The Charlotte News
Friday, March 30, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Atlanta that nearly all of the officers of the 1,100-member Atlanta League of Women Voters had seceded this date in protest against racial integration and other policies. Those turning in their resignations included the president, three vice-presidents, the treasurer, secretary and five directors, along with three members of the nominating committee. The local League, the largest in the state, was left only with a vice-president, a handful of directors, and a nominating committee to continue its business. The resigning leaders issued a statement to the membership providing several reasons for their leaving, all more or less directly connected with policies of the national League, which had no racial restrictions on membership. The local League had failed on Tuesday, by a vote of 57 to 42, to adopt a resolution to continue its policies of segregation. The resigning members said that the membership was so deeply separated on that and other issues as to divide them into factions and prevent their working together effectively. They also protested that they were "not able to vote on revisions to inoperable bylaws."
In Raleigh, the North Carolina Advisory Committee on Education would go before the people the following Thursday night with their recommendations for meeting the school segregation issue, with the Committee having stated the previous day that its seven members would use radio and television facilities to provide their report, expected to set the stage for Governor Luther Hodges to call a special session of the Legislature during the summer, as he had indicated he would likely do after the report issued. The report had been completed in its details only the previous day and remained cloaked in secrecy. Speculation centered on it recommending some combination of tuition grants and local option. Governor Hodges had stated that study had been made by the Committee of the Virginia plan of tuition grants or transfers for students objecting to attendance of integrated schools. The Governor had used the phrase "local option" in discussing segregation problems, apparently a plan to allow communities faced with school integration as a result of court action to vote to decide whether to close public schools or integrate them. For either of those suggested plans to be implemented, the State Constitution would have to be amended, and a vote by the Legislature during the summer would make it possible for a vote on such a constitutional amendment in the fall general election. The Committee had been created by the 1955 Legislature, and Governor Hodges had then appointed its members. It had replaced a similar group named by the late former Governor William B. Umstead, who had died in November, 1954.
Congress adjourned for a ten-day Easter holiday this date, having little major legislation to show for the first three months of the session and plenty to accomplish when the members returned on April 9, including such issues as the farm program, Social Security expansion, foreign aid, aid to education, the highway program, housing and possibly civil rights and tax reduction. It would likely be the last long holiday for the legislators before the end of the session prior to the political conventions in August. Most legislation had occurred thus far in the House since the beginning of the session, with the Senate having spent much of its time on a limited number of subjects, having spent a month debating a bill to deregulate natural gas, only to have that measure vetoed by the President, and having spent most of another month debating the farm bill, having passed a measure which a joint conference committee was presently rewriting, with Republicans predicting that it also would be vetoed. The House had acted the previous year on both the farm and the natural gas deregulation bills. Another week of the Senate's time had been consumed by discussion of proposed changes to the electoral college system, after which the whole issue had been sent back to committee for further study. The House, meanwhile, had passed six annual appropriations bills, one of which had cleared the Senate, and an assortment of miscellaneous measures, some of which still required Senate action.
In Jerusalem, in the Jordan sector, thousands of persons were gathering this date in the old city to retrace the "way of the cross" in the annual Good Friday pilgrimage, following the path from the place of Christ's trial to his tomb. The Israeli-Arab tensions cast ominous overtones, however, over the celebration. Guns along the frontier dividing the city between Israel and Jordan were stilled for the holiday, but some Holy Week observances were curtailed, and residents of Arab Jerusalem complained that war tensions had prevented tourists from attending. Hotel facilities had been booked solid from the previous day through Easter Sunday in the old city, but the extra accommodations ordinarily required in previous years had not been needed during the current holiday. The primary Easter sites were on the Arab side of the line dividing Jerusalem, but a ceremony commemorating the Last Supper had to stop short the previous night because of the division of the city. Normally, a procession of Christians went from St. Savior's Church inside the old walled city to Cenacle, the site of the upper room where Christ had eaten his last meal with his disciples. Cenacle was on the Israeli side and the pilgrimage had gone only as far as St. Mark's Church inside the Arab Christian quarter. A symbolic service on this night would carry out the burial of a statue of Christ in the Holy Sepulcher. Ceremonies ahead of Good Friday included a gathering the previous night in the Church of All Nations in the Garden of Gethsemane, where hundreds observed an hour of silence in commemoration of the agony of Christ in the Garden. Earlier, the feet of 12 men, representing the disciples, had been washed in a service at the entrance to the Holy Sepulcher. The following day, the resurrection would be marked by the blessing of the holy fire by Latin patriarch Alberto Gori, in a ceremony symbolizing the resurrection of Christ and the spread of the gospel which he taught.
