The Charlotte News

Thursday, July 14, 1955

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Dulles had flown to Paris this date to help put the finishing touches on Western strategy for the forthcoming Big Four summit conference, set to begin four days hence in Geneva. He would confer this date and the following day with French Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay and British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan for the purpose, and they would meet on Saturday with the North Atlantic Council to outline the Western policy to the other NATO foreign ministers. When Secretary Dulles had been informed that Soviet Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Defense Minister Georgi Zhukov were accompanying Premier Nikolai Bulganin to Geneva, he said that was normal. He also said at the airport that there were "great hopes" in the air that steps would be taken at the conference for peaceful settlement which would be "rich in human values". He believed that it would be easy to obtain agreement between the Western allies for the coordinated agenda at the conference, and that it would serve as a good beginning for their efforts to reach agreement with the Soviets. He said it was to be hoped that the conference would "implement our unceasing quest for a secure and just peace and breathe a new spirit into the future efforts needed to achieve that result." French Premier Edgar Faure had stated at a press conference the previous day that security, disarmament and German reunification were the three principal problems for the summit meeting to address, that disarmament would promote security and, in turn, facilitate the ending of Germany's division. He proposed, with the endorsement of his Cabinet, that funds which the major powers might save through disarmament be diverted to improvement of living conditions in underdeveloped areas of the world, and that each of the four major powers devote a percentage of the sums which they presently spent on munitions to such a joint four-power fund. It was reported that the Western allies were ready with a plan to limit Germany's armed forces, even after reunification, to half a million men in order to convince Russia that a unified Germany within NATO would not be a menace to the Soviets. The 500,000 maximum was the same as that presently set for West Germany, and the curbs on West German armament would be applied to a reunified Germany under that plan. The Western allies contended that Germany could not be united unless it was free to make any alliance it wanted, whereas Russia believed that Germany could not be unified if it were free afterward to join any military grouping.

The Senate Investigations subcommittee this date blamed 48 errors and Army red tape for the promotion and honorable discharge of the Army dentist, Maj. Irving Peress, who had been the major focus of the Army-McCarthy hearings at their outset the previous year, Senator McCarthy having claimed that the promotion and discharge was the result of Communist subversion within the Army. The subcommittee report indicated that Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, or perhaps some of his Pentagon bosses, had done "a disservice" to the country by concealing facts about the matter for nearly a year, and it accused the Army Department of some deceptive practices toward Congress. But it made no mention of subversion, saying that the matter showed "individual errors in judgment, lack of proper coordination, ineffective administration procedures, inconsistent application of investigating regulations, and excessive delays." It said that the Army's delay in making the facts public had "served to unduly arouse and increase suspicions of the public as to possible Communist influences and thereby was a disservice, to the Army as a whole, to this subcommittee, to the Congress, and to the general public." One member of the subcommittee, Republican Senator George Bender of Ohio, had refused to sign the report, contending in a dissent that a statement to the effect that "no Communist influence was found in the Army" should have been included in the report, that "not one iota of evidence" had been found to support the charges by Senator McCarthy that some "silent Communist mastermind" in the Pentagon had been involved. The majority report had said that former Army general counsel John G. Adams, who had since resigned, had shown "disrespect for the subcommittee when he chose to disregard" a letter from Senator McCarthy the day before the dentist had been honorably discharged on February 2, 1954. The Senator, then the Investigations subcommittee chairman, had demanded that the dentist be court-martialed, and had written the Army on February 1, urging that the honorable discharge be delayed. Mr. Adams had testified during the preliminary closed-door sessions of the Army-McCarthy hearings in March that he had passed up that "last clear chance" to block the discharge. The report said that the Army had since made "procedural changes" in handling such cases, but should make more such changes. It said that the failure to make the changes prior to the case in question was inexcusable. It said that Maj. General Miller White, then president of the Army Personnel Board, had recommended that the dentist be kicked out of the Army, but in so doing had cited "a nonexistent regulation" and another regulation "under which the action recommended could not be taken." It cited several others guilty of errors in the matter, including Brig. General Ralph Zwicker, who was the commanding officer of the dentist and who had been denounced by Senator McCarthy for his handling of the matter, his treatment before the subcommittee having led to a blanket order from Army Secretary Stevens that officers not cooperate with the subcommittee in the future, that order, though supported by the President, having subsequently been altered by agreement that, according to Secretary Stevens, the subcommittee would not again humiliate or mistreat officers, causing Senator McCarthy to deny that such an agreement was made or that there had been any mistreatment in the first instance. The hearings into the matter began with that stance, ultimately culminating the prior December in the censure by the Senate of Senator McCarthy.

