The Charlotte News
Monday, September 3, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Clinton, Tenn., that National Guardsmen with fixed
bayonets had overawed a new mob, mainly comprised of teenagers, late
the previous night, turning back threats of renewed anti-integration
riots in the town for the time being. The last remnants of the
boisterous mob had gone home early this date after defiantly
gathering before 633 National Guardsmen who had arrived in town the
previous morning with ten tanks and a helicopter. The crowd had risen
to 1,500 around the Anderson County Courthouse by the evening, and
for awhile, a riot threatened, the tension reaching its highest point
with the appearance of a black sailor on the street, which brought a
third of the crowd surging after him with hoots and threats,
following him to a service station a block from the courthouse
square, where a lone military policeman stood off the mob until
fellow Guardsmen came to his aid, rescuing the man with five
jeeploads of Guardsmen. Shortly afterward, half of the contingent of
Guardsmen, 300 men, had been deployed into lines flanking the crowd
on the square. The crowd, definitely much younger than those of
previous nights, had then begun to thin out. At the peak of the melee
on the square, someone had set fire to a cross in the passageway
connecting Clinton High School with its gymnasium, but the fire had
gone out before firemen had arrived. The protests were regarding the
admission a week earlier of 12 black students among the 796 white
pupils at the high school, setting off a week of growing lawlessness,
climaxed by violent mob scenes the prior Friday and Saturday nights.
It was the first high school integrated within the state of
Tennessee, so ordered by a Federal court pursuant to the petition of
black parents of students seeking admission to the school, a petition
which had been pending since 1951, initially denied as the Federal
District Court had found that, under the Plessy v. Ferguson
doctrine then in effect, there were separate but equal facilities for
black students, but then reversed in favor of the black
parents in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education
decision of 1954, overturning the Plessy doctrine. It was the
first forced desegregation of a Southern state's secondary school
system which had not been preceded by voluntary desegregation. The
community of 4,000, with few black residents, had unexpectedly become
the battleground for forces larger than itself. Previously, black
students in the county had been bused 20 miles away to a black high
school. John Kasper, 26, of Washington, the executive secretary of the
Seaboard White Citizens Council, had entered the community the prior
Tuesday night, addressing 500 people that night and another 800 the
following night, seeking to stir up racial hatred and unrest against
the admission of the black students. He had been sentenced the
previous Friday to one year in jail for violation of a Federal
District Court temporary restraining order issued against him and others, prohibiting, either by words, acts, or otherwise, further hindrance, obstruction, or interference with the carrying out of the court's order to integrate the high school and against picketing in front of it, directing Mr. Kasper to appear on the following day in the court at Knoxville to show cause why a preliminary injunction should not issue—his contempt citation and sentence to be affirmed on appeal the following June by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on the basis that once a court order issues, it has to be obeyed until reversed on appeal, regardless of whether it is ultimately held constitutional, the Court also holding, however, the speech of Mr. Kasper not to have been within the ambit of First Amendment protected speech as he advocated "immediate action to accomplish an illegal result" by others, to violate the injunction ordering integration of the high school. (In a subsequent contempt case arising in 1957 out of separate and distinct actions alleged against Mr. Kasper and others to have occurred the subsequent November and December, 1956, he and his co-defendants would again be found guilty, this time by a jury, and the case would again be affirmed in 1959 by the Sixth Circuit, with lead co-counsel for Mr. Kasper's co-defendants on appeal having been future Mississippi segregationist
Edward R. Murrow would present the
following January 6, on his "See It Now"
In Fort Worth, Tex., police the previous night had dispersed an angry, yelling mob of 150 white persons who had threatened a black family who had just moved into a previously all-white residential block of the Riverside section of the city. The crowd, yelling, "Get those niggers," hung the effigy of a black person in front of the home of the family, the father of whom sat with a rifle at his front window, keeping the mob at bay most of the afternoon and night. Shortly after the effigy was hung, a shot had rung out from the home of the family, and when a youth claimed that the bullet had struck the hood of his car, the crowd began howling and throwing pop bottles at the house until the police chief and a dozen officers arrived, at which point they began moving back from the house. The chief ordered all people and cars cleared from the area and the mob quickly dwindled to a small group of about 35 persons, moving more than a block away, beyond a police barricade. The demonstrations had started the previous afternoon after a called meeting of residents of the neighborhood at an elementary school, where a man said that the presence of the black family was part of an "insidious plot" by the NAACP to get blacks to move into the school district, indicating that the time had come "for everybody to stick together and not let them come any further", cautioning against violence but indicating that a peaceful demonstration would be acceptable to show the sentiment of the people. The man had then gone to the home of the family to talk to the father, and the demonstrators had followed.
