The Charlotte News

Friday, February 24, 1956

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Montgomery, Ala., that the first 27 black citizens brought to court pursuant to grand jury indictments delivered the prior Tuesday, alleging participation in an illegal boycott in violation of state law, entered pleas of not guilty at their arraignments this date, and the charge against the Rev. A. W. Wilson, pastor of Holt Baptist Church, was dismissed by the court at the urging of the prosecutor because the minister had testified before the grand jury which returned the indictments. The judge said that he was therefore "happy" to dismiss the charge as the minister could not be prosecuted on the basis of his own testimony before the grand jury.

In Thomasville, Ga., the President's personal physician, Dr. Howard Snyder, said this date that the President "might be safer" from a health standpoint in serving a second term than before his heart attack, addressing the press on the fifth-month anniversary of the attack in Denver on September 24. The exchange occurred as the President was climbing aboard a hunting roadster near the town, embarking on a new quest for quail. The doctor told the press that he had no impression regarding whether the President had determined to run again, and also said he did not know what anyone could tell regarding whether the President would be able to serve through a second term, that there was no guarantee that another attack would not occur, a similar statement to that which he had made at a press conference on February 14, though indicating then that he had made a good recovery from the heart attack and appeared fit for another 5 to 10 years in a job such as the presidency. Dr. Snyder said, "All he can do is trust in God if he goes ahead."

Julian Scheer of The News reports of HUAC's history, in light of its coming hearings in Charlotte on March 12-14, saying it had been praised and damned during its history since it was chaired by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas in 1938 at its creation. Such persons as Fritz Kuhn, head of the German-American Bund, and William Dudley Pelley, right-wing extremist, had appeared during the Dies era, while more recently, in 1948, Alger Hiss, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers had grabbed headlines. It had become the chief forum for such members of Congress as J. Parnell Thomas, subsequently imprisoned for defrauding the Government through illegal salary kickbacks from relatives and associates who did little or nothing, and Richard Nixon, prominent during the Hiss investigation. The current chairman was Congressman Francis Walter of Pennsylvania and the previous chairman during the Republican controlled House had been Congressman Harold Velde of New Jersey. It had become involved in long, tiresome investigations which had proved fruitless as well in investigations which had ferreted out "disloyal" persons employed by the Government. Representative Walter would be on the subcommittee set to hold hearings in Charlotte. While the itinerant nature of the hearing was new to North Carolina, the Committee had been so engaged previously, the previous year having traveled to Dayton, Miami, Detroit, Portland and other places. During its 18 year history, it had traveled far and wide, looking into every facet of American life, including the Best Picture Academy Award winner for 1946, "The Best Years of Our Lives"—plainly, a subversive piece of Commie propaganda. It had been made a permanent standing committee in 1945 with the purpose of investigating "the extent, character, and objects of un-American propaganda activities" in the country, and the "diffusion … of subversive and un-American propaganda that is instigated from foreign countries or of a domestic origin", and all other questions relating thereto which would aid Congress in providing remedial legislation. Critics of the authorizing resolution pointed out that "subversive" and "un-American" were not defined terms. The Committee had accumulated 600 filing cases of information, with more than a million names, records, dossiers and data pertaining to alleged subversive activities in the country. One of its favorite targets from early in its existence, as Mr. Scheer points out on an inside page, were organizations representing minority groups, alleged to be infiltrated by Communists. Mr. Scheer does not recount of the time, in 1938, when Congressman Joe Starnes of Pennsylvania considered calling before the Dies Committee Kit Marlowe as a subversive writer, though Mr. Starnes had insisted, after the country began laughing out loud at his historical faux pas, that he had only been joking all along. As was said many times, if one dared in those times, the only thing un-American involved with the Committee was itself and its existence within a representative democracy. Had it not been so recklessly dangerous in its charges, it would have continued as a standard joke, as it largely had before 1948 when Mr. Nixon decided to make it very serious in his inimitably unhumorous fashion during the Hiss investigation, which ultimately devolved to attempted identification of Mr. Chambers by Mr. Hiss through his bad teeth, alleged transfer of title to a Model A Ford from Mr. Hiss to Mr. Chambers for a nominal fee, microfilmed "secret" documents, which even Mr. Nixon admitted were innocuous, conveyed to Mr Chambers as a Communist courier allegedly by Mr. Hiss in 1938, and stored by Mr. Chambers first in a dumb-waiter shaft at the home of a relative for a decade before being transferred to the infamous pumpkin on his Maryland farm, all revealed eventually just after Halloween in 1948, with a grand jury, at the urging of Mr. Nixon as its chief witness, indicting Mr. Hiss, then-head of the Carnegie Endowment, formerly of the State Department and a primary aide to the U.S. delegation at the U.N. Charter Conference in 1945 and a lower-level aide to FDR at Yalta in February, 1945, not Mr. Chambers, the admitted former Communist, for perjury.

