The Charlotte News

Tuesday, August 30, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Dulles had said at a press conference this date that there had been reliable reports that Russia had offered arms to some countries in the Middle East and that, if true, it would not contribute to the relaxation of world tensions. He emphasized, however, that he had no official information confirming the reports. He declined to name any particular country as the target of the reported offers, but said that there were indications that offers had been made to Egypt and to other countries in the region. He said there was no evidence that Soviet equipment was already possessed by Arab countries, which had been getting their military supplies from non-Communist sources. He also said that the U.S. had, within the previous 48 hours, urged Israel and Egypt to refrain from the use of force in their current border dispute, the two nations having been involved for weeks in bloody skirmishes in the area of the Gaza Strip. He said that Israel and the Arab governments were studying his proposal of the previous Friday for a U.S. guarantee of a peace settlement, provided they would make one, and that the reaction of those countries would determine what the U.S. would do next in trying to obtain a settlement. He said also that the U.S. backed the position of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, that conditions in the Communist North were not ripe for holding national free elections, but that the U.S. saw no reason to oppose holding elections, provided conditions of genuine freedom could be established. (In accordance with paragraph 7 of the final statement in July, 1954 of the Geneva conference on restoring peace in Indo-China, free elections were to be held in Vietnam in July, 1956, but, as Secretary Dulles had pointed out in a press conference of the prior June, neither the U.S. nor South Vietnam had been signatories to the Armistice and had expressly protested its terms, while he also stated, as he did in this press conference, U.S. support of the general principle of elections which would restore unity of the country, provided they were genuinely free, as called for by the Armistice.) He further said that the U.S. had to maintain patience and hope in negotiating with Communist China at Geneva for the release of American civilians detained there, adding that he did not, however, feel any great encouragement with respect to the Geneva talks thus far, except as he believed that with the passage of time, some result might eventually be achieved.

Justice William O. Douglas had been mountain climbing in Soviet Central Asia and was expected to arrive within a few days in Moscow, where his wife had arrived this date to join her husband. Commie... He's probably going to defect.

In Washington, Aldo Icardi pleaded not guilty to charges that he had committed perjury before Congress when he denied complicity in the World War II death of Maj. William Holahan, during a secret mission in Italy. A grand jury had indicted Mr. Icardi on perjury charges, on which he was being represented by Edward Bennett Williams and Murdaugh S. Madden, Mr. Williams having argued at the arraignment that the $20,000 bail requested by the Government had been unreasonable, seeking a $2,500 bail, finally set by the court at $10,000. The perjury charge stemmed from testimony Mr. Icardi had given before the House Armed Services Committee in 1953 during a probe of the death of Major Holahan during the mission, which was sponsored by the Office of Strategic Services, designed to give weapons to the underground partisans. Mr. Icardi, in the Army at the time as a lieutenant, had participated in the mission, and reports by witnesses who appeared before the grand jury and had testified previously in an Italian criminal case which had found Mr. Icardi guilty of the murder and sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment, said that there had been an argument between the two men as to whether they should provide arms to partisans, with the major contending that the arms would wind up in the hands of Communists, and the lieutenant nevertheless favoring provision of the arms to the partisans. Mr. Icardi was beyond, however, the reach of extradition by Italian authorities.

In Chicago, a woman who had locked her husband out of their home because he led a UAW union local strike, had relented and allowed him to return home after nearly a week of the dispute, in the wake of resolution of the strike. She said that the reunion had not resulted in any kissing, hugging, tears, "no nothing". She had contended that the strike was illegal because the union contract had not expired when the workers walked out. The union spokesman said that the 350 union members out of the company's 450 employees had unanimously approved the previous day a new contract agreement reached on Saturday with the company. The wife said that she was happy with the agreement, that her husband was a "good guy" and she hoped they could get back to normalcy.