In Ingalls, Okla., 63 years earlier, 13 U.S. deputy marshals had come to the village to wipe out the Dalton-Doolin outlaw gang, who had noted the arrival of the officers in a covered wagon and split up to trap them, with the result having been that three marshals were killed or fatally wounded and six of the outlaws were shot, though all had recovered. Some 200 former residents from a dozen states had returned to the village the previous day to observe the anniversary of the gunfight, with the usual friendly pro-outlaw and pro-marshal arguments having gone unsettled. During the day, a bronze plaque, bearing the names of the slain officers, had been dedicated by the 50 townsfolk and visitors. The plaque, along with historical documents and items, were to be set permanently into a stone monument. The celebrants had also dedicated a highway marker telling of the incident. The secretary of the Oklahoma Historical Society gave the dedication speech, explaining that the gang had used the town as a retreat after train and bank robbing forays, until the intrusion by the Federal officers. The deputy marshals had entered the town via covered wagon because it appeared to be the most inconspicuous method, given that the Cherokee strip to the north was to be opened to land seekers 16 days later, on September 16, and many of them were passing through Ingalls in covered wagons. The marshals had successfully gained entry to the town, but when they had exited from the wagon, the gang members spotted them and word was quickly passed, as five of the gang moved to the south while the rest took up sniping positions in second-story windows.
In Hong Kong, it was reported that Communist China this date had admitted shooting down a U.S. Navy plane and its 16 crewmen off the Chinese coast the previous month, but declared that the attack had been justified because it had occurred in a "combat area". A Foreign Ministry statement broadcast from Peiping had dismissed as "groundless and unjustified" a U.S. demand for compensation for the loss of the patrol plane and its crew, demanding that the U.S. halt "provocative activities" off of China's coast. U.S. officials had announced that the plane had been lost early on August 23 while engaged in a routine patrol flight over international waters, and that in a subsequent search, wreckage had been sighted 100 miles southeast of Shanghai, with two bodies having been recovered, and no survivors found.
In Detroit, Adlai Stevenson pledged this date to fight the "ugly patches of poverty and insecurity" which he said still denied dignity and decency to "almost one-fifth of all American families." He accused the Republicans of "blindness" toward depression on the farm, unemployment in factories and a cost of living "rising to an all-time record high point." He called again for a program for a "new America" in a speech prepared for delivery at a Labor Day rally in Cadillac Square, saying that, like unemployment in Michigan's automobile industry, "inflation offers a stern warning that too much of our current prosperity has been borrowed from the future on the easy payment, buy-now-and-pay-later plan." He promised to provide in detail during the campaign his plans for the "new America", based on "expanded programs of unemployment insurance, worker retraining, guaranteed annual wage" and other programs. He advocated a somewhat more moderate plan of prepaid medical insurance than that which had been proposed by the Truman Administration, not providing details, but saying that his program would encourage "formation of comprehensive plans of private, voluntary, prepayment health insurance." Under it, he said there would be "provisions enabling the purchase of such insurance by families who are themselves now unable to afford it." He endorsed proposals to raise the minimum wage above the recently enacted one dollar per hour, higher unemployment benefits such as those recommended by Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams, Federal aid for distressed economic areas, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, Federal aid for schools and the training of teachers. In a subsequent speech, drafted for delivery before a meeting of Polish War Veterans, Mr. Stevenson contended that Secretary of State Dulles and other Republicans had sought to obtain votes in 1952 by "a partisan falsification of history," implying the enslavement of Eastern Europeans to have been the fault of the Democratic leadership "rather than of Communist perfidy."