Charles Kuralt of The News tells of cloudless skies setting the stage this date for a fair and cool Easter weekend in Charlotte, with hundreds of special church services being held this night and on Sunday. Easter sunrise services were scheduled in many communities, with the largest one locally to be early Sunday morning in Charlotte's Freedom Park, and many regular Sunday morning services to include cantatas and the celebration of the Holy Communion. Schools were closed this date on Good Friday and would not reopen until Tuesday, affording students their longest vacation since the prior Christmas. (Those of you of the Jewish faith can just perhaps have a party. Mazel tov...) Blue skies would afford excellent driving conditions all over the state, with the forecast being for a cool Easter morning with a low of 40 degrees and a warm afternoon, with a high of 65. Showers were expected on Sunday during the evening. Mr. Kuralt reports that modern Easter habits were borrowed from pagan spring rites which were centuries old, that even the name derived from the Norse word "Ostara", the divinity of spring who was welcomed by the Norsemen on her annual return to earth. To Christians, the holiday was intended to commemorate the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. The celebration of Easter had begun in the year 325 A.D., when a general law of the Church had been enacted to establish a day for Christians to celebrate.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that a man who allegedly had engineered a robbery of the Waxhaw Banking and Trust Co. almost a year earlier, had walked the streets of Charlotte for several months following the robbery, with much of the nearly $9,000 in loot possibly having been spent in Charlotte, as the FBI had not yet recovered any of the money. The Charlotte man had been charged by the FBI with conspiracy to rob the bank, with the warrant also naming an alleged accomplice in the crime who had not yet been charged because he was on his way back to the state from Florida, where he had been serving a 60-day vagrancy sentence. The robbery had been investigated for 11 months by the FBI prior to the charges being brought against the two men, one of whom allegedly had driven the getaway car.
In Raleigh, two unemployed transients were being held this date in connection with a $14,000 safe robbery of a Kings Mountain cattleman and his wife earlier in the month, one of the men being from Delray Beach, Fla., and the other, from Norfolk, both arrested by Wake County ABC agents several days earlier on liquor law violations. An SBI agent said that the agents had been searching their rented home in Zebulon when they found $3,500 in cash and two diamond rings, supposed to be part of the loot taken from the the cattleman's safe on March 11, in which $12,500 in cash and two diamond rings, valued at $1,500, had been stolen while the cattleman and his wife were attending church. The wife had identified the rings recovered from the arrested men and the SBI agent said that one of the men had a prior prison record.
In Baytown, Tex., an explosion the previous night had blasted a gaping hole in an Esso oil tanker receiving kerosene at a dock, causing two crewmen to be sent to the hospital while most of the ship's 42-man crew had been on shore leave. The explosion had been felt as far away as suburban Houston, 25 miles distant. The flames had been extinguished within an hour.
In Roosevelt Field, N.Y., it was reported that the field, where Charles Lindbergh had taken off in the Spirit of St. Louis on his historic first solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927, was disappearing, as workmen had begun clearing the area for a large Long Island shopping center. The field had been used until five years earlier.
In Berkeley, Calif., Army psychologists of the Human Resources Research Office at Fort Ord, Calif., told the Western Psychological Association that "bossy" mothers produced poor soldiers, that soldiers from homes run by mothers were least likely to stand up in emergencies.
On the editorial page, "Special Session: The Sky's the Limit" finds that Governor Hodges had good reason for uneasiness about calling a special session of the Legislature during the summer to examine the segregation problem, as a political open season would inevitably be started in both houses and, once called, the Governor had no authority to limit business to any particular subject, no matter how important he deemed it.
At earlier special sessions, legislators had behaved in the manner of a horse riding off in all directions at once, with the original purpose for the special session being all but ignored while pressures for other causes grew stronger. During the 1920's, North Carolina's ambitious "good roads" program had developed out of such a session, although that had not been the reason for calling the session. In the past, hundreds of laws, completely ancillary to the reason for the session, had been rammed through such sessions. In 1913, 497 pieces of legislation had been passed, 416 of which were private, local or special acts, during the special session. During one such session in 1920, 428 laws were passed, 330 of which were in the private category. In the special session of 1924, 415 laws had been passed, 290 of which were private.
Legislators, no matter how popular a particular governor, tended to have minds of their own and wanted to please their constituents back home, often not sharing a governor's enthusiasm for a particular issue.
It imparts that special plans were already underway for the likely upcoming special session to bring other issues than segregation into the limelight, for instance bills granting schoolteachers higher pay, and, according to the Raleigh News & Observer the previous day, the highway program promised to be a second major issue. There would also be inevitably many private bills being presented.
The integration issue could be expected to produce a spirited and long debate between citizens determined to maintain segregation and those determined to preserve the public schools, producing an extremely long and windy session.
It concludes that there was need for a device to limit the issues raised in such sessions to avoid crowding the agenda, wasteful of the Legislature's time and the people's money. In the meantime, even a little political restraint would be welcome.