In Raleigh, State Prisons director William Bailey this date told the State Highway Commission, with authority over the prisons, that he did not see the necessity for concern regarding the uprising on Monday by four prisoners at the Huntersville prison camp near Charlotte, describing it as "nothing unusual". He said, in response to a quoted statement by the Huntersville mayor that the four prisoners should have been in Central Prison, that the latter facility only held 900 inmates and that they had to be spread around to other facilities. He said that the Huntersville camp was designed for misdemeanants and the four prisoners in question were convicted felons, transferred there temporarily and supposed to be in cells segregated from the other inmates. Mr. Bailey pointed out that two of the prisoners had staged a rebellion the previous night at the Stanly County camp but nothing had been said about it by the press or local officials.

Ann Sawyer of The News reports on the trial in Charlotte of a 28-year old woman accused of assaulting her 3 ½-year old step-daughter who had died the prior Christmas Eve. Since September, 1954, the woman had lived with a man, the father of the child, whom she had never married while separated but not divorced from her husband. The woman denied the accusation made by her neighbors of child abuse, saying that burns on the feet and legs of the child had been caused by a flare-up of the floor furnace, that her teeth had come out when she attempted to get the child's tongue out of her throat with a spoon when the child had a convulsion. She showed the jury marks on her hands where the child had bitten her. She admitted tying the arms of the child to her crib to prevent her from scratching herself, but said she had tied only one arm most of the time because she did not have the heart to tie both arms. The jury was expected to receive the case this date.

Near Durham, N.C., a 32-year old construction company employee had suffered cuts and bruises in a cave-in of a rock quarry the previous night, after being trapped for 4.5 hours before fellow employees could rescue him. He had been pinned up to his knees in a hole in the bottom of a large pile of rock. He said that he would tell his wife that he had been in a bear trap. It's good that it is in the paper as she will insist that you were involved in some kind of cat fight otherwise.

In Greensboro, N.C., two basketball players, Bob Cunningham of UNC and Bill Tucker of Wake Forest, had been suspended by the Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner this date "for an undetermined period" for engaging in a fight in a game between the two teams nine days earlier. The Conference commissioner, Jim Weaver, announced the decision following an investigation spanning several days, with the report of the investigation to be submitted to officials of both schools the following Monday, after which they would have five days to appeal the decision to the Conference executive committee, set to meet in Raleigh the following Friday during the ACC basketball tournament, possibly to be expedited by Wednesday, prior to the Thursday start of the tournament. Young Mr. Cunningham, a sophomore from New York City—no relation to the later UNC All-American Billy Cunningham from Brooklyn—would not be able to play this night in an important game against Duke, while young Mr. Tucker, a junior from Louisville, would be unavailable for an equally important match with N.C. State the following night. UNC had won the game in Chapel Hill against Wake Forest by a score of 77 to 73, with the fight erupting at the end of the game, after several players had begun swinging just as the final horn sounded, joined by hundreds of spectators within a few seconds. Mr. Weaver said that he had interviewed all of the players from both teams, the coaching staffs and school officials, and while not minimizing or condoning the behavior of each player involved, he believed that the preponderance of guilt lay with the two players who had first committed "the unsportsmanlike act of a disqualifying nature", thereby inciting their teammates to retaliatory measures. He said that his decision was based on the two players' testimony and that of others. He indicated that control of spectators had to be the responsibility of the host institution, but that spectators could hardly be expected to behave while the participants in the event misbehaved, saying that he found no reason to believe that the spectators would have rushed onto the floor had it not been for the unsportsmanlike conduct of the players. A similar free-for-all during a 1954 football game between the same two schools had resulted in the Conference enacting a rule empowering the commissioner to investigate and act on incidents of unsportsmanlike conduct. Well, they do call them from time to time "cage scraps" on the sports pages, and so what do you expect? You're lucky that they don't choose to settle their differences, after the gauntlet has been laid, with switchblades, coming, as many of them do these days, from the streets of New Yawk.

In Miami, Fla., it was reported that six light planes which had been missing after taking off from Cuba for Jamaica, had been found at Niquero, Cuba, and the 16 missionaries aboard were all safe. Only three of nine such planes had initially reached their destination in Kingston, all of the missionaries having been sponsored by the Church of God of Prophecy in Cleveland, Tenn., on a 3,000-mile tour of the Caribbean islands. Those missing were undoubtedly in the Devil's Triangle until the Devil realized who they were, gagged and coughed them up.

On the editorial page, "Charlotte Aviation: Hesitation's Reward" finds that the extensive time it had taken to hire a new airport manager for Charlotte might actually be a saving grace. The previous manager, David Rea, had died in October, 1955, at a time when the airport had been going through a particularly crucial stage of development, thus leading to impatience to find a new manager. But by proceeding with great care, City Manager Henry Yancey apparently had been able to secure the services of a top individual, A. S. Quinn of Georgia, a former engineer with the Civil Aeronautics Administration and possessed of considerable technical experience in aviation.