It was anticipated that those returning home after the Labor Day weekend this date would bring the steadily rising traffic toll for the long holiday weekend of 78 hours to a total possibly breaking the record set in 1951 of 461 for the weekend. Associated Press figures showed that at least 310 traffic fatalities, 45 drownings and 44 miscellaneous fatalities had amounted to the overall total of 399 dead thus far from accidents. The holiday would run through midnight this date. The president of the National Safety Council said that he believed without question the toll would break the 1951 record. The Council had predicted that there would be 480 traffic deaths during the weekend. He urged drivers to team with law enforcement officers in an effort to keep down the death toll to no more than 350, a normal death toll for a non-holiday three-day period in early September. The Labor Day weekend was normally second only to the Christmas holiday period as the deadliest of the year. The previous year, the Labor Day traffic death toll had numbered 438, with 81 drownings and 92 miscellaneous deaths, for a total of 611. The total number of accidental deaths in 1951 had been 658.
In Oklahoma City, a new American speed record of more than 1,000 mph was to be announced this date during the final performance of the National Aircraft show. The plane which had set the record, an F8U Crusader, would be presented in an aerial demonstration at the show, piloted by Commander Robert Windsor, who had set the record in the plane in California. He would seek to duplicate the record run this date as part of the trophy race. The existing record was 822 mph set in August, 1955, by an Air Force F100 Super Sabre. A new Air Force plane, the Lockheed F104 Starfighter, described as "a missile with a man in it", would be displayed, and two other new Air Force planes, the McDonnell F101 Voodoo and the Convair F102 delta-wing interceptor, would be demonstrated for the first time before the public at the air show.
In Hamden, Conn., police officials examined the details of the kidnaping of a six-week old infant girl, but admitted that they had nothing solid in the way of clues to the abductor. The prosecutor said they were pinning their hopes on the conscience of the woman they believed had snatched the infant from her carriage outside a crowded department store the prior Saturday, that he believed it was not a kidnaping for ransom but rather by a woman who deeply needed a baby or that the baby had been stolen for sale, though indicating the latter scenario was unlikely. The FBI had officially entered the case the previous afternoon, 24 hours after the kidnaping, as permitted by Federal law pursuant to the presumption after 24 hours that the kidnaping involved interstate flight. For six hours, 600 volunteer searchers, including off-duty milkmen and Boy Scouts, had scoured swamps, fields and gullies during the course of a fine rain, while small ponds were drained and rivers dragged, without turning up clues. Meanwhile, the parents of the infant continued to make television and radio appeals for the safe return of their child.
In Bombay, India, it was reported that the official count of the dead had climbed to 112 in a train wreck of the previous day in central India, and officials said that the toll might rise higher. The engine and two passenger cars of the train had crashed over a bridge into a flooded river, hurling passengers from their sleep to sudden death. The train crew and 22 passengers in two of the cars had escaped alive, but were injured. It had been the second rail disaster in the state of Hyderabad in the previous two years, the first having been on September 28, 1954, killing 137 persons, the worst rail disaster in India's history, that wreck, as the one the previous day, apparently having been caused by floods weakening a railway bridge.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the following Saturday, there would be a special election regarding the Pearsall Plan, with three additional proposed changes to the State Constitution also on the ballot. The Pearsall Plan, passed by the July special session of the Legialture, consisted of a proposed amendment authorizing education expense grants for private education and local votes to suspend operation of local public schools. In addition, there was a proposed amendment on the ballot changing the number of days for which a member of the General Assembly could be paid and authorizing expenses for members while engaged in legislative duties, an amendment changing the date for convening the General Assembly from January to February, and an amendment authorizing a married woman to exercise powers of attorney conferred upon her by her husband.
In North Hollywood, Calif., television's culinary expert, chef Joe Milani, had presented to his bride, Miss Utah of 1936, a one-ton wedding cake. She had been his business manager for the previous year and he had earlier promised to bake her the largest wedding cake in history, utilizing 40 crates of eggs for the Italian rum cake, taking him a week to prepare. The questions are how long will it take the couple to consume it and how much will each weigh when they are done?
On the editorial page, "Elections Are Not Won in September" cautions Republicans that the election was not yet in the bag and that professional politicians, regardless of what they said in public, foresaw a much closer race than now appeared on the surface, amid regional issues, including lower farm income, the public power debate, soft spots in the economy, and the President's health.
