates in the May 27 primary race for the Democratic nomination in the special election for Senator to fulfill the remaining four years of the unexpired term of the late Senator J. Melville Broughton, who had died two months into office the prior year and been replaced by Governor Kerr Scott's appointment of Frank Porter Graham, longtime liberal president of UNC.

On foreign policy, the candidates, including conservative Raleigh attorney Willis Smith and even more conservative former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, differed little on such major issues as the Marshall Plan, the U.N., or the hydrogen bomb. Internationalism was a byword of the Democratic Party and was not threatened by the race, except by the presence of Senator Reynolds who was no longer regarded as a serious contender.

Insofar as domestic issues of note, waste in Government spending and resort to subsidy far too willingly marked the Truman Administration, even if the President gave lip service to economy, not usually backed by his actions. The Fair Deal was partial to labor unions and their moguls, favored extension of Federal authority, especially with regard to the creation of the FEPC, Federal aid to education and its conditions to be enforced with it, socialized medicine, substituting "red tape for gauze and adhesive", socialism, including Government ownership of industrial plants and encroachment of the Government into free enterprise. It concludes, therefore, that it was against the Truman domestic policy and so seeks a candidate for the Senate who would have simpatico views.

Former Senator Reynolds, who had praised Nazism before the war, even received a decoration from Hitler on one occasion, and made a habit of kissing movie starlets, while making his fellow Senators and the public laugh, had no place in this race, it finds, thus hopes the voters would cancel him from active consideration.

Senator Graham was a man of "learning, character, tolerance and integrity" and deserved no slur on his good name. Willis Smith, whose campaign manager had hinted at supposed Communist sympathies of Mr. Graham, knew better. He was "no spy disguised in a sheepskin" but "a distinguished and beyond loyal, devoted American." Yet, it finds, he was not the proper choice for the Senate. He had made mistakes out of innocence, allowing his loyalty to be called into question for his various endorsements of movements and membership on certain committees before coming to the Senate. It finds that he would be handy in a Harding, Coolidge or Robert Taft Administration, shaming the reactionary with his idealism, but not as a supporter of the Truman domestic policies. He would not check Federal extravagance, extension of authority into state and local affairs, or favoritism to labor, even if expressing some reservations to the policies, such as disfavoring an FEPC with compulsory enforcement powers.

Willis Smith, it finds, while his campaign was more sensational than it liked, was a North Carolina conservative, not in the Kerr Scott or Frank Graham mold of progressivism. He had made policy commitments designed to win large groups of support, such as subsidized farmers, a position the editorial regrets for the need of revision of the farm program. But the bulk of his positions were compatible with those of the editorial, and it believes he would serve as a check on "the Truman joy ride", not become a me-too Fair Dealer. Thus, it favors his election.

It adds that the election of Governor Scott, the appointment of Senator Graham, and the elevation of Jonathan Daniels to be the North Carolina national committeeman of the Democratic Party had already been costly and divisive—"...one of the hottest political divisions in North Carolina since the late Senator [Furnifold] Simmons and [recently deceased] Frank McNinch saved the state from rum and Romanism and delivered it over to the Hoovercrats." Senator Clyde Hoey had bent to this wind of change because it was his nature, but would resume his natural conservative stance after the wind had passed.

It finds that the combination of Senator Hoey and Mr. Smith in the Senate would unify North Carolina's Senate influence and lessen the influence of Governor Scott and Mr. Daniels in the state, whereas Senator Graham would cancel out Senator Hoey and the Scott-Graham-Daniels triumvirate would ratify the Truman upset of 1948.

It should be noted that while the Red-baiting against Senator Graham had begun in the Smith campaign, as noted in the editorial, the race-baiting was yet to come, after the initial primary, which would be won by Senator Graham but only by a plurality, necessitating a runoff. In that runoff, campaign adviser Jesse Helms would undertake race-baiting tactics and, whether determining the difference or not, with the combination of the bulk of the votes which had gone to Senator Reynolds on May 27 presumably going to Mr. Smith, he would narrowly defeat Senator Graham in the late June runoff.

Drew Pearson tells of an exchange program ongoing between the Jaycees of Salzburg, Austria, and Amarillo, Texas, with the Salzburg Jaycees represented by Eric Geiger. He had been brought to Washington and had observed Congress and the hearings on Owen Lattimore, found Congress impressive for its democratic and individualistic tendencies, contrary to Austria where if a member of the party defied the will of the majority, he had to resign. The exchange program had been a success and the Jaycees hoped to expand it.

