The Charlotte News

Wednesday, July 24, 1957

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana had urged the Senate this date "in a spirit of reason" to convert the Administration's civil rights bill into a measure aimed primarily at protecting voting rights. Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey had said that "all of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are of equal standing", pleading for retention of power for the Attorney General to initiate civil rights suits to uphold the rights of children to attend non-segregated schools. The Senate was headed toward a mid-afternoon vote which would likely approve an amendment removing from the bill enforcement powers except for the protection of voting rights. Senator Mansfield, the assistant Democratic floor leader, said that Part III of the bill, which the amendment would strike, was "simply a resurrection of a Reconstruction statute. It can reopen old wounds, but it cannot heal them." Senator Case had argued that the "present criminal procedure appeals to the civil rights opponents simply because it doesn't work. The fact is experience has demonstrated that the punitive approach guarantees, not enforcement of the law, but its frustration." Two defeats the previous day for the bill's supporters had indicated that unless there was an unexpected shift, the Senate would adopt the amendment of Senators Clinton Anderson of New Mexico and George Aiken of Vermont to eliminate the authority for enforcement of civil rights in general under the bill. Senator William Knowland of California, the Minority Leader, had told newsmen that if that part of the bill were eliminated, there was "a possibility" that a modified substitute for it might be offered later, depending on whether the language could be found which would be "helpful" and which had sufficiently "widespread support". He and Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson said that after the vote on the Anderson-Aiken amendment, they anticipated that the Senate would consider proposed amendments to the part of the bill which would set up a presidential civil rights commission. Senator Knowland had told reporters that he did not believe opponents of the jury trial amendment had lost any votes as a result of the contempt conviction the previous day of seven persons accused of violating a Federal Court injunction against interference with desegregation in Clinton, Tenn. Some other Senators had taken the view, however, that the convictions were a powerful rebuttal to arguments that convictions in civil rights cases could not be obtained from Southern juries.

In Knoxville, Tenn., the attorneys for John Kasper and six Clinton segregationists convicted of contempt, vowed this date to appeal the verdicts. They were obviously stunned by the verdicts returned the previous day by an all-white jury, saying that they had lost a skirmish but not a battle. The court had deferred sentencing pending argument on a new trial motion to be filed by the defense, providing counsel until August 14 to file the motions. The convicted defendants faced a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. There was evident some bitterness at Clinton, along with some shock and satisfaction regarding the verdicts. The previous fall, a dozen black students had been enrolled in Clinton High School along with about 800 white students. It was the first State-supported school in Tennessee to have integration following the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. Initially, everything had gone smoothly in the desegregation efforts with one black student having been elected chairman of her classroom. But then violence had flared up and mobs formed, producing rioting. The Reverend Paul Turner had been badly beaten after he had escorted six black students past segregationists to the school the prior December 4. Six males and one female had been convicted of criminal contempt in the case for violating the Federal court order against interference with desegregation of the high school, including a service station operator, an unemployed man, a carpenter and itinerant preacher, a farmer, a machinist, and a housewife, along with Mr. Kasper, the organizer of the anti-segregation effort. Four of the remaining defendants had been found not guilty by the jury, comprised of ten men and two women. Knoxville was a predominantly Republican community, and unlike the rest of the state, had sent men northward during the Civil War to fight on the side of the Union. The Assistant Attorney General of Louisiana, William Shaw, who had been a member of the defense team during the trial, said, "There won't be any convictions by juries in segregation cases down South." (Other reactions are set forth on page 2, though none are provided from defense counsel and future Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett.) Five other original defendants had already been dismissed from the case, four for insufficient evidence presented by the Government during its case-in-chief, and one because she was pregnant.

