The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 14, 1954

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the six-Senator select committee studying the resolution of censure against Senator McCarthy, having completed its hearings the previous day, began working in secret on its report this date, with its chairman, Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, indicating that there was "a possibility" that the report would be complete prior to October 1. Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas, a member of the committee, said that there had never been any other thought except to keep the committee's present legal staff, despite attacks by Senator McCarthy on the fairness of the two lawyers. Both Senators talked briefly with reporters following a two-hour closed session of the committee. Senator Watkins said it would be "very improper, unethical" for him to discuss the possible findings to be adduced by the committee for the full Senate to consider later. He declined to discuss the request by Senator McCarthy and his attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, that the committee hire new, independent counsel to assist in writing the report. Senator McCarthy said that he was still disturbed by the statement of Senator Watkins that the jury did not have to be impartial. Mr. Williams called for appointment of independent counsel to study the facts and the law as developed by the ten witnesses during nine days of public hearings before the committee. Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a member of the committee, said that he agreed with the views of Senator Carlson, that while the suggestion of Mr. Williams had "some merit", a search for new counsel at this juncture would only delay a report for weeks and that he wanted the report out at the earliest possible moment.

In Maine the previous day, voters had elected a Democratic Governor, Edmund Muskie, for the first time in 20 years, defeating incumbent Governor Burton Cross in voting which Vice-President Nixon had described in advance as "the first statewide test of the Eisenhower Administration program." The Vice-President had campaigned for Governor Cross during a brief vacation in Maine, urging "an even greater majority than ever before" to herald Republican victories in the other 47 states in the midterm elections in November. Congressman Muskie had received 135,400 votes to 113,000 for Governor Cross, with most of the state's precincts reporting. Governor Muskie would go on to become Senator in 1959, running with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey as the vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket in 1968 against former Vice-President Nixon and Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, and then, after becoming the front-runner for the nomination for the presidency in 1972, having his campaign derailed by Nixon dirty tricksters, subsequently serving in the latter half of 1980 as Secretary of State under President Carter. Maine's elections preceded the rest of the nation by two months, and Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the state's three Republican House members all had won re-election, with only one member of the House delegation narrowly winning, the others having substantial margins of victory. Nine other state primaries for Senate and House seats would take place this date.

In New York, a Government witness testified in Federal District Court this date that Puerto Rican Nationalists in Chicago had been ordered to go underground after other members of the organization had shot up the House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress, the previous March 1, and that records of the party's Chicago junta had been destroyed after the shooting. The witness was one of 17 Puerto Rican Nationalists indicted in New York on charges of seditious conspiracy against the Government. He and three others had pleaded guilty and had become Government witnesses against the 13 other defendants. He testified that he headed the Nationalist group in Chicago and had come to New York after the House shootings to meet with one of the alleged leaders in a plot to attack the "Presidency" as well as others, had been told return to Chicago and tell the other members of the situation and that they should be cautious to avoid arrest and, if necessary, return to Puerto Rico or elsewhere. The witness was the brother of Lolita Lebron, who had been convicted, along with three other defendants, in the March 1 House shooting, each having been sentenced to terms varying between 16 and 50 years in prison. Ms. Lebron was one of the 13 defendants in the New York conspiracy trial, and another of the defendants was the person who had told the witness in December, 1953 of the plans for attacks on Congress, the Presidency and the resident commissioner for Puerto Rico. The witness had pleaded guilty to the charge of seditious conspiracy and was being held under a $25,000 bail pending his sentencing, implicitly to be based, in part, on his testimony.

At White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., following five days of integration of the Greenbrier County schools, a return to segregation was ordered by school officials after being confronted with angry parents and striking white students, with the high school closed for a half day to allow the 25 black students, under police protection, to secure their books and return to their segregated all-black school. About 600 parents had protested the previous integration order, threatening a mass meeting the previous night to remove bodily any black students who attempted to attend the previously all-white high school this date. The previous day, about 300 of the high school's 440 students had marched in demonstration through the streets of the mountain resort town, protesting the integration order, some carrying placards reading, "no Negroes wanted in our schools". Another demonstration had occurred in Rupert, about 33 miles away, where about 100 students protested in the streets against 14 black students attending their formerly all-white school.

Stupid hicks, you don't want to go to school, go back to the coal mines where you belong, in black face.

In Stanley, N.C., a truant officer said this date that half of the 150 striking black pupils in the town had told him that they were afraid to return to school, and that most of the other pupils had vowed that they would never return if they were forced to attend schools in other towns. He said that he did not know of whom they were afraid, but quoted one girl as saying, "They would pull me off the bus and beat me up if I went back." The strike was in its 11th school day and the truant officer said that he would take no court action for the time being, preferring instead persuasion. The students had refused to board buses for the schools in other communities, but two or three of the male students had hitchhiked 15 miles to Lincoln Academy in Kings Mountain. Fifty pupils were striking against being transferred to that academy from Highland High School in nearby Gastonia, which officials said was overcrowded. One hundred elementary school pupils were protesting against attending a new school in Dallas, six miles from Stanley, after their school had been closed following condemnation by the State, with their parents seeking replacement with a new school in Dallas.