In Charleston, S.C., FBI agents had returned to nearby Folly Beach this date to resume an investigation into the private life of a man they had arrested on Saturday night at the beach, wanted on charges of first-degree murder out of New York City and for an escape from a Boston jail, during which there was an assault with a deadly weapon on a guard. He had been unarmed at the time of arrest, but two revolvers and two rifles had been found in his rented beach cottage. The New York Daily Mirror had stated that the FBI was making a thorough search of the resort for the possible graves of a man and his wife, the man being a close friend of the arrested man and was a missing suspect in a $305,000 Queens bank robbery in New York. The newspaper account said that two suitcases of the arrested man had been sent to a laboratory for examination of the clothing contained therein, but the FBI in Charleston and in Washington had no comment on those reports. The police chief of Folly Beach, who had worked closely with the FBI on the case, said that he had no information that the missing man and his wife had been killed by the arrested man, that he had walked over every foot of ground around the arrested man's cottage and had seen no signs of fresh dirt or anything of the kind. He said that while any bodies could have been buried somewhere else, he believed that the missing couple were likely still in the Charleston area, that they had been living at the Isle of Palms, a few miles north of Folly, and had reportedly left there on about July 28. (Folly is a much better beach.) The arrested man was expected soon to be extradited to New York for the murder prosecution, based on the killing of a friend in a barroom brawl three years earlier. He was quoted this date as having said that he was about to kill the two FBI agents who arrested him, but was deterred in carrying out the intention by the arrival of two cars full of men. Trigger was in a lot of trouble and Roy had best get down there to help him.

In Charlotte, as treated further by an editorial below, it was reported that Capital Air Lines would provide the city with competitive air service to major Southern and Eastern cities, provided the Civil Aeronautics Board followed the recommendation of an examiner.

Also in Charlotte, News reporter Emery Wister reports that on North Tryon Street at the intersection of Sylvania Avenue, a new skyscraper was being erected, not an office building, but rather a new grain elevator for the Ralston Purina Co., being constructed by a firm out of Atlanta. Presently, it had reached 105 feet in height, but in a week or so, would reach its full 14-story height of 146.7 feet. He details the construction process, in case you have an abiding interest.

J. A. Daily of The News reports that Charlotte would become the recognized capital of the world's greatest hosiery manufacturing region the following January 1, when the Southern Hosiery Manufacturers Association would be merged into the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers, which would then relocate its headquarters from New York to Charlotte. The merger was to produce greater efficiency and expansion of Association activities. Currently, the Southern Association was headquartered in the Liberty Life Building in Charlotte and the new headquarters of the merged organization would be determined later. The national organization would continue after the merger to maintain offices in New York for its publicity and marketing divisions.

In Paris, a French airman was being held in jail this date, charged with stealing luggage from five U.S. soldiers, with police saying that he had wanted revenge because of someone having stolen his luggage in New York. Police said that he had struck up conversations with U.S. soldiers on holiday in Paris, and that during the conversation, he would state that in France, they considered certain numbers unlucky, prompting soldiers sometimes to reply that their hotel room bore such a number, at which point the man would telephone the hotel, posing as the soldier and state that a French airman would come by to pick up his luggage, and after he had picked up the bags, would dump them in the Seine.

In Winston-Salem, it was reported that a mystery of a seeping sewer was over, solved by a Charlotte man, after six days of effort by Winston-Salem firemen, safety engineers and gasoline company executives, seeking to figure out why a manhole kept filling up with gasoline, sometimes at the rate of a gallon per hour. There were four gasoline stations on the corner near the place of seepage and no one could figure out which tank was leaking, despite chemical analysis and hydrostatic tests. During the leakage, someone counted the number of gallons the manhole had yielded and found that since the previous Monday, 46 gallons had been removed. At that point, the Pure Oil station called in a pump mechanic from Charlotte, who had arrived at the scene the previous afternoon, walked over to the station, lifted a cover in the driveway and found the check valve housing filled with gasoline. He then replaced a gasket and the flow ceased.

In Hollywood, actress Rita Hayworth had walked out on singer Dick Haymes "in the best interests of my children, Dick and myself," adding that she did not know whether the separation would be final. Mr. Haymes, after being apprised by reporters of the statement, said that he could not believe it. Her attorney refused a request from photographers that Ms. Hayworth remove her dark glasses for photographs, and did not permit her to state any reason for the separation. The couple had been married in Las Vegas in September, 1953, and she had stood by her husband during his successful deportation fight and complicated income tax troubles, when the Government had sought to deport him to his native Argentina on grounds that he was an alien illegally in the country. Mr. Haymes said he had returned to their Malibu home early the previous day from a singing engagement at the Cocoanut Grove to find his wife and their daughters gone. He admitted that they had an argument, but did not think it serious. A physician friend told the press that he was not in any condition to make a statement at present, that he admired, loved and respected his wife very much.