The 11-man Interstate Commerce Commission this date arranged to meet in full to hear arguments about racial segregation on trains and buses, regarding two separate cases involving sharply contradictory findings by hearing examiners. In one, the NAACP was asking the ICC to forbid segregation of interstate travelers, not only aboard trains, but also in train station waiting rooms and depot restaurants, with the hearing examiner having found that segregation on trains and waiting rooms violated the Interstate Commerce Act by subjecting black passengers to "unreasonable disadvantage", per the proscription of the statute. He expressed doubt, however, that the ICC could regulate station restaurants, which were leased and operated by concerns not in the transportation business. He had taken note of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in May, 1954, ruling segregation in the public schools per se unconstitutional per the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause, and the decision's finding that segregation of the races denoted inferiority. That case had been filed before the ICC by the NAACP in December, 1953, against 11 railroads operating principally in the South, the Terminal Co. of Richmond, Va., and the Union News Co., which rented the restaurant space in the Richmond station from the Terminal Co. Some of the railroads had filed stipulations that they provided separate coaches for the races, contending that it was in conformity with the laws of the states through which they operated. All contended that the Brown case could not be applied, since public schools involved a Government function while transportation was a private business. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, however, disagreed with that notion in a brief filed with the ICC, indicating, "The time has come for the Commission to declare unequivocally that a Negro passenger is free to travel the length and breadth of this country in the same manner as any other passenger." The second case involved the complaint of a black WAC, Sarah Keys, stationed at Fort Dix, N.J., that she had been mistreated and was humiliated during a 1952 bus trip to her home state of North Carolina, when she refused to move to the rear of the bus and was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct and held in jail overnight. The hearing examiner in that case had recommended dismissal of the complaint, saying in a report the previous September that he found no constitutional or statutory prohibition against "reasonable segregation" of passengers based on race, if separate accommodations were equal.

It would be the following December, incidentally, when Rosa Parks would take her famous stand in refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., municipal bus when requested to do so by the driver to make room for white passengers in accordance with a local ordinance, Ms. Parks stating she was motivated by the brutal killing in Money, Miss., the prior August 28 of fourteen-year old Emmett Till, the resulting bus boycott having brought to national attention for the first time the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and hence marked the official beginning of what would come to be known as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 1960's. The difference between the case of Ms. Parks and that of Ms. Keys was that the former did not arise in the context of interstate commerce and thus did not import the Commerce Clause and Federal jurisdiction over the matter unless it could be shown that interstate commerce was somehow unduly burdened by the discrimination on the local buses, as a practical matter not demonstrable because of the intrastate nature of the travel. Thus, the Montgomery case utilized the economic pressure on business exerted by the local black community to effectuate the change in policy of enforcement of the local ordinance, as the conviction of Ms. Parks under the ordinance would stand in the Alabama courts. She lost the battle but won the war. Query, however, why a Constitutional issue in the Parks case was not raised on the basis of the ordinance being discriminatory under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, its enforcement involving state action, just as in the recent Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recreation facility case out of Baltimore, basing its decision on Brown, subsequently affirmed per curiam by the Supreme Court. While the latter case did not involve criminal statutes or ordinances, enforcement of racial discrimination by punitive action was all the more reason for holding such discriminatory state action unconstitutional. Even sought enforcement of private contractual racially restrictive covenants in housing had been deemed state action violative of the Fourteenth Amendment in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948. For whatever reason, that theory was never advanced in the case of Ms. Parks and it never went beyond the Alabama appellate court, which found that Ms. Parks had made no assignments of error on appeal and thus dismissed her appeal. In Browder v. Gayle, however, four plaintiffs sued City officials in Montgomery in early 1956 pursuant to 42 USC 1981 and 1983 for violation of their Fourteenth Amendment rights for the racial discrimination of the bus ordinance and won, making the absence of the claim in the Parks case, ostensibly at least, even more puzzling. The thinking at the time was undoubtedly, however, that a national example of the situation needed to be made by bringing an economic boycott with its attendant national publicity, in tandem with the separate legal case, to try to bring an end to the need for repetitive litigation achieving only piecemeal victories in particular localities, just as the murder of Emmett Till had focused national attention in a dramatic, emotional way on the renewed problem of lynching. Thus, those who have argued out of the context of the times that the Rosa Parks matter was, of itself, inconsequential do not understand the times then extant or the entire flow of events which proceeded from her act of civil disobedience.

