The Charlotte News

Thursday, February 9, 1956

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the South Carolina General Assembly this date went on record unanimously as favoring interposition regarding desegregation of the public schools. A third and final reading of the resolution the following day would result in it being sent to Governor John Bell Timmerman, Jr., for his signature. The resolution expressed the state's intention to exercise "all powers reserved to it to protect its sovereignty and the rights of its people". It thoroughly condemned the decision in Brown v. Board of Education and called on other states and Congress to "take appropriate legal steps to prevent, now and in the future, usurpation of power by the Supreme Court…" It urged that copies be sent to the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court and legislatures of all of the other states. Some of the State representatives had threatened earlier an attempt to amend the Senate-passed measure with a clause declaring Brown "null and void", but had relented in the interest of speed, so that the State Senate measure could simply be voted on directly by the State House, unchanged. South Carolina had been one of the four states, along with Kansas, Virginia, and Delaware, directly before the Court in Brown, with the District of Columbia having been the subject of the companion case decided at the same time, Bolling v. Sharpe. (For an understanding of the theory of interposition, and its backward interpretation of the Constitution, read this editorial, ironically but appropriately titled, "Interposition: Yesterday and Today", by James Kilpatrick, editor at the time of the Richmond News Leader and one of the central leaders in resurrecting the long discredited theory from the ashes of the Civil War period and secession. The editorial expresses the heart of the misunderstanding of basic Constitutional law when it says that the original conception by the Founders was that "in certain areas the Federal government would be supreme; in all other areas, the respective states would be supreme." Obviously, Mr. Kilpatrick and the adherents to the theory had never bothered to read and understand the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution in the context of the whole fabric of the document. The Clause provides that the Constitution, the laws of the United States "made in pursuance thereof", and treaties are the "supreme law of the land". The misinterpretation arises with respect to the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states or the people the powers not delegated by the Constitution to the Federal Government, which includes the Article III Federal judicial branch, giving it power to decide all cases "arising under" the Constitution. The Constitution includes all ratified amendments, including the Fourteenth Amendment and its Equal Protection Clause, ratified in 1868, which the Supreme Court held was violated by continued segregation of the public schools, the separate-but-equal doctrine, made up by the Supreme Court, watering down the Equal Protection Clause, in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, with words nowhere like its infamous phrase in the Constitution, having never fulfilled in 58 years its avowed purpose of producing equal facilities as applied to segregated public schools. In short, the Supreme Court was well within its Constitutional powers to decide the cases before it, seeking and obtaining a holding that the practice of segregation in the public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause. The argument to the contrary asserts that the states and local communities had the exclusive authority to determine public education of their children, but in the process blinks the notion that any state action under the Fourteenth Amendment is subject to challenge for violation of that amendment's strictures, that the states must afford due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens.)

Relman Morin, Associated Press correspondent, provides the third of a four-part series of articles on the decision of the President whether or not to run for a second term, relating in this piece that in June, 1952, General Eisenhower, just after having spoken in his hometown of Abilene, Kans., at the beginning of his presidential campaign, had underscored the reasons for his entering the race, that he had been worried about the world situation and that Republican leaders had convinced him that he might be able to unify diverse elements in the nation and the party. Top Republicans were now saying that the same two considerations would figure heavily in the President's deliberations on whether to seek a second term. After his September 24 heart attack, the President had been surprised by the amount of disturbance in the country, including disturbance in the stock market, saying that it was a very critical thing to change governments in the country at a time which was unexpected. Trading on Wall Street had been heavy since the beginning of the year, with businessmen indicating that it was because of the general uncertainty of the political picture. Another potential factor which the President might consider was how he liked the job at present, with people close to him saying that he liked it a lot and was just beginning to enjoy it when he had his heart attack. One of his close advisers said that his low point had come during the hassle between former Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and Senator McCarthy, but that afterward, he had seemed to settle into the job and had appeared by September to be getting a great kick out of his work. White House correspondents who had been observing the President since the beginning of his term and had been in Denver at the time of his heart attack, generally agreed with that impression, with Mr. Morin indicating that a large number of them did not believe he would run again. General Lucius Clay, who had been one of his early supporters, said that the last time he had gone fishing with the President, he had seemed like his old self. Not long earlier, the President had said that he had to guess as to the ensuing five years, and that the problem was what the effect would be on the Presidency, not on him, personally. A professional soldier had observed that one had to remember that ever since the President had been at West Point as a young man, he had been accustomed to the thought that he might get killed in the line of duty, was trained not to take that into account, and the soldier believed he would not consider it at present. Mr. Morin concludes with the question whether the President was calculating the biggest risk of all.