Seven previously all-white schools in North Carolina's three largest cities, Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, had the previous night taken an historic step to admit small numbers of black pupils the following fall, thus becoming the first of nine Southeastern states to initiate limited school desegregation. The Charlotte City School Board had voted to admit five black pupils to four white schools. Greensboro had voted to admit six black pupils and Winston-Salem had voted to admit one person, a female, to Reynolds High School, with two other approved applications to the same school having been withdrawn. (The latter student could now take pride in knowing that she, as with all of the other students at the high school, was a Black Demon.) An application of black pupils for transfer to white schools was pending in Raleigh, with action expected soon. Five applications from black students for reassignment to white schools had been presented to the Mecklenburg County School Board, but it had given no indication as to when it would act on them. Forty-one applications for reassignment had been rejected by the three boards, 35 of them in Charlotte. The Charlotte Board said in a formal statement that it had acted only "after earnest and prayerful consideration of the many complex factors involved." It said that its sincere desire had been to preserve the public schools of Charlotte and North Carolina. Some three dozen opponents of desegregation cheered a Charlotte citizen when he had told the Board, following its vote, that its action was an "outrage and a crime". The man in question was a leader in the Patriots of North Carolina, Inc., and the Patriots' Mecklenburg Chapter. He said that he was speaking "as a citizen", but the crowd of opponents obviously was composed largely of Patriots. He had presented the Board with a petition which he said contained 16,500 signatures opposing desegregation of the schools. Three black girls and two boys had been admitted to the City schools, one to the tenth grade at Harding High School, two to the seventh grade at Alexander Graham Junior High, one to the eighth grade at Piedmont Junior High, and one to the 11th grade at Central High School. All three of the school boards had acted pursuant to the Pupil Assignment Act of 1955, as amended by the 1956 special session of the General Assembly. The Act authorized and directed local school boards to assign pupils to specific schools "so as to provide for the orderly and efficient administration of such public schools, the effective instruction of the pupils therein enrolled, and the health, safety and general welfare of such pupils." The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had denied approval of Virginia's pupil assignment act because it was backed by strict segregation laws, had ruled that the North Carolina law was not "unconstitutional on its face." Col. William T. Joyner, vice-chairman of the Governor's Advisory Committee on Schools, which had formulated the Pearsall Plan and the Pupil Placement Act, said that he thought that some mixing in some of the schools was inevitable and would have to occur, that the admission of less than one percent of black children to schools previously attended only by white children, was a small price to pay for the continued operation of the public schools and to keep the mixing "within the bounds of reasonable control". Appearances the previous night by the Patriot leaders at the board meetings in Charlotte and Greensboro indicated that the group of segregationists would spearhead the opposition to the limited desegregation efforts. The leader of that effort in Charlotte had vowed that the Patriots would fight to close the desegregated schools.

In Raleigh, parents of a black youth seeking admission to a white high school had reported this date that they had received a bomb threat. The person had called on their telephone the previous day and stated, "If you don't quit sending messages to the School Board", they would have their home bombed. It had been one of two messages received by the mother of the student the previous day, the other coming from a woman who informed her that she did not want her son going to school with her children. The father had reported the phone calls to the police. The family lived only a few blocks from Needham Broughton High School, to which their son was seeking entrance.

The Government's cost of living index, produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had risen a half of a percent in June to reach its tenth record high in as many months. The report meant that some 650,000 workers in the electrical manufacturing, aircraft, trucking and construction industries would have their pay increased by between two and four cents per hour under contracts which followed the consumer price index. The purchasing power of the average worker's weekly earnings had been declining all year because of price increases and shorter working hours, but in June, that trend had been halted at least temporarily, and the Bureau had stated that spendable earnings had increased by about one percent or 65 cents per week. Food prices had been reported to have jumped 1.4 percent from May to June, the major factor in the advance which carried the consumer price index to 120.2 percent of the 1947-49 average. The average prices of all commodities except foods had risen by .2 percent and the cost of services, including transportation, laundry, repairs, medical bills and the like, also had climbed by .2 percent.

