The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 12, 1957

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Newport, R.I., that White House press secretary, at a press conference this date, spoke with the authority of the President in denouncing "radio and television comment" which had reported that Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had "thrown in the sponge" regarding the use of the National Guard to bar black students seeking to enter previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. He said that the President still awaited word from Governor Faubus fixing a time for their scheduled meeting in Newport, where the President continued his vacation. The Governor had requested such a meeting the previous day to try to break the deadlock between the Federal District Court order to continue integration and the order of the Governor to the Guard to block it for the stated purpose of preserving peace and tranquility in the community, though to many observers, causing the outbreak of violence by stimulating certain whites given to protest the integration policy. The President had quickly accepted the Governor's suggestion and set a conference for the following afternoon or Saturday morning. Mr. Hagerty was in an angry mood when he started the press conference, saying that he and the President had been "listening to some radio and television comment" on the Governor's proposal and heard that "White House aides" were quoted as saying that the Governor was "throwing in the sponge". Mr. Hagerty said that they had also heard "a great deal of other junk" on the air and had deliberately refrained from making any such remarks and the reports were completely untrue. He said that he would appreciate it, as would the President, if the press would carry his remarks this date in full.

In Nashville, where a dynamite blast two days earlier had destroyed one of six elementary schools being integrated in their first-grade classes, school officials, hoping for a permanent end to violence, kept open the integrated schools this date, supported by police and the prospect of a court injunction. Mayor Ben West and U.S. Attorney Fred Elledge, Jr., prepared a petition for the U.S. District Court, seeking an injunction to prevent interference with integration in the schools. The same judge had ordered the integration of the first-grade classes on the prior Monday and a total of 15 black students had shown up for the first day of classes, with racial violence following immediately. It was shortly after midnight the next morning when the dynamite blast had occurred. Six men had been arrested for questioning in connection with it, and three of them, charged with possessing weapons, had been fine $50 each in City Court, and were bound over to a grand jury on state charges, maintained in custody under a $25,000 bond. Various weapons and detonating devices had been found in a car occupied by the men and they had been observed in the vicinity of the integrated elementary schools, as well as having attended a rally of segregationist John Kasper. The other three had been charged only with vagrancy.

Also in Nashville, Mr. Kasper had gone to work as a duster of the workhouse bars in the City workhouse this date, to which he had been committed the previous day after failing to pay a fine imposed by City Court of $200 for his part in demonstrations against the integration of the first-grade classes. He had been given until Friday to obtain a $450 appellate bond for release pending his appeal, and if he failed to do that or pay the $200 fine, he would spend 133 days at the workhouse. Officials of the facility said that if Mr. Kasper had dusted all of the bars in the place by that point, they would need dusting all over again.

Ann Sawyer of The News reports that the principal of Harding High School, J. R. Hawkins, had imposed a crackdown on students who had abused the only black student entering the school, a 15-year old girl who had been spat upon and hit with sticks and verbally abused on her first day of attendance the prior week, thereafter remaining out of school with a sore throat for two days and then returning on Monday for regular classes, with no further incidents having occurred, after which the pattern of abuse had begun again on Tuesday. Mr. Hawkins, in a prepared speech delivered via the school's public address system, told the 1,200 students of the school that actions similar to that of the previous day would not be tolerated. Two meetings with teachers were also planned for this date. The student had been kept at home this date by her parents, after someone in a group of white teenagers had hurled an object at her brother's car and broken the rear window, when he came to the school to take his sister home for lunch the previous day. The principal did not mention the girl by name, but referred to the misconduct of students and told them that it had to stop.

In New York, Mayor Marshall Kurfees of Winston-Salem, speaking on a national CBS radio broadcast, said, regarding Governor Faubus, that he did not think anyone was correct in defying the Federal Government. "I think we're supposed to have a government of laws and not of men, and … the Supreme Court is the last word when it comes to our laws… So, consequently, I don't think anybody should defy the government to the extent of carrying out the point." He pointed out that the Winston-Salem City School system had begun integration, at least as to one female student who had entered Reynolds High School the previous week, and said that they had not had any trouble at all and did not need any, would not have any, provided there was no outside interference. He said of Governor Faubus: "The Governor may be absolutely right in his conviction that he is trying to preserve law and order. But from all I've read in the papers, it doesn't seem to have that tendency."

Whether, incidentally, the notorious "Kurfees curve", carved around businesses on Hawthorne Road below the new I-40 being constructed through downtown Winston-Salem, and along which circuitous road, about a mile away, was Reynolds High School, was supposed to convey a subtle, symbolic reminder, in the nature of Nathaniel Hawthorne stories, to slow things down a bit when approaching the dark woods, wherein the Devil resides, so as not to wind up one of the Devil's own, is anyone's guess, subject entirely to subjective interpretation. Over the subsequent years, numerous motorists did not make the curve, and wound up off the guard rails down below in a service station parking lot or hanging off the edge, as the case might have been. Whether that may have been subconsciously stamped in our mind that spring morning on the way to school, albeit off the freeway at Stratford-on-Avon, not onto Hawthorne, when the left front wheel noticeably started wobbling as we approached our school, before finally breaking off the center of the rim just in front of the Moravian Church, as the right one had done, just as we crossed Robin Hood onto Avalon, three months earlier on the way from the shop where the engine had been overhauled, we could not say. In any event, these are things one picks up hanging around Bohemia, that is, Salem…

The editorial page is here. Marquis Childs tells of the Communist propaganda mill taking advantage of the situation in Little Rock.

Herblock has one of those quotes which we had to learn many years ago and attach to the speaker of it and provide its context, as we studied one January Sunday afternoon in the Ramada Inn in Charlotte, together with our Latin lessons, for the mid-year exams in same, with the quote in question clearly being from a dutiful cleaning woman, a scrubber, "the scrubber woman", engaged in ridding Duncan's murder scene of its aftermath, or, possibly, a woman who disliked an unruly cur dog and wished it out of Dunsinane Castle and banished to Birnam Wood. But we had no idea that Nikita Khrushchev was a viable alternative answer or we would have gone into the Cuban Missile Crisis and had a field day, leaving no time for the rest of the exam answers. "Screw your courage to the sticking place." —Screwtape Letters. Also, some football coach, circa '68. Maybe, Bill or Vince Dooley. You provide the context, beldams.

As we have fallen behind, full notes on the pages will be sporadic until we catch up.