On the editorial page, "Judiciary Needs Congress's Ear" supports the recommendation by U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John J. Parker that the Chief Justice make an annual report to Congress on the state of the judiciary. The suggestion had received unanimous endorsement of the judicial conference of the Fourth Circuit, when it had first been proposed the previous year by Deputy Attorney General William Rogers—future Attorney General under President Eisenhower and Secretary of State under President Nixon.

Such an address, it urges, would provide the judicial branch a direct line of communication to the Congress for the first time since 1939, when the Administrative Office Act had made the courts independent of the Department of Justice, and the President had stopped including the judiciary in his appeals for legislation.

Some of the problems for the judiciary were delays in cases, as in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, where a lawsuit had been languishing for two years after being filed before coming to trial, while in the Southern District of New York, the waiting period for cases to become ripe for trial was nearly four years, with few cases in the Federal system coming to trial immediately. Yet, the need for an increased number of Federal judges had been ignored during the previous session of Congress. There was also a general abuse of habeas corpus petitions submitted to the lower Federal courts by prisoners after being convicted in the state courts and losing on their direct appeals. A bill had been introduced, supported by nearly every Federal judge and approved by a House Judiciary subcommittee, which would have remedied that situation, but Congress took no action.

It quotes from Judge Parker, indicating that Congress had the power of the purse and of legislation, but the judiciary had no such commensurate power beyond merely judging, and needed Congress to address its problems and deficiencies. It thus urges adoption of the proposed annual message by the Chief Justice to Congress.

"C.A.B. Report Encouraging Step" indicates that an examiner's recommendation to the Civil Aeronautics Board would provide Charlotte competitive one-carrier service to New York and Philadelphia, as well to New Orleans, through extension of the Capital Air Lines routes which presently ended at Washington and Atlanta. It would mean that air travelers would have a choice between Capital and the present Eastern Air Lines service between those points. It finds that the resulting competition would improve service as well as increase patronage to both airlines. The recommendations still had to be approved by the CAB, but the recommendation was a victory for the city, the Chamber of Commerce and the Airport Advisory Committee officials who had presented the case in Washington.

It had not been a complete victory, because the examiner did not recommend one-carrier flights to the Southwest and areas such as Dallas, which had been sought in the same proceedings. It urges that the city had to continue to press for that service, as well as faster flights to Midwestern areas such as Chicago, as increasing air service was essential to the city's future as the distribution center of the two Carolinas. It suggests that the city should instruct its Washington counsel to explore every means toward linking Charlotte with every area having actual or potential trade ties with the city, whenever traffic justified those links. Rails had determined the location of the great cities of the country, but air routes were the lifelines of future centers of commerce and industry, and Charlotte wanted to be one of them.

"Tar Heel Education Loses a Friend" laments the death of Dr. Thurman D. Kitchin of Wake Forest, who, from 1930 to 1950, had been president of the College, leading it through the depression and disaster, at a time when the loss of students had been steadily depressing the institution's standing.

Under his administration, the College had erected eight buildings and an athletic stadium, tripled its enrollment and converted the two-year medical school to a four-year medical college in Winston-Salem, and improved greatly its law school.

His father, William, had been a Congressman, as had been his brother, Claude, and another brother, W. W., had been Governor. He had brought the same dedication to education which they had brought to government. It concludes that education in the state had lost a great friend and that thousands of alumni of the institution felt the loss in a personal sense.

A piece from the Green Bay (Wisc.) Press-Gazette, titled "Need for Sounding Off", indicates that an acquaintance of the editor had remarked recently that every now and then, he sat down and wrote a letter to his Congressman or some other public official to express his opinion about some issue of public policy, assuming that only about one in 10,000 people ever did so and that therefore his opinion carried the weight of 10,000.

The piece finds the comment shrewd, that journalists who covered legislative bodies often pointed out that letters from home carried a great deal more influence with lawmakers than most people realized, that despite legislators receiving every day a great deal of mail from pressure groups and people with individual axes to grind, all of which had some influence, they were discounted to a great degree in favor of letters from voters who simply felt strongly about a particular subject, enough so to write their Congressman. It indicates that the people who avoided writing such letters were often those most interesting to lawmakers and newspaper readers, such as small businessmen, merchants, professional people, laborers and farmers. By contrast, those who consistently wrote letters to members of Congress and editors, merely because they had nothing better to do, had little influence.

