The Charlotte News

Friday, September 27, 1957

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, in a by-lined piece by Associated Press reporter Relman Morin, that in Little Rock, Ark., Army paratroopers ushered the nine black students into Central High School for the third consecutive day this date, as white students, waiting at the front entrance, laughed and joked while the students came up the steps. No one booed, as one student had the previous day, and something akin to a cheer had arisen from amid the laughter of the white students. Over 200 white students, more than on previous days, had clustered on the steps and in front of the doors, as a lieutenant walked in front of the six black girls and three black boys, with one soldier following them, while they entered the school. The officer was carrying a pistol in his holster, but the soldier appeared to be unarmed. The same Army station wagon, with a jeep in front and another in back, had brought the black students to the school shortly before classes started. The superintendent of Little Rock schools reported that attendance this date was 1,450, a relatively small increase over each of the previous two days, meaning that about 550 students remained absent, compared to 600 the previous day and 650 two days earlier. Total calm settled over the area this date and no bystanders gathered outside the school. Traffic flowed smoothly and people in cars stopped slowing down to look as they passed the school. Four girls, accompanied by a woman, had emerged from the school building shortly after the black students had entered. The accompanying woman would not provide her name, but claimed to be the mother of all four girls, although they appeared to be approximately of the same age. She said that she was taking the girls out of the school for good. The girls remained silent when reporters asked them questions and they all had walked swiftly away. The number of paratroopers at their stations in the street fronting the high school or waiting with stacked rifles on the grounds below the front entrance had been sharply reduced this date. The total force, about 350, were still on the scene, according to officers. But there was no line of men, previously spaced at three-yard intervals, in front of the school as before. Only a few were manning the barricades at the streets on the north and south ends of the school, instead being lined up on the sidewalks, facing inward, on the side streets. It could not be discerned what the temper of the people was like in Little Rock or how it had been affected by the speech the previous night of Governor Orval Faubus, or what would occur when the paratroopers were finally withdrawn. A black official, who had asked not to be identified, said that they hoped that good will would spread from inside the school, indicating that there was hope that when word got out that the entering black students were decent and intelligent, the parents and friends of the white students would begin to accept them, but that there was no way yet to tell.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said this date that Governor Faubus had stated a falsehood in accusing the FBI of holding teenagers in Little Rock incommunicado for hours of questioning. The Governor had said in his television address the previous night that "teenaged girls have been taken by the FBI and held incommunicado for hours of questioning while their frantic parents knew nothing of their whereabouts." Mr. Hoover said that the Governor's statement in that regard was false, as had been his recent statement that the FBI had tapped his telephone. "No teenager or anyone else has been held incommunicado by the FBI for hours of questioning." He said that the FBI had talked to the students, including those whose names had been furnished to the Bureau by the Governor's counsel, to secure information regarding possible violence. He said that if the Governor had been interested in securing the truth rather than disseminating falsehoods, a telephone call to the Little Rock office of the FBI or to Mr. Hoover would have provided him with the facts.

Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker said this date that a canceled order for increased riot training of troops in the South would not be revived, not disclosing precisely what the order had said or the name of the person who had issued it. The Army had issued the order on Wednesday, the day after the President had sent the paratroopers to Little Rock, but the Secretary had personally killed the order the previous night within hours after it had become public knowledge. The Secretary said that the order might have been misinterpreted, and declined to discuss the matter further. Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson also commented, saying that there was nothing to cheer about in sending troops to Little Rock, but that there had been nothing else they could do. He also declined to discuss the riot training order.

In Raleigh, North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges had been placed in the role of peacemaker in the dispute over the deployment of Federal troops to Little Rock. Recently, in advance of the admission of 11 black students to previously all-white schools in Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, the Governor had warned that lawlessness or violence would not be tolerated, and there had been no serious incidents as the limited integration had transpired. The Governor was chairman of a committee of five Southern governors who would meet with the President at the White House the following Tuesday, their purpose being to persuade him to withdraw the Federal troops from Little Rock as soon as possible. He said that he had not wanted the job of leading the Southern governors, but felt that he had to accept it.