The Daily Worker had denounced Earl Browder and Bella Dodd after they testified that Owen Lattimore was not a Communist. Mr. Browder had been expelled from the Communist Party for repeatedly asserting that the U.S. and Russia could get along.

GOP Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, while Governor, had written an article in 1944 for the New Masses praising the Moscow pact and the Cairo and Tehran conferences for answering the prayers of millions of people that nations could get along. Mr. Pearson suggests that the news better be kept from both Senator McCarthy and Congressman George Smathers, following the latter's successful Red-smear campaign conducted in the primary race against Senator Claude Pepper. Gardner Cowles, Jr., publisher of Look, had also praised the Russians in the New Masses.

The Kansas City underworld was following Federal laws, cared little for local and state laws, which were subject to circumvention by bribery. The members operated in small groups rather than as syndicates.

The manager of a radio station which recorded Senator McCarthy's February 9 Lincoln Day speech at Wheeling, W. Va., in which he charged that there were 206 "card-carrying Communists" in the State Department, was providing affidavits from those who heard the speech to the State Department regarding the contents.

Secretary of State Acheson sent word to U.S. Ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas to ask U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie to stay out of Moscow and not meet with Prime Minister Josef Stalin, as he feared the Secretary-General was walking into a propaganda trap, leading to world confusion.

The next GOP complaint would be against Government officials who consumed too much alcohol at parties and became loose-lipped. They were investigating a report that one official told guests of a cocktail party how many atomic bombs were in the U.S. arsenal, where they were hidden, and how they were protected.

Don Reynolds had authored a book, Champion of Champions, the proceeds of which would go to the boys clubs of Washington.

Joseph Alsop, in Rome, finds one of the most conspicuous effects of the maturing world situation to be the removal of the fig leaves from the Communist parties of Western Europe, particularly in France and Italy, where the parties had ceased all pretense of operating as normal parties with normal aims. Their sole immediate objective had become to disrupt the defense of the West while their long-range goal was to prepare to become the paramilitary fifth columns when Moscow demanded. They were scarcely distinguishable from the Soviet Army.

The change revealed the renewal of the Soviet intent to bring Western Europe within its sphere. The West needed to prevent such weakness from occurring to disallow the Kremlin from ordering intimidating demonstrations utilizing these party structures in Berlin, Vienna and against Yugoslavia.

The Communist Party in Italy had been losing large parts of its membership but also strengthening itself and its paramilitary units by purging the less committed elements while intensifying its control of the transportation and communications unions. During the early winter, Italy had been cut in two by a paralyzing transportation strike. Such incidents, if spread throughout Western Europe, could have a devastating impact on morale, especially if making full use of the paramilitary units.

But if Western defenses were made sufficiently strong, then such problems could be relegated to the police for control.

The Communist parties were held together by a belief that the Kremlin represented the wave of the future. Once that binding force began to crumble, the parties would also crumble.

Robert C. Ruark tells of Ezio Pinza leaving the Broadway production of "South Pacific", to be replaced by Ray Middleton, and heading to the movies. Mr. Pinza had become the heartthrob to "40-year-old juveniles", the "be-girdled bobbysoxers". Mr. Middleton, meanwhile, was reassessing the role of Emile de Becque in the musical, as transformed by Mr. Pinza, and had come to believe that Emile was a younger man of no more than 48 and should be sweaty, not impeccably dressed, as befitting his role as a plantation owner on a tropic isle.

While Mr. Middleton, he concludes, might not drive the memory of Mr. Pinza entirely from the swooning fans, he had lasted 32 months in the male lead of "Annie Get Your Gun" opposite Ethel Merman. And if it turned out otherwise, he could adapt to the part of Nellie, played by Mary Martin with short locks, and let her step into the role of Emile, and no one would know the difference.

A letter writer takes to task the letter appearing the previous Tuesday expressing considerable dislike for the suggestion of sportswriters, as Bob Quincy of The News, that racial equality ought be recognized in sports. Mr. Quincy had written in favor of allowing teams with black players to play in William Neal Reynolds Coliseum on the N.C. State campus so that it could become a site for the N.C.A.A. Tournament. This writer, originally from Indiana, thinks that the previous writer had spoken out of turn in suggesting that the proposal was by either ignorant Southerners or ignorant Yankees. He finds it equally abrasive and insulting to that of the rhetoric of Mrs. J. Waties Waring, who had the previous January made controversial remarks at the black YWCA of Charleston, suggesting that white Southerners were uncivilized and morally weak and low for their racial attitudes. He favors disagreement without being disagreeable.