It concludes that democracy would operate better if more people took the trouble to express their opinions to their representatives more often, and that there would be a better informed public if such people would write letters to editors as well.

Drew Pearson's column continues to be written by his staff during his brief vacation, indicating that House hearings on the businessmen serving the government without compensation, so-called WOC's, had become somewhat hilarious as the chairman of the committee holding the hearings, Emanuel Celler of New York, had sought to decode a letter from Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, in which the latter had been coy about when he might testify before the committee. The Secretary, who had a number of WOC's in his Department, said that he was willing to appear "later", provided the House committee let him choose the time. Representative Celler had said that the letter reminded him of the Alice in Wonderland story, in which Alice asked the white queen for jam, but was told, "Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today," eliciting laughter from the spectators.

Representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, also a member of the committee, then told a story about a man on his way to be hanged, that the road to the gallows was muddy, causing concern that the execution might be delayed, prompting the doomed man to tell his escorts that "there ain't going to be a hanging until I get there," and so they should not worry about the muddy road.

Representative Peter Rodino of New Jersey—who would subsequently chair the House Judiciary Committee in summer, 1974, when it would return articles of impeachment against President Nixon, Representative Scott, by then elected Senator, being among the delegation of Republicans going to the White House immediately thereafter and informing the President that he would have only a handful of votes in the Senate to withstand removal from office, prompting the President, having already lost many of the President's men to resignation in disgrace or by dint of criminal conviction, also to resign in disgrace, absent his trusty coterie of King's Men to enable putting him back together again—had brought the committee back to its business at hand, demanding to know whether Secretary Weeks would or would not be a witness. Mr. Celler had replied that he did not know from the letter of the Secretary, and that if anyone else could glean anything from it, they were better than he. He added that years earlier, he had received an angry wire from a constituent demanding to know whether he was for or against the draft, to which Mr. Celler had replied, "I certainly am." He suggested that the Secretary was in a similar position, but that it was still undecipherable as to where he stood. Representative Scott then said that it reminded him of a member of Congress who had been talking for quite awhile, prompting someone to ask, "What is he talking about?" to which another replied, "He didn't say."

The column indicates that after the side excursions into Alice in Wonderland, capital punishment, selective service and Congressional oratory, Mr. Celler had redirected the committee to an investigation of the operations of WOC's.

All of which brings to mind, since we linked to it yesterday, that it is worth a gander to go back and read the first couple of pages, at least, of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, especially in light of the not yet reported murder in Mississippi of young Emmett Till, occurring the previous Sunday morning. The study of history, if properly appreciated and treated—not just as pointillistic events transposed as dots on a two-dimensional canvas but inclusive of a concatenation of images and their associated sounds and other sensory stimuli, some confined by their miasmic engorgement, some recalled consciously, some retained without awareness, imprinted on the mind of an actor and which sometimes impel the actor to action impulsively, even compulsively, whether in the ordinary or the untoward, in ways which the actor could not predict or understand under a given set of circumstances, which, nevertheless, are subject to being gleaned then by others as the gleaming needle from amid the proverbial haystack, hidden, but in plain view once the focus properly directs to it—, is really just a ghost story...

Joseph Alsop tells of U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Charles Bohlen having informed the State Department that Soviet leaders were supplying signs of seriously desiring some disarmament, that they were not in danger of imminent internal collapse, as thought by some as a result of the overtures, that they were unlikely to sacrifice anything they regarded as vital to obtain disarmament. Yet, he had continued, they would rather have some disarmament than not have any. Considerable consequences had come from his report.

It had influenced the White House mood leading to the preparation for the Big Four summit conference of July in Geneva, and without Mr. Bohlen's opinion, the President might not have presented to the Russians his proposal of mutual aerial inspection of defense facilities for each country. In addition, with the President's backing, Harold Stassen was now leading the U.S. delegation at the U.N. Disarmament Commission, seeking to accomplish two things at once, to resume general disarmament talks, which the Commission had been considering for some time without resolution, and to start bilateral disarmament talks with the Soviets. Those talks, if Ambassador Bohlen's observations were accurate, could not be regarded as merely empty gestures in response to world opinion desiring disarmament.