In Albany, Ga., a fire attributed to vandals had done damage estimated at nearly $300,000 to the Albany State College for Negroes early this date. Firemen, police and school officials agreed that two or three persons had been seen running from the building but they differed whether they were white or black. There was little doubt that the fire had been from an incendiary source. The one-story Hazard Training School, attended by some 250 black pupils and used by the College to train black teachers, was destroyed. While it was burning, a fire had broken out in a building housing the College auditorium and administration offices. The president of the College attributed the fire to vandals, indicating that it was communicated to him that white youths had been seen fleeing from that building. But a City police detective said that a fireman had a good look at the fleeing figures and that they were black. The detective said that officers intended to discover the identity of the white persons at the scene and to ask them how they had come to be there.

Before the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct in labor and management, Robert Scott, a former secretary-treasurer of the Michigan Federation of Labor and a former official of the Teamsters Union local in Michigan, testified this date that he had once been threatened with death because he refused to help a brother of Jimmy Hoffa in "getting in the rackets". Mr. Scott also told the Committee that he was once advised by Owen Brennan, an associate of Mr. Hoffa and president of Teamsters Local 337 in Detroit, that he "had better have his insurance paid up." (Mr. Brennan had pleaded the Fifth Amendment privilege the previous day and refused to testify.) Mr. Scott also testified that he believed officials of the union had hounded his wife to her death in 1946 with telephone calls threatening his life.

In Federal District Court in Washington, opponents of Mr. Hoffa and other present leaders of the Teamsters Union had won a preliminary battle in their effort to get an injunction to prevent an election of new officers at the following week's Teamsters convention in Miami Beach. A group of New York Teamsters, contending that delegates to the convention had been illegally selected to rig the election in favor of Mr. Hoffa, were seeking the injunction. The judge in the matter overruled a motion by union attorneys to quash the effort of the New York Teamsters.

In Miami Beach, Mr. Hoffa said this date that he had never favored providing retiring Teamsters president Dave Beck the position of president-emeritus of the union, but felt that a man who had been in organized labor for 35 years ought to make the decision regarding his own destiny.

The editorial page is here. "The Southern Sense Must Be Restored", indicates that one Southern politician had moaned that the President had forced the South to fit the mold of the "critical Southern caricature."

"He must have seen in his mind's eye the impetus given the Ku Klux Klan, the hate mongers and the passers of obscene pamphlets. He must have seen wise and temperate southern leaders forced into the fire of political opportunists eager to capitalize on fear, unrest and resentment. He must have seen all the large and small monuments to racial harmony shaking on their pedestals. He must have seen communities which have taken small steps toward compliance with unwanted law turning backwards in their tracks."

It finds it easy to see or feel such sentiments in reaction to the President's deployment of the Army paratroopers to Little Rock, as anyone understanding Southern regional pride and individualism knew "the enormity of the President's error." It finds it a pity that no one among the President's advisers could appreciate that Southern sense.

But the furies had been loosed and seeds of violence re-sown. "Open minds are snapping shut. The winds of self-righteousness blowing out of the North are whipping up the same force in the South. It is an old, old story—history repeats itself."

It suggests that it must have a new ending which the South would have to write, that to respond to the stereotyped image by replying in kind with "violence, smug self-righteousness and false prophets" would not be productive, that instead it was to be hoped that Southerners would follow their moderate leaders of state, regional and national standing, able to drive home to the nation some blunt truths, prime among which was the theory that "'forced integration'" inevitably would prove to be a fallacy. Those same leaders would also have to state some truths to the South, that ways had to be found to live with the law.

It finds that those types of leaders had emerged during the week, including Governors LeRoy Collins of Florida, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and Frank Clement of Tennessee, "with plans to bind rather belabor the wound." It believes that the South should keep them out front and give them the latitude required for constructive leadership.

Yet, for all its protestations, the President's deployment of the Army paratroopers had brought order from chaos in the situation in Little Rock, whereas Governor Faubus had given license to reactionary chaos from the lesser lights, whipped up by professional outsider John Kasper, against the dignified order which the nine black students had brought with them to the first day of school, as the Governor deployed the National Guard and then gave them orders to block entry to the black students on the first day of classes, September 4. The piece seems to be insisting on its version of moderation, letting Governor Faubus continue to proceed along his wayward course to prohibit the implementation of a Federal Court order, a course specifically set out in the implementing decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, leaving it to the Federal District Courts to make prudent decisions, based on perceived local conditions, to implement desegregation. It appears to forget that the defiance of the Court order was at the heart of the controversy, a standoff created by Governor Faubus between states' rights and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, the longstanding tension since the Founding, which ultimately had to conclude, not with white supremacy, but the supremacy of Federal law and the Constitution, in this case the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

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