The UNC law, medical, and graduate schools would admit their first black students in 1951, and the first undergraduate black students would matriculate in 1955. It would, however, take another eleven years for the first scholarship black athlete, Charles Scott, to enter the University, though there had been a small number of black athletes prior to that time, including a freshman basketball player.

To those of a different generation who view all of that history with disdain, that it took far too long to achieve integration, that negative view was shared by many Southerners, white and black, young and old, during that earlier time. Hatred, for obvious reasons of the need to televise it and hopefully cut it off at its roots, received far more publicity than the converse, and so it is natural to view that era with a jaundiced perception in hindsight, especially if one was born or matured afterward. But one must keep in mind that systems change by increments, slow advance and then, in inevitable reaction to it, retardation of that advance—witness the present retardation versus the past eight years of progress.

Who's to blame today? Certainly not those who voted for and advocated continuing progress in 2016. The same can be said of those of the past, including the overwhelming majority of the country who voted for President Johnson in 1964, after his signing of the Civil Rights Act on July 2 of that year. And one must also bear in mind that unless an atmosphere of general acceptance was present, an athletic coach or college administrators had to be concerned for the welfare of the individual student to be admitted, that they would not become any object of ridicule or physical harm.

We can report that in the case of Charles Scott, there was no reluctant acceptance of his presence on the basketball court by fans, either those of opposing teams or of UNC, during his sophomore year in 1967-68 and subsequently. We sang his praises regularly at the time among our peers, both for his scholastic standing and his play on the court, and never heard anyone express anything in response other than wholehearted approval. He was simply "Scott", without any reference to race or color, just as were teammates Miller, Clark, Bunting, and Grubar. We attended the North-South Doubleheader every year from 1964 through 1971. It was played in Charlotte with N.C. State, UNC, South Carolina and Clemson, with each of the North Carolina schools alternating in opposition to the South Carolina schools on two successive nights, Georgia Tech substituting for South Carolina after 1969. We never heard any fans, in an openly expressive atmosphere where lots of harsh words flew, say anything which smacked of racism in 1968 or afterward. The same was true of the neutral court games in Greensboro, many of which we attended involving UNC, as well as the UNC vs. Wake Forest game annually in Winston-Salem. It would have been shocking were it otherwise. For by then, the basketball world had become quite accustomed to the presence of black players, both at the college level and in the NBA, and so it was a natural transition for Southern sports. The racism in that regard was more prevalent during the mid-fifties when the game was being initially integrated nationally.

Much is made in retrospect of the Texas Western squad, an all-black starting lineup, which won the national championship in 1966 against an all-white Kentucky team. The significance of the racial component of that game is more than a bit of subsequently constructed myth. It is an abstraction from the overall events of the times, lending undue attention to one aspect of one game. No one in 1966 made a big deal out of the fact. Indeed, that would have been regarded as insensitive to the players and coaches by that time. Texas Western was the decided underdog and thus those fans of the game who like to pull for the underdog naturally pulled for Texas Western. But Texas Western, which had integrated its athletic teams in the 1950's, is located in El Paso, on the border, and, consequently, is more a Southwestern school than a Southern school, thus did not present the same issues of integration which the more truly Southern universities and colleges had to face.

Moreover, Texas Western did not have the same entrance requirements as UNC, Davidson, Wake Forest, N.C. State, and some of the other Southern universities and colleges which led the way in integration of their sports teams, another roadblock to integration in the South as a byproduct of the long history of underfunded black primary and secondary Southern schools. The same could be said of two other quasi-Southern programs, located in large cities in border regions of the country, the University of Houston with Elvin Hayes and the University of Louisville with Wes Unseld, both entering as freshmen in 1965—though we mean no adverse reflection on the academic standing of any individual players on those teams as we do not know, comment primarily on the location of those three schools. But it was the fact that the Atlantic Coast Conference at the time had more exacting grade-point standards for eligibility than did the N.C.A.A.

Whatever the cause for delay beyond the mid-fifties, it was not the case, we assure you, that coaches saw the Texas Western win and then suddenly decided, individually or en masse, that they should start recruiting black athletes. A push in that direction had been ongoing for over a decade, but the timing had to be right to avoid backlash and thereby potentially setting back the schedule by years.