"In Charlotte Beware the 'Wheel Boot'" tells of the City having purchased two wheel boots for motorists with large numbers of unpaid parking tickets, designed to disable their automobile.
It finds that the name of the device was not enough threatening, that it should be called perhaps a "zowie", with signs posted warning of its possible use. Another problem was that the local police would be tempted to place too much reliance on it, that there would be people who had a number of parking tickets who would simply buy blowtorches and remove the device.
It finds that notwithstanding the drawbacks, the relatively cheap expense to the City would be well spent if it reduced the ranks of parking cheaters and hopes that its use would encourage compliance with the parking laws.
"For Civilization's Flowers, a Carnation" tells of the doctor being a traditional folk-hero, automatically ascribed virtue by the multitudes, suggests that perhaps it had been Hippocrates, with his Physicians Oath, who had planted the seeds of that universal respect. Plato also had a hand in the matter, having written in The Republic: "No physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers his own good in what he prescribes, but the good of the patient; for the true physician is also a ruler having the human body as a subject, and is not a mere money-maker." The Apocrypha had instructed the faithful to "honor a physician with the honor due unto him."
While it was true that Billy Bones had contemptuously remarked in Treasure Island that "doctors is all swabs," Robert Louis Stevenson had made up for the comment later when he said that there were men and classes of men who stood above the common herd, "the soldier, the sailor and the shepherd not infrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still, the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule. He is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization."
It indicates that in Mecklenburg County, the flowers of the civilization were wearing carnations at present, presented to them by the Mecklenburg County Medical Society Auxiliary, finds it appropriate as part of the observance of Doctor's Day, sponsored by the Auxiliary, its purpose being to observe and place emphasis on the many services rendered to the community by doctors. It finds it proper that there should be such a day, as no profession was more deserving of tribute, not because the doctor was unappreciated but for the reason that it was human nature for busy people to take goodness for granted.
A piece from the Lexington (Ky.) Herald, titled "Gospel Is Good News", tells of there having been a time not so long earlier when preachers and evangelists had given strong emphasis to the doctrine of future punishment. The rough pioneer preacher, Peter Cartright, and the distinguished metaphysician, Jonathan Edwards, had both dwelled at length on the subject of fire and brimstone and a place of physical torment, appealing primarily to man's fears. Horace Greeley, commenting on an event in the Civil War period, the tragic consequences of which he feared, had mentioned a treatise on theology which he had read while a young man, stating that the first chapter had been about hell, and the second chapter was about hell continued, which the piece finds an apt description of the general attitude of preachers of that time.
Now, however, evangelists were emphasizing the love of God for lost men and the atoning work of the Saviour. Those were the topics of Billy Graham's sermons and of the late, lamented Peter Marshall, chaplain of the Senate. The new emphasis accounted for the enormous crowds which Reverend Graham attracted when he had gone to Britain and Europe, preaching love, compassion, forgiveness and regeneration. The Gospel was now "'good news'", pouring a flood of light upon the character of God whose love is a "'fountain opened for sin and uncleanness in the house of David.'"
Drew Pearson, in Kansas City, tells of having dropped in on former President Truman in his office recently and found him clearing his desk of a large pile of correspondence, saying that his wife, Bess, had said that if he would keep his mouth shut, he would not get so much mail, and he guessed that she was right. He was in good spirits and they had talked about a lot of things, from his daughter Margaret to his old critic, Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star, to the tense situation in the Near East and how war could be avoided.
They had both agreed that Mr. Roberts was mellowing since he had married the widow of Charles Ross, the late former press secretary of President Truman. The President said that he had even given Margaret a nice write-up on the current morning and that he had wept some when he read it.
Regarding national problems, Mr. Truman was careful not to criticize President Eisenhower, but had definite ideas on the way some things were drifting, among them race relations, finding that the country was going through a period similar to that just before the Civil War. He said that the Civil War could have been avoided had Presidents James Polk, Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan made up their minds on firm policy, that if President Andrew Jackson had been in power at the time, he would have stopped nullification before it had ever gotten started. He said that his mother was unreconstructed and had never gotten over the Civil War, telling his brother before she came to see him in Washington, "If Harry asks me to sleep in Abraham Lincoln's bed, I'll sleep on the floor." He said that a lot of people like her still lived in their part of Missouri but were aware also that they had to give black children a chance, that blacks had to have economic equality and that a prerequisite for same was educational equality. He said that a lot of progress in that direction had been made in Arkansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina, even in Texas and Louisiana, until Senator Strom Thurmond "and his boys" had come along and "whipped things up. All this bitterness didn't have to happen. It could have been prevented."