But on the unfavorable side of the picture was the fact that the Soviets had announced a cut of 640,000 men, about 30 divisions, from the Soviet armed forces, causing wishful thinking about the prospect of disarmament, whereas high levels at the Pentagon considered it to be an opposite indicator, that the Soviet military was in fact now able to rely more heavily on atomic weaponry rather than infantry. Although the U.S. Army had been first to develop the atomic cannon, the Red Army was well ahead in the establishment of experimental infantry units specially organized and trained for atomic ground war, leading to the conclusion that the Soviets were presently preparing to make their 155-division ground Army ready for atomic warfare, a quite costly undertaking which had been abandoned by the Joint Chiefs because of its cost, requiring large expenditures on air and ground transport to enable the maximum dispersion and mobility necessary for such an effective force. Yet Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had undertaken defense economy which had, in one application of it, deprived U.S. ground forces of any transport capability. For that reason, it was estimated that to make the 17 under-strength divisions in the U.S. program ready for atomic warfare would cost no less than two billion dollars per year for several years to come, with heavy maintenance costs thereafter.

Thus, Mr. Alsop suggests that if the Russians were actually planning to make about 30 of their divisions ready for atomic warfare, the cost would be very high, though it would substantially increase the overall fighting capability of the Red Army, explaining readily why they were planning to cut about 30 of their divisions, with the atomic-ready divisions multiplying by a factor of four or five their fighting strength overall.

Thus to Mr. Stassen, such facts made it imperative that disarmament take place and that such manpower reduction as proposed recently by the Russians would not only be useless but also quite dangerous. Yet, there was no agreement within the U.S. Government as to the nature of the disarmament plan which the country should sponsor. The Russians wanted the actual disarmament which Ambassador Bohlen had discussed in his report to the State Department, not the inspections proposed by the President at Geneva. Mr. Stassen had sought to find a way out of that dilemma by having the President call in experts and name a high-level committee composed of Dr. Ernest Lawrence of Berkeley, Benjamin Fairless of the U.S. Steel Co., former Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith and General Lucian Truscott, each of whom were among those who had agreed to serve as consultants to Mr. Stassen. It remained to be seen whether those experts could find a way around the grim disarmament problem which human ingenuity had never previously solved.

Marquis Childs, in Vatican City, tells of Pope Pius XII, during his 16 years as Pope, having never wavered from his stress that humanity had to find a way to peace and that war was inherently immoral, from the appeals he had made at the outbreak of World War II to the present time, insisting that those who resorted to war could not escape individual guilt for its consequences to humanity. He believed that all nations were members of "one large human family to be guided by the principles of justice, legality, equity and charity and by mutual pacts that are to be respected with the conviction that true patriotism consists not in denying the rights of other nations but in participating for the greater common good in the family of nations in which each one has a contribution to make and a place of honor."

In 1951, when the cold war was at a peak of intensity during the first eighteen months of the Korean War, the Pope had declared that the church would not take sides in the struggle. In his Christmas message that year, he said that those who wanted to make the church "their ally or the instrument of their political alliances" would "bring her down to the same level on which conflicting temporal interests are locked in struggle." He had repeatedly condemned the materialism of both the East and the West, warning against the dangers of reviving nationalism and the threat to peace inherent in the "nationalistic state". He urged instead European unity, placing special emphasis on that in his 1953 message, when there appeared still to be hope for ratification of the European Union.

Mr. Childs indicates that the Pope's Christmas message of 1948 had summed up his convictions on the responsibility of the individual, urging that Christians could not confine themselves to isolationism when witnessing the needs and misery of others in economic distress, realizing the aspirations of the working classes for more normal and just conditions of life, being aware of the abuses of an economic system which placed money above social obligations, and the "aberrations of an intransigent nationalism which denies or spurns the common bonds linking the separate nations together and imposing on each one of them many and varied duties toward the great family of nations."

While the Pope had not commented directly on the recent Big Four summit meeting at Geneva and the renewed hope of peace, the Vatican Secretary of State had referred reporters to passages from the Pope's previous Christmas message, in which he had confirmed his view of war as an immoral act, resting on the consciences of those who resorted to it. In a front page editorial just prior to the Geneva conference, the Vatican City newspaper had hailed it as an important first step toward ending the cold war and fulfilling the desires of mankind for establishment of true peace, indicating that the Pope had received the "greatest satisfaction" from the fact that the conference was taking place. Mr. Childs concludes that the Russian dictatorship could not properly understand the force of the words of the Pope, which could have greater impact than all of the military force mustered in preparation of war.