HUAC was slated to conduct a hearing in Charlotte in the Federal courtroom at the Post Office Building on March 12, 13 and 14. Presumably, it was intended to be follow-up to the trial of Junius Scales, which had resulted in conviction the previous year in Greensboro. A faculty member of Campbell College in Buies Creek, who taught French and Spanish and coached the golf team, informed the newspaper that he had received a letter from the Committee to appear on March 12. He said that he presumed the reason for his being called was because of testimony by two witnesses in the Scales trial, both of whom had said that they thought the faculty member had been a Communist while a student at UNC. He said that he had never been called before the Committee previously, and that he had never been informed that he was accused of anything. In a letter he had drafted to the Daily Tar Heel, the UNC student newspaper, he stated that he wanted to inform his friends and the people of the state that during his testimony to the Committee, he would not reveal either his own political beliefs or associates, or those of anyone else. University sources had said this date that in 1949, he had refused to answer questions put to him by the University regarding Communist affiliations. He was a World War II veteran with considerable service in the Pacific and was the recipient of the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He was an honors graduate of Wake Forest in 1938, and had a masters degree in romance languages from Syracuse University in 1940, had received a teaching fellowship to UNC in 1940, and then his draft notice on December 10, 1941. He had returned to UNC after the war in 1946 and had later studied at the Sorbonne in France, returning in 1952 to accept his present teaching position at Campbell.

Julian Scheer of The News reports that Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina would resign from the Senate sometime before April 5, according to what he had told the newspaper this date, saying that the resignation was for the purpose of keeping his pledge made to the people that if elected in 1954, he would resign in 1956 and seek the nomination again in a primary. He had won the 1954 election to a full six-year term on a purely write-in basis. He had made a campaign issue out of the fact that Edgar Brown had been named to the Democratic ticket by the State Democratic executive committee. The late Senator Burnet Maybank had been renominated to the Senate in a June primary in 1954, but had died on September 1, with the executive committee then picking Mr. Brown and placing his name on the general election ballot in November, without a new primary. Senator Thurmond had argued that another primary should have been conducted, but the committee ruled that there was insufficient time for it. At that point the former Governor then announced his write-in candidacy, winning the race handily over Mr. Brown. The reason for the April 5 deadline for his resignation was that he had to file by that date for the June 12 primary. Senator Thurmond would not say, however, exactly when he would resign and when his resignation would become effective.

Dick Young of The News indicates that the new air pollution control engineer for the City, Charles Frost, had a machine which detected the amount of smoke and other pollution in the air, registering 82 percent concentration the previous morning, for instance. Mr. Frost said it was the largest concentration he had ever seen in his three years of experience with the detection instrument, called a smoke spot sampler. It was one of several pieces of scientific equipment which he used in his effort to clear the air of pollution. Another vital piece of equipment was a hydrogen sulfide detector, said to be one of the most toxic of the more common industrial gases, with Mr. Frost's tests the previous day having shown no traces of that gas in Charlotte's air. A smokescope, which resembled binoculars and enabled the user to focus on an individual smoke-emitting source, determined the density of smoke issuing from a smokestack and included telescopic cameras to enable obtaining photographic evidence for use in Mr. Frost's educational campaign. He said that the information gathered through those instruments was accurate and irrefutable. (It might be noted that, at least insofar as the results might be used in some evidentiary proceeding, nothing of the type is "irrefutable", depending on regularly kept records regarding proper calibration and maintenance of the instrument, whether there could be variance caused by such conditions as wind and weather, etc.)

Donald MacDonald of The News reports that hoodlums had wrecked the main office, the principal's office and four other rooms of Harding High School the previous night in what a City detective described as "deliberate and senseless vandalism." Records had been removed from desks and cabinets in the offices, thrown onto the floor and set on fire, and in one room, a bottle of ink and a jar of paste had been dashed against the wall. Windows had been smashed, office doors broken, and the soft drink machine looted of approximately three dollars in change. The total damage amounted to several hundred dollars worth and, according to the detective, it was the worst damage they had seen in a long time. Further damage to the school is described.

Also in Charlotte, City Manager Henry Yancey made a request to the State Highway Commission this date for an extension of Independence Boulevard by doubling the width of the Wilkinson Boulevard pavement from Morehead Street to Remount Road.

On the editorial page, "Local Vandalism Must Be Stamped Out" indicates that the destruction of public property in parks and playgrounds was an old story in Charlotte, but that of late, the "hoodlum taste for cheap, mob-style theatrics" had come into the open at high school athletic events. The superintendent of parks said that vandalism cost the city $50,000 per year in park and playground property, emphasizing the extent of the problem.