In New York, after night-long deliberations, an all-male jury reported during the morning that it was unable to reach a verdict in the union labor shakedown case against racketeer Johnny Dio. The jury was sent to bed and told to return for further deliberations the following morning at 11:00. The jury had deliberated for 13 1/2 hours since receiving the case the previous evening at 7:00. Mr. Dio and two union officials had undergone a month-long trial on charges of conspiracy to extort $30,000 from two companies anxious to keep labor peace. He had also been accused of engineering the acid-blinding attack on labor columnist Victor Riesel, with the trial of the latter case having been delayed indefinitely by refusal of prosecution witnesses to testify. Mr. Dio was also a target of the Senate Select Committee investigating union and management misconduct.

The House Interior Committee this date voted 16 to 14 to kill a bill to authorize Federal construction of the Hells Canyon dam on the Snake River.

In London, Harold Stassen this date told the five-power disarmament conference that he would submit the following day U.S. proposals on the future control of guided missiles and other rocket armaments.

At the Atomic Test Site in Nevada, the ninth shot of the Atomic Energy Commission's current test series had exploded this date. A Navy blimp was tethered on the test site within the blast area as part of a continuing study of blast and radiation effects. At a range of 4.75 miles, more than twice the distance from ground zero from which military observers were situated, 18 scientists withstood the blast in a heavy shelter, present to study instruments measuring blast and radiation effects.

In Wuerzburg, Germany, a U.S. Army courier plane had crashed while putting on a demonstration flight this date before about 40 German children, with two men having been killed in the crash.

In Trento, Italy, it was reported that Italian Alpine rescue teams had struggled slowly down the rugged face of peaks this date with the bodies of 11 U.S. airmen who had been killed when their twin-engine plane had plowed into a mountainside the previous Friday.

In London, Britain held up airstrikes against rebel tribesmen in the Persian Gulf Sultanate of Muscat and Oman this date after expiration of an ultimatum for them to call off an uprising.

In Lincoln, Ill., eight small boys were seized by police after they had allegedly thrown open a railroad switch so that they could "see a train turn over". Their target train had come to a halt just in time after the engineer spotted the open switch.

In Muncie, Ind., a crippled 80-year old retired railroad worker, said to be worried about who would care for him, had killed his landlady, wounded her daughter-in-law, and then taken his own life on Tuesday when asked to move from his rented room. The man had an artificial leg since losing both legs in a boyhood railroad accident. The wounded daughter-in-law was reported to be in serious condition in a hospital. The daughter of the 75-year old landlady who was killed had witnessed the shootings and told police that her mother had asked the man to give up his room because she felt that she was getting too old to care for it.

In Detroit, a 35-year old truck driver had borrowed the previous month four thousand dollars to purchase a small white bungalow. Before he had moved his wife and two children into the first home of their own, he decided to install a basement and paid a contractor $600 down on a job which would cost $2,550 to do so. But the house slipped off supporting jacks and crashed into the basement excavation. He then received a note from the City informing him that his bungalow constituted a hazard and would have to be removed. For $350, a wrecking crew had hauled it away. The man then paid another $1,000 for the purchase of a brick home, which was then condemned as part of the route of a new expressway. For another $1,000 he contracted to have the house moved and paid $500 for lifting utility wires along the route. The moving date was scheduled for the following week, but it was found that the lot was 30 feet wide and building codes required a house to be at least 3 feet from the lot line, with the blueprint showing that the house was 25 feet wide, which meant that it was a foot too wide on one side to afford adequate clearances. The City Council the previous night, however, after hearing the plight of the man, said that it would consider waiving the restrictions provided the neighbors did not complain. The man said that a neighbor on one side appeared a little reluctant and that the other wanted to consult an attorney before committing himself. The man concluded that it seemed "to be the house that Jack didn't build."

In London, the meeting of the American Bar Association had contributed the previous night to an Englishman's thirst. After standing in a long line of delegates, registering at the Savoy Hotel for the meeting, the man finally reached the head of the line, indicating his order of a whiskey and soda, to which the man behind the desk said that he was sorry but that it was the American Bar Association, that what he wanted was the American bar on another floor.

On the editorial page, "The School Board's Painful Decision Must Be Respected and Supported" tells of a study by the Charlotte City School Board having resulted in a decision to authorize admission of five out of 40 black applicants to white schools in the coming fall term.