Associated Press reporter Bem Price tells of the Southern Regional Council, whose executive director, George Mitchell, believed that segregation in the public schools would be ended within 12 years. Dr. Mitchell had stated from Atlanta: "When the tree has done been cut and it is falling over at you, that ain't no time to holler 'hold it back!' It's time to git." He said that an old black man had told him that when he had been talking to him about segregation, that the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education had cut the tree and that it was time for the South to do some "gittin'". Dr. Mitchell, who was an economist and sociologist, was one of the South's foremost authorities on race relations, believed that its problems would have to be worked out at the community level, where "the church women will make it work." The Council was the only regional organization with an ongoing program for racial tolerance, and had recently been granted $240,000 by the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, to help prepare the South for calm acceptance of Brown. The Council was composed entirely of Southerners, both white and black, and operated on the basis that all men were entitled to equal opportunity, a principle often arousing bitter resentment among Southerners long nurtured on the idea of white supremacy. Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia, who had charged in his personal political newspaper that the Council was "pink" in its orientation, believed in that principle of white supremacy, and had challenged the State Legislature to abolish the public school system. Monsignor T. J. McNamara of the Catholic Church's Atlanta-Savannah Diocese, called the charge by the Governor regarding the Council's supposed pink orientation "absurd and ridiculous". Dr. Mitchell believed that segregation could be ended in the South with only some trouble and some violence, that the "sweet voice of facts and reason" had to be raised, that Southern towns were imitative, such that if something had been done before, they figured they could do it too. The mission of the Council, he said, was to find the "frontiers of progress and make them known honestly and temperately", to give the facts and persuade, that he expected segregation to be over within a dozen years at the outside. He said that the conscience of the South on racial matters was borne by women, and he liked to remember the work of Jesse Daniel Ames in Texas, who had now retired and lived in Tryon, N.C., having indicated in the wake of lynchings and the excuse being given that somebody had to protect the honor of Southern white women, that someone had to go into the county where the lynching had occurred and talk to fellow church women to start a petition to be taken to the sheriff stating that, as white women, they did not want anybody protecting their honor other than the sheriff, who would then get the hint that the women wanted the law enforced and so would not give up many prisoners to lynch mobs afterward. Dr. Mitchell thus concluded that the matter would be worked out by the church women at the local level. He believed that segregation would first end in the regions with sparse black populations of less than ten percent and would end last in the Deep South plantation regions, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and parts of Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and the Carolinas. The problem would be most acute, he ventured, where there were not only racial differences but also class distinction, where blacks had always been the servants, the sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The Council had come into existence during World War II after a group of black citizens had met in Durham, N.C., and said, in substance, that if the U.S. were fighting for democracy, it ought to practice what it preached, offering an invitation to Southern leaders to get together and talk over the situation, with a meeting thereafter having been attended by 97 white Southerners, ultimately leading to a second meeting in Richmond, Va., where the Council was formed, chartered by Methodist Bishop Arthur Moore of Atlanta, Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, UNC sociologists Dr. Charles Johnson and Dr. Howard Odum, and Atlanta University professor, Dr. Rufus Clement. Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, had said of the Council that it was "the sanest and best informed organization dealing with race relations."

In April, 1941, incidentally, Ms. Ames had written to W. J. Cash, in the wake of publication the prior February of The Mind of the South, inviting him to speak before the Council's predecessor organization, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta, an invitation which he had to decline because of limited means, after he had already been to Atlanta in March pursuant to an invitation from Rich's Department Store to attend a book-signing after the book had become a best-seller in Atlanta.

Harry Shuford of The News indicates that television actor and producer Ralph Serrano of New York had brought a petition into Charlotte's Recorder's Court this date, through his attorneys, seeking issuance of a writ of error coram nobis to set aside a conviction for larceny occurring in Charlotte in 1935. The writ, if issued, would admit that there had been an error in the first trial and grant a new trial on the original charge. Mr. Serrano was facing deportation to his native Dominican Republic as a result of having two court convictions on his record as an alien, the other having occurred in Los Angeles, a conviction for petty theft in 1942, which he stated in an affidavit had occurred regarding an outstanding hotel bill for $11. (His attorney should have had the charge reduced to defrauding an innkeeper as an infaction, or, better, simply obtained a dismissal through agreement with the hotel owner to pay the bill, explaining that it was not deliberate, that he was not following the story line of one of O. Henry's offerings.) He contended that at the time the conviction in Charlotte had been entered and he was sentenced to four months on the roads, he understood little English and did not know what the word "larceny" or a plea of "guilty" meant. The three police officers who had testified in the case had since died and there was no legal record of it maintained other than the daily minutes of the court. Before entering the television acting and producing business, he had sold Good Humor ice cream, cars, and been a secretary to a New York firm. He had been in the country since 1933, having been invited by his uncle who was forced into political exile.

On the editorial page, "Charlotte Needs Human Relations Group" indicates that, according to Southern School News, Raleigh, Greensboro and Rocky Mount each had interracial citizens' committees meeting regularly to work in the field of human relations and study ways to accommodate the Supreme Court's holding of the prior May 17 in Brown v. Board of Education. In Rock Hill, S.C., a Council on Human Relations had also been formed, and in Chicago, citizens were profiting from unpleasant experiences in racial friction by initiating information and education campaigns, while in Florida, a state group was studying problems related to Brown. The latter group had concluded that there was great misunderstanding between the races regarding segregation, with white leaders believing blacks to be more satisfied with the condition than they actually were, and black leaders believing that whites were more willing to accept desegregation gracefully than they actually were, with the solution being to take cooperative steps to bridge the gap and establish better understanding between the races through interracial meetings and cooperative activities already undertaken by teachers and school administrators in many counties of that state.