Bill Russell had led the University of San Francisco to consecutive N.C.A.A. championships in 1955 and 1956. Wilt Chamberlain led the 1957 Kansas team to the national finals, barely losing to North Carolina by a point after three overtimes. Ohio State had won the national championship with an integrated team in 1960; so had the University of Cincinnati in both 1961 and 1962, as had Loyola of Chicago in 1963, as had U.C.L.A. in both 1964 and 1965. So Texas Western was hardly a novel team in terms of its racial composition in the national championship game by 1966. That aspect of the game was not even discussed or considered, privately or publicly—except perhaps by racists who sat at home in their hoods and white sheets watching the game, unlikely though that was as most could not read the sports section. Texas Western was novel only because of their underdog status, just as had been Loyola of Chicago to two-time national champion Cincinnati in 1963.

It is best, in short, not to rely on Hollywood versions of reality for history lessons, with simple defining moments and cut-off points between progress and retrogade attitudes, with slo-mo imagery of everlasting triumph and angels singing to cap it all off at the end, roll credits. Reality does not work that way, operates on a continuum by generations, forward in strides sometimes, followed by stutter-steps, stumbles, and rearward marching, to repeat the cycle again. But reality all too often gets lost in sentimentality and the need to compress a story, which spans decades and many facets of societal development, into 90 to 120 minutes, seeking broad audience appeal in the process. The highlights may be essentially correct, but the devil is always in the details, and the details usually get tossed aside on the cutting room floor, if ever included in the script in the first instance, in favor of broad generalities with appeal to the average mentality. After a movie based on real events occurring long before one was born, one must read assiduously regarding those events and the persons depicted before drawing any reasonable conclusions, no matter how entertaining the movie.

To obtain a fair understanding of mass perceptions and reactions, it is best to begin with contemporaneous accounts of the events as they were covered in the mainstream newspapers and magazines of the time, not subsequent books and movies, always bearing in mind that a newspaper or magazine story is but a snapshot in time against deadline and may, itself, contain inaccuracies. But at least one can glean the attitudes and perceptions generally which pervaded the time. Otherwise, one winds up grossly misled, perhaps even embittered toward a past which was in fact not the way it is being portrayed or perceived in the present but rather was friendly, by and large, even more open in some respects than today, notwithstanding the heavily publicized, exceptional voices of hate from that earlier time—which still exist and sometimes threaten to drown out those of peace and brotherhood, as they did in fact abound in the white community at large of 1964 and later, if not earlier, prior to the assassination of President Kennedy.

It is easy to be misled by the latter-day cynical voices of ridicule regarding the more sober tendencies of that era, even mocking it for its ideals and expressions of hope. But to be so misled is to be led into ignorance and perhaps a repeat of history, as during Reconstruction, by demanding too much on the belief that it is necessary, leading to embittered reaction, as we saw in the presidential election of 2016.

Anyway, we have still not forgotten that 68 to 66 loss to South Carolina on the night of Valentine's Day, 1969. It better not ever happen again.

A letter writer also responds to the same letter and suggests that the reason sportswriters advocated equality in sports was that they were more Christian than most other people. He disputes the previous writer that they were ignorant Southerners or Yankees. He finds that true Christians typically favored integration of the races. He says that the test for participation in athletics should not be race but skill and adherence to the code of sportsmanship and other standards. "A white can be just as nasty in sports as someone with a little darker covering." He is proud to be a member of the human race, says there was in fact no black or white race or any other. He takes exception to the prior letter's reference to "all decent white people", finding that the writer had not followed Christian precepts in his statements and had only sown discord through his white supremacy.

We are not certain of the writer's suggestion regarding "true Christianity" being the sine qua non of race neutrality, but we agree that it can be a valuable factor in that regard. As to sportswriters being more inclined to belief in equality, we would expand that to embrace the fans of major sports generally, whether of baseball, football, or basketball, especially for those fans who have played one or more of those sports competitively, with the exceptions always standing in proof of the rule. But there are many avenues for obtaining such views of fairness and equality of humanity, and sports and religion are but two. Neither forms an exclusive club to engender the perception.

A Quote of the Day, from the Greensboro Daily News:

"The Electoral College
May have political knowledge
But is probably fit to die
No stadium, no alumni."

"So it was agreed. George went to the game and saw Nebraska knock another home run, but he remembered best what happened afterwards. When the player had had his shower and had dressed, the two friends left the ball park, and as they went out a crowd of young boys who had been waiting at the gate rushed upon them. They were those dark-faced, dark-eyed, dark-haired little urchins who spring up like dragon seed from the grim pavements of New York, but in whose tough little faces and raucous voices there still remains, curiously, the innocence and faith of children everywhere."

—from You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe, Harper & Bros., 1940

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