Near Shreveport, La., the bodies of four men were removed from an Air Force B47 Stratojet bomber which had crashed ten miles south of the city early this date, according to officials at Barksdale Air Force Base, with it being indicated that an Air Force crash crew and civilian authorities had reached the wreckage about three hours after the crash, which had occurred shortly after midnight on the banks of the Red River. The report does not indicate what had caused the crash.

Helen Parks of The News reports from Barium Springs, N.C., at the annual meeting of the North Carolina Presbyterian Synod that campaigns were being considered to raise three million dollars for a proposed college in the southeastern portion of the state and a 1957 campaign for Queens College of Charlotte. The Synod the previous day had called for the consolidation and merger of Peace College in Raleigh, Presbyterian Junior College in Maxton, and Flora Macdonald College at Red Springs.

The prevailing opinion among the delegates at the meeting was that the question of segregation in North Carolina Presbyterian churches would be settled at the local level, the delegates indicating that their understanding of the recommendation adopted the previous night by the Synod was that it was intended to be used only as a guide by local churches, the recommendation having asked the churches to consider dropping racial barriers to membership. The Synod had accepted an interim committee's recommendations which called for study of ways to admit blacks to public worship in the churches and in the Presbyterian colleges, with the vote having been 228 for and 153 against the recommendation. The recommendation concerning segregation was generally that sessions of local churches "earnestly consider" meeting "sincere Negro Christians at services of public worship and study ways of ultimately accepting Negroes into membership", that the local churches, where they had not done so, should establish committees on Christian relations for "continuous study and guidance in ways and means for full expression" of that aforementioned principle. At the 1954 meeting, the First Presbyterian churches of Fayetteville, Goldsboro, Burgaw and Maxton had presented resolutions calling for the Synod to repudiate the Church's 1954 General Assembly action on segregation, and the previous day's recommendations were considered responsive to those resolutions.

Emery Wister of The News indicates that mountain dew, that is moonshine, was now legal in Charlotte, provided it could be bought in an ABC store, that ABC stores all over the state were now stocking hillbilly corn whiskey in an effort to meet the competition of the mountain moonshiners and bootleggers. The state ABC officials said it would be a month or so before they could determine whether the legal corn whiskey was selling.

Chief of police Frank Littlejohn announced this date that a police officer who had been hired recently, after which it had been discovered that he had been convicted of an assault during the recent Southern Bell Telephone Co. strike and was forced to pay a fine of $10 and court costs upon conviction in City Recorder's Court on April 21, would be terminated. The chief said that the man had applied for the position in February, before the strike, and that the required FBI check into his background, along with those of many other applicants, had shown a clean police record at the time.

Dick Young of The News tells of those who would sip a refreshing drink during intermission of an opera concert or a Broadway musical at the city's new Auditorium never knowing what debate had preceded the installation of the soda fountain, with some 90 minutes of discussion by the City Council having transpired over whether there should be a four-spout or a two-spout fountain, with two flavors each, or to accept an offer made by the Coca-Cola Co. for the free installation of a machine with 12 spouts. They had wound up calling for new bids on the fountain for the lounge of the Auditorium. The architect had recommended award of the contract to the original low bidder, at $28,464, which had been reduced to a little over $15,000 through further negotiations. But a representative of another company had protested that the bids had not come up to specifications, as it was for fountain equipment with only two spouts, whereas the specifications required four spouts. The protesting company said that its two-spout fountain could dispense four flavors and called upon the man who manufactured the equipment to verify that statement. One member of the Council wondered how that could occur, how he could press the button for a Coca-Cola, say, and get a glass of beer, which would be bad. The manufacturer explained that it all worked by valves, and the company with that fountain claimed that their bid was low by about $4,000, but that they had been apprised that their bid was irregular because of their two-spout fountain.

In Hollywood, Marion Davies had become a hotel owner, the former actress announcing the previous day that she had bought the Desert Inn in Palm Springs for two million dollars. She said that her plans as sole owner would be to convert it into a miniature Rockefeller Center.

On the editorial page, "Mr. Smith's Embarrassing Insistence" finds that the great expense associated with the new Coliseum and Auditorium complex on Independence Boulevard had appropriately garnered the attention of the community's citizens. As an example, an expensive ring of tile had been placed around the Coliseum after it had been turned down by the City Council, with the tile having already been purchased prior to the matter being presented before the Council for approval.