A letter writer from Morganton praises Congressman Charles Jonas, whom she says spent his time away from Washington visiting each town or county seat in the district, and maintaining office hours at the courthouse where anyone could approach him with their problems. She recommends re-electing him in 1956 to show appreciation for his seeking to save money for the taxpayers.

A letter writer responds to two previous letter writers, whom she believes thought that "their great, white forefathers taught the Negro everything he shows knowledge of knowing." She questions whether God should not receive credit for the teaching, wondering who taught George Washington Carver how to convert the peanut into so many useful products, as well as teaching Eli Whitney how to invent the cotton gin. She says that one could buy an education, but wisdom was gained through experience. She says that the previous writers in question knew nothing about how black people felt regarding segregation and that "God in his own good time will settle everything", concluding, "'Let God abide.'"

It is unclear precisely which two letters she had in mind, as there were several of the type in recent weeks. The most recent had been this one the previous week, with another having appeared the week before. We have to question, however, whether it might have been God or the Devil who instructed Eli Whitney in his invention, as it was the cotton gin, after all, which first made the growing of cotton on an extensive scale profitable and thus led to the explosion of the slave trade for the purpose of harvesting it, primarily occurring after 1820. And were such Northern communities as Fall River, Mass., with its large textile mill established in 1811 to manufacture clothing for both Northern and Southern markets, not as equally complicit in the establishment of that profitability of the trade as the slaveowners and overseers, many of the slaveowners having been absentee and not residents of the plantations or, in some cases, even of the South, during the 45 to 75 years prior to the end of the Civil War? (Which begs the question whether the ragtime tune of Lizzie Borden actually pertained to the hypocrisy of rags and her consequent desire to slice them up? But that's another topic... Would it have been better simply to play Adam and Eve, at least in summer?)

And there was a modicum of truth in the notion that the majority population, which happened to be white, had provided through taxes and policy many benefits, including public education, to the minority population, even if on a subjugated and segregated basis and thus psychologically demeaning for its engendering of alienation and separation from the mainstream of society in every respect, physically, economically, spiritually, culturally. But that effort was required by law insofar as the payment of taxes by the general population was concerned, and the disproportionate amount of those taxes paid between the majority and the minority arose only as a function of the disproportionate numbers of the population between the races and the disparity in relative income earned on which those taxes were premised, based on discrimination in both the types of employment generally afforded the minority and the wages paid, at least outside the segregated minority community. Moreover, after Plessy v. Ferguson was decided in 1896, it was established law that the states had to provide substantially equal facilities between the races, though maintained as separate, to pass muster under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, even if the notion was erratically applied in the Southern states prior to the decision being overruled in 1954, for its general failure as a policy to afford either equal protection or due process, by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe. Furthermore, the notion of paternalistic hand-me-down benefits and knowledge is true in any family setting, not only between parents and child but as well between siblings and others in the family on a peer to peer basis, is true in any business or corporate setting where a major industry supplies employment on a large scale to a given community. It could be as easily said that the American Tobacco Co. of Buck Duke provided an education to the students of Duke University by providing an endowment which enabled moving of the small Trinity College from Randolph County to Durham and its eventual conversion to Duke, likewise to the parishioners of Methodist churches throughout the state of North Carolina, built under the same endowment. The same could be said of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. with regard to Wake Forest or of a myriad of other colleges and universities throughout the country, including public universities endowed by various private trusts. Any such endowment or industrial contribution to a given community is a form of benefaction also to that community and the state in which it is situated and thus contributes to the individual benefit of those living in the community or attending the school so benefited.

The notion, therefore, that white people provided benefits to black people, while true to a degree, is not at all remarkable in any society or social setting where there are people grouped on one basis or another, whether by age discrepancy, by race or ethnicity, or any other individuating factor where one such race or group is in the majority while the other is in the minority in their relative economic relationship. It was thus unthinking of the previous letter writers who suggested such paternalism as some exceptional trait of white Southerners vis-à-vis black Southerners. And, of course, the trait of benefaction was certainly not pervasive in any event, especially between the disparate groups mutually within the lower economic classes, vying in competition for means of obtaining provender.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date Links-Subj.