He said that war in the Near East was not inevitable, but there was one great danger, that the Russians were after the 400 billion barrels of oil, 70 percent of the world's supply, in Saudi Arabia, which was why they had provided arms to Egypt and the reason for the trouble in the Near East. He said that they could have outmaneuvered the Russians with his development plan, under which he would have siphoned water from the Mediterranean into the Dead Sea and dug a ditch between them, that the fact that the Dead Sea was 1,200 feet lower than the Mediterranean, meant that the rush of water would supply electric power for all needed industries. He would have made Israel the industrial country of the Near East and then let the Arabs raise the crops to feed Israel and themselves. He indicated that they were cousins and did not have to fight one another, that it could be one of the breadbaskets of the world. He said that in Iran, which had once been the Garden of Eden, before Tamerlane had come in and destroyed the irrigation system of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the U.S. could rebuild that capability, that the people who lived there followed the doctrine of kismet, that things would take care of themselves, while the West did not think that way, but rather favored building. He said that he had sent the director of his Point Four program to Ethiopia to make a survey, which had shown that on a 12,000-foot plateau two crops of wheat could be grown each year, enough to feed 100 million extra people and eliminate starvation. He said that with Israel supplying the industry and Ethiopia and Iran supplying the food, a sound economy could be established which would bring cooperation and peace back to that part of the world, preventing war.
He said that when he was in the White House, he made some surveys, finding that in Africa there were the great Zambezi Falls just waiting to be harnessed, the way to stop Communism in Africa. In the Andes, there was Lake Titicaca with its wasted power, indicating that he had made an offer to Chile and Peru that if they would give Bolivia an outlet to the sea, the U.S. would harness the power of the lake and use it to run all of the mines of Peru and Chile. He said that they had refused, but that someday they would agree. He further indicated that there were two falls on the Parana River in South America which could supply power for the entire area. He also recounted of a proposal to internationalize the Danube and make it a great seaway from the Baltic to the Black Sea under U.N. supervision, that he would have done the same thing with the Suez and Panama Canals, that it was the way peace was built, demonstrating to people how they could work together.
Mr. Pearson concludes that his voice had enthusiasm in it, "the vibrant quality of a man whose most important work was unfinished."
Edwin S. Bergamini, music critic and reporter for The News, discusses the need for funding of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, that business efficiency alone would not cure the financial problems of any orchestra, as half of all orchestra income had to be unearned, from contributions by corporations and individuals or bequests in wills. It applied to community orchestras, as in Charlotte, as well to fully professional orchestras, as in New York and Philadelphia. The budget for the Charlotte Orchestra was $40,000 and had a deficit for the current season of $7,000. The New York Philharmonic, with a seven-figure budget, had a comparable percentage deficit. The other half of the Charlotte budget was earned, from ticket sales, advertising space in programs and from a weekly tv show, the "Carolina Hour", on which the Little Symphony appeared, with ticket sales being the primary source. But were the orchestra to price tickets at a level to balance its budget, it would price itself out of the entertainment market.
Thus, the responsibility was on the contributor to fund the orchestra. Richard Bray, new president of the Orchestra, had said that there were 238 individuals and businesses making contributions. Nashville's orchestra and that in Spokane had two to three times, respectively, the contributions of Charlotte in cities of comparable size. The yardstick for measuring contributions was that it ought be a quarter to a dollar per capita, with Charlotte thus expected to produce a budget of between $45,000 and $180,000. But while about $20,000 was needed from contributions to meet the Charlotte budget of $40,000, only $13,000 was received, producing the deficit.
He concludes that if the Symphony Society would realize that budget, it would need more individual and corporate donors.
A letter writer says that during the morning she had been driving down East Fifth St., between Tryon and College Sts., and heard a bump-bump noise whereupon her car became hard to steer. She had seen a police officer standing on the corner of Fifth and College Sts. and told him that she had a flat tire, after which the police officer examined the tire, found that it was flat and told her to drive very slowly across the street and stop, at which point the officer took out the jack, jacked up the car, took out the spare tire and soon had it on the car. Another officer arrived on the scene and held the jack while the wheel was being tightened, and within a few minutes, she was on her way again. It had happened early in the morning during rush hour. She says she offered to pay the officer the regular price for changing a tire, but he refused. She commends the white officers for helping a person of color and finds that the type of gesture would iron out racial differences.
A letter writer from Morganton finds it a shame and a disgrace that North Carolina teachers had to beg for an increase in pay, when the foundation of the nation rested upon the children and the teacher, in many cases, was the only one who gave the children any training, when parents were working and children ran wild. Some counties were too poor to provide a satisfactory increase in salaries and the State ought assume that burden. She indicates that the choice was between better education or more prisons, with education being far cheaper. She had worked with prisoners and found it pitiful when talking to a group of them to have one say that if someone had told them what she was telling them, they would not be in prison. She urges asking representatives in the Legislature what they intended to do about increasing teacher salaries and that if they indicated that teachers were receiving adequate pay, people should not vote for them.
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