In addition, American voters were fickle, susceptible to the type of political campaign being conducted by Adlai Stevenson and Senator Estes Kefauver, "a sort of glorified handshaking, whistle stopping marathon." It finds that they were embarking on a campaign which made 1952's campaign appear almost casual.
The Democratic campaign manager, James Finnegan, had analyzed the 1952 Republican majority in 14 states and argued that a relatively slight shift in votes would put those states in the Democratic column, giving Mr. Stevenson 181 more electoral votes than in 1952, when he received only 89, enough to provide him a majority of 266.
It cautions that such figuring was no more than a political parlor game, as the votes first had to be won. But neither party could afford to sit on its hands until the November election, for it was said that the public was apathetic, making it the duty of both parties to awaken it.
Mr. Stevenson was free of former President Truman and no longer had to defend the Fair Deal as in 1952, could attack the Republican record while staking out his own claim on the future.
The President could not merely assume a defensive posture, as his position called for courage and initiative, needing therefore also to stake out a claim on the future, outside easy slogans and rhetoric.
"A Lesson in Star-Spangled Irony" finds the U.S. Information Agency's "salute to immigrants" to have been a study in irony, coming in a year in which Congress had rejected 17 separate requests by the President to liberalize Federal immigration laws.
The New World had been made richer by the efforts of immigrants. Included in the salute had been the stories of orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini, Dr. Selman Waksman, who had discovered streptomycin, Joseph Pulitzer, Dr. Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and former Senator Robert Wagner, Sr., of New York, who had come to the country as a German immigrant.
But many of the distinguished individuals might never have been permitted into the country under the terms of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act and the Refugee Act of 1953, as well as other recent legislation. The 1952 act had been passed over the veto of President Truman and had later been described as "discriminatory" by President Eisenhower, who had consistently worked for improvements of it, rebuffed by Congress each time.
"Just as USIA preaches, it is a traditional American belief that a dynamic nation is built of many viewpoints, many enthusiasms and the absorption of new nationalities and creeds. In fact, a nation gains strength from the diversity within it." It concludes that members of Congress owed it to their consciences to rededicate themselves to those ideals in 1957 by drafting a national revision of "an inane, highly restrictive immigration policy."
"Woman Is Great and Shall Prevail" finds that the banning of female wrestlers in Oregon had checked the rise of women for the first time since the days of the suffragettes. A State Supreme Court decision, from which it quotes at length, had upheld a law forbidding public wrestling matches between women.
It finds uneasy admiration for the courage of the court but would not be surprised to hear that the justice announcing the decision had been pinned in effigy by an unemployed female tag team. It suggests that he should remember the bad time given John Knox, a Scot who had objected to having women in government during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, finding English troops breathing down his neck after proclaiming that "to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to His revealed will … the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice." He believed that women were blind, weak, sick, impotent, foolish, mad, frenetic, frail, impatient, feeble, inconstant, variable, cruel, lacking in the spirit of counsel and regimen, corrupt and venomed fountains from which could spring no wholesome water. He also doubted that men who were subject to the "counsel or empire" of their wives were worthy of public office.
It concludes that he, like the Oregon Supreme Court, had been involved in a lost cause, that the female was more deadly than the male, "therefore superbly equipped for the squared circle and the body politic. Mere laws are putty in their hands. Remember the 19th Amendment?"
A piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, titled "Thin Skins and Tender", tells of the Arizona Lath and Plaster Institute having called for cessation of use of "plastered" as a synonym for "inebriated", that linking their trade with overindulgence detracted from the "dignity of a respectable industry."
It reminds the members of the Institute that it had always heard it said "that this or that toss pot is stewed, boiled or fried, but never have we heard a Cordon Bleu alumnus or a member of the culinary workers union suggest that his tender feelings have thereby been lacerated." Carpenters and sculptors had not objected to the use of the term "chiseler" in a negative context, and the AMA had not sued for damages because adulterated merchandise or cropped photographs were said to be "doctored". People continued loafing or "soldiering" without offending bakers or soldiers.
"The plasterers, we say, are hypersensitive and are vainly betraying the fact by attempting to alter the language by resolution."
Drew Pearson was touring the Middle East and in his absence his partner, Jack Anderson, was writing the column, telling of AFL-CIO president George Meany's outspoken stand against segregation which might precipitate a Southern revolt inside the labor movement. Before going on record on the issue, he had read and ignored a confidential warning that "a major revolt" was brewing among Southern trade unionists, with talk of the formation of a Southern federation of labor based on segregation, according to the memo. They intended to tie it to the trade union element already represented in the growing White Citizens Council movement. The memo had estimated that there were more than 250,000 members of unions who had already been seriously affected by inroads made to organized labor by the White Citizens Councils in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina, warning that there were unlimited funds available from Southwestern oil and other interests for a movement aimed at the destruction of labor unions. It reported that workers in the Firestone Rubber plant, a Ford assembly plant and the International Harvester Co. at Memphis were beginning to constitute a majority of the White Citizens Councils and Pro-Southerners, Inc. Steelworkers at Fairfield, Tarrant City and Bessemer, Ala., were "the base" of the local White Citizens Councils, and in Montgomery County, the seven-man executive board of the Council included four union members. In Tuscaloosa, observers who had been present at the riot at the University of Alabama accompanying the admission of Autherine Lucy the prior February had reported that the demonstration had been organized and led by union members from nearby rubber, paper and steel plants, despite the denials of the rubber workers' local union that their members had participated.
The memo had concluded that there was very little new organization work which could be successfully undertaken in the South by the staffs of AFL-CIO in the face of the racial crisis, that the trade union movement would be set back between five and ten years by that crisis, that if and when an independent union movement based on segregation was launched, it would attract practically all of the white union membership, that without the leadership of the whites, the black members would fall away, and that some of the union leaders wanted to work out a method of operation which would permit them to live with the White Citizens Council movement, involving a public statement by the AFL-CIO president to the effect that there was room for dissent on the civil rights issue.
But, Mr. Anderson concludes, Mr. Meany, after digesting the memo, "clamped his teeth on his cigar and testified exactly the opposite at the Democratic Convention. Later he blasted both parties for 'weaseling' on the civil rights issue."
Julian Scheer of The News, having traveled the state off and on for two weeks in search of answers to the "school riddle", visiting a Scottish clan gathering, the Blowing Rock retreat of Senator Estes Kefauver, a tobacco market in Lumberton and a long safari through the Piedmont, says that he had rediscovered the face of the state. He finds it a good face, a sensitive face, a happy and worried face, much like the face of an M.D. from Ellerbe, which he called a "buggy stop" on a large farm, as he sat in a tobacco barn at night and watched the lightning skip across the sky, talking of rain and how it did not bother him too much anymore as he had an irrigation system on his farm which had cost $5,000. He said that farming was rough, however, and that he had considered going to Winston-Salem to obtain a job at the Western Electric plant as a guard.
Down the road in Roberdel near Hamlet, another man talked of schools, politics and nature. Roberdel was a strange town with a large, silent, window-smashed, haunted mill, "a town of people gently rocking on front porches at twilight."
The face also consisted of fascinatingly named towns such as Whynot, Marriage Hill, and Shoeheel Creek, sometimes missed by cartographers. It was also Laurinburg "with handsome, stately houses and tall, aged trees or quiet Maxton, an old watch shop or shanties on the wrong side of a railroad track." It was a large room at Southern Desk Co. in Hickory where shirt-sleeved draftsmen designed benches, tables and lecterns, or a line of people at the Cannon plant in Kannapolis asking for jobs. It was also a variety of colors, "the blue of the windows of a textile plant, the old red of a bricked mill, the sandy crown of a peach orchard, or the rich blue of the mountains."
There were dogs with no front legs, signs on restrooms in a tobacco warehouse saying "White Men", "Colored Men", "Indian Men", and yellow school buses creeping up dirt roads. It was a store on the side of the road near Lee's Mill consisting of three rooms, with a black woman using the middle room for a jukebox, an ice cream box, a counter, an ironing room for her laundry and the other two for bedroom and kitchen, while outside hung signs for Honey Bee Snuff and Black Maria Chewing Tobacco.
It was the Laurinburg-Maxton base with miles of trucks, tractors and Army vehicles lying idle, and a tent show in a small town with a barker walking the sidewalk, yelling, "Don't miss it, friends, don't you all miss it."
It was also "a small restaurant in Rockwell with good country style steak and a bar-be-que place near West End and cool water from a farmer's jug in mid-field at noontime."
Churches were everywhere, large and small, most with picnic tables in front or even a new church near Southern Pines, in keeping with the wealthy air of that community.
"Faces—they're seen in many forms like the women pumping water from a well, to the tune over a radio, to fill an electric washing machine and the face of a Negro woman cleaning the aristocratic estate of a couple near Robbins.
"Faces—the face of North Carolina is rediscovered.
"It's a good face."
A letter writer from Raeford finds the statesmanlike behavior of most of the Southern delegates at the recent Democratic convention in Chicago to have been strange in the nomination process of the vice-presidential candidate, suggests that Senator John F. Kennedy, "their strange choice, is an able and promising young Democrat to be sure; yet if there is anything in his background or public record to indicate his helpful and sympathetic attitude toward the South's problems, some earnest, diligent political prestidigitator will have to dig it up." Now, the state voters were faced with the Pearsall Plan, set for a referendum the following Saturday, to determine whether to ratify State Constitutional amendments to enable tuition grants for students to attend private schools and to enable school districts to abolish their public schools by popular vote rather than integrate them. The writer favors calling it "Operation Paper Bag" for it would hold water about as long as a good paper bag. It might frighten the timid and impress the law-abiding for a little while, but would not solve anything, as a democracy had to provide proportional representation and valid participation to all of its "worthy minority groups". He finds that it would not hurt the state's leaders to take a long, dispassionate and deliberate look at the upward progress of mankind, remembering the injunction, "Feed my lambs," from Sunday school.
A letter writer from Fayetteville presents an open appeal to Governor Luther Hodges, asking for his leadership, as there were those who would destroy the future of the children of the state. Governor Charles Aycock, at the beginning of the 20th Century, had undertaken a campaign to bring universal education to the state and it had made much progress since that time, but still ranked in the lower ten percent of all the states in educational standards. He thus wonders how Governor Hodges or anyone else could advocate closing a single school for any reason, but the Pearsall Plan did just that. He indicates that the Governor had been quoted as saying that abolition of the public schools and replacement by private schools would be a "last-ditch and double-edged weapon", with appalling results in "ignorance, poverty and bitterness." The writer urges the Governor to tell the people where he actually stood, "with the school burners or with the future of universal education of all North Carolina citizens." He urges adoption of some other plan which would not potentially close public schools.
A letter writer indicates that after a big day at Knoxville, Tenn., Adlai Stevenson and Senator Estes Kefauver had taken a ride with strong pro-segregation leaders of Tennessee and the Carolinas to Oak Ridge and Norris Dam, through a strong, pro-segregation and Republican part of the South which had furnished more volunteers to the Union Army during the Civil War than any other part of the nation. He finds the most interesting part of the trip to have been through Clinton, Tenn., where there was a major issue regarding integration of the public schools. Yet, the candidates had nothing to say about the race problem "the Supreme Court has created", that the approval of the Brown v. Board of Education decision by both Mr. Stevenson and Senator Kefauver had placed a gag on mentioning the race question, which the writer suggests was the most burning issue at present. At Harriman, Tenn., Governor Frank Clement said that Mr. Stevenson could skip the town, though not named for Averell Harriman, as Mr. Stevenson was in no mood to stop in it. He finds it was the way the Democrats had soft-pedaled the race issue and finds it to be interesting how the Republicans would handle it when they began campaigning in the South, whether they also would soft-pedal it.
He makes no sense, first blaming the Supreme Court for the violence and mob action in Clinton, Tenn., and then accusing both parties of soft-pedaling the racial issue, leading one to question what he wanted in the way of hard-pedaling, made more obvious in his prior correspondence with the newspaper.
A letter from the corresponding secretary of the Women's Auxiliary of the Mint Museum in Charlotte indicates their appreciation for the publicity given them by the newspaper.
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