The Charlotte News
Monday, March 2, 1959
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Moscow that the Soviet Union had renewed this date its call for a summit meeting on Berlin and Germany, but said that it would take part in a foreign ministers' conference if the West was not yet ready for a meeting of the heads of state. The Soviets suggested either that the heads of state or the foreign ministers ought meet the following month in Vienna or Geneva, agreeing in advance to complete their work within 2 to 3 months. In addition to the Soviet Union, the U.S., Britain, and France, Moscow urged the inclusion of Poland, Czechoslovakia and East and West Germany. The Soviet position had been set forth in notes delivered just prior to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan having conferred at the Kremlin with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, wherein they had talked for nearly 2 hours. In a speech prepared for delivery to Soviet television viewers, the Prime Minister declared that it was possible to achieve improved relations between Britain and the Soviet Union "if we can make a start and go forward step by step. Agreement on one thing leads to agreement on another. It's the first step that counts. That's why I'm here." He urged that the two nations should "avoid acts which disturb the existing position anywhere in the world to the other's disadvantage." The note this date to the U.S. had repeated earlier Soviet warnings that Western use of weapons to maintain the present occupation status of West Berlin would lead to war. Moscow had threatened to turn its own occupation functions over to the Communist East Germans on May 27, unless agreement was reached with the Western Big Three. The Western allies feared that the Communist East Germans would then try to cut off West Berlin from the non-Communist world. The Moscow radio summary said that the Soviets emphasized that there was now still a possibility of returning to four-power cooperation on the important question of Germany. The note had remarked, however, that a U.S. note on the subject of February 18 had expressed a determination to apply "all appropriate means" for maintaining occupation rights.
In Detroit, it was reported that the police commissioner this date had blamed discontent, including objection to integration in the Police Department, for an apparent slowdown strike by Detroit police in ticketing cars lacking renewed license plates. One factor, he said, was objection to integration orders, planning to place white and black officers in the same car. Police had issued only 60 tickets on Sunday to motorists who had failed to display new tags after the Saturday midnight deadline, whereas the normal number would be 800 on the first day after expiration. The commissioner said that any police officer found to have neglected his duty in issuing tickets would be suspended. Divisional commanders were ordered to investigate and take immediate action if warranted. The Detroit News had quoted one patrolman, who had asked to remain anonymous, as saying, "integration is the big beef." Other patrolmen complained of low pay. The police commissioner had conferred with precinct commanders and acknowledged that there was a move by patrolmen to withhold tickets, that officers in two precincts had issued hardly any tickets. He said that they had anticipated some difficulty with integration, as would occur whenever changes were made, but that they would wait and see what developed regarding that matter. Most of the police officers interviewed by newsmen had complained about wages and the integration order, putting into effect a 30-day pilot study at the Hunt Precinct Station. Two of the six scout cars at that station had been integrated the previous day. If successful, plans called for an extension of integration to other precincts. Under the new policy, white and black officers were to be assigned to scout car crews without regard to race.
In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that the appearance of extra police officers and a cold rain had helped to hold down violence in the Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mill strike this date. Only three incidents of brick-tossing had been reported at the mills' South Henderson plant and everything had been quiet at the North Henderson plant. The strike of the Textile Workers Union of America had entered its 16th week this date, with management's desire to eliminate an arbitration clause in the contract which had expired November 15 being the primary issue. It appeared that some 15 extra officers from neighboring counties and towns were on hand this date when the single shift reported for work early in the morning. It was also payday for between 200 and 300 workers who had elected to return to work, a factor which officers feared might cause more trouble. The mayor the previous day had again appealed for an end to violence, saying that the series of explosions, bottle throwings and other violence had caused "everyone here to be jittery". It had been indicated that the Senate Rackets Committee, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, might investigate the strike. The mayor said that he would welcome such an investigation as soon as possible. About 30 strikers had called on the mayor during the morning and protested importation of five police officers from nearby Oxford, who had been posted at the South Henderson mill. The mayor said that he had put those policemen on duty to protect life and property and to preserve the peace.
In Los Angeles, it was reported that police this date hoped for some clue which would lead them to an ailing kidnaped baby and a babysitter who had wanted a child of her own. The baby boy was one of twins born just eight weeks earlier to a widowed mother of six children. The infant had been missing since early on Saturday from its home in suburban Ontario. The mother had gone out Friday evening and when she returned shortly after midnight, the twin and the babysitter were missing but her other five children were still present. She told police that the babysitter, a woman of about 25 to 30, had identified herself by a particular name, but police had been unable to locate anyone of the name and believed it was not her real name. The mother said that the woman had offered to babysit for her, had told her that she was unmarried and said that it was too bad that a single woman who wanted a baby and could support one could not adopt one. The widow said that her baby had a severe cold and through police made a plea that the babysitter take good care of him, watch his cold and bring him back to her. The baby's formula was broadcast.
In Vancouver, Wash., it was reported that a pair of high school youths, scared, chilled, but uninjured, had been hoisted the previous night from a precarious perch midway up a sheer 325-foot cliff to safety. The youths had been trapped for six hours by crumbling rock, had begun to climb, hoping to climb a ladder which they thought had been built into the cliff as part of a dam construction project, but there was no such ladder. They began their climb late on a warm afternoon without jackets and wearing only cotton shirts. After the sun had gone down and as they clung to the cliff, the youths had been chilled by icy winds from the Lewis River Canyon. Seven men from the Mountain Safety & Rescue Council of Oregon had come from Portland some 50 miles southwest of the area to rescue them. When the two boys were pulled up, they drank coffee, ate sandwiches, warmed themselves at a bonfire and drove home in their own car. The boys said that they had started late in the afternoon to climb the cliff which was man-made during the construction of the Pacific Power & Light Co's. Yale powerhouse and dam just 100 feet downstream. They said they got about halfway up and then the rocks had started breaking up and they realized they could not go that way. They said they did not begin to worry until about midway through the ordeal, when one of them had twice shouted that he was beginning to slip. The other had a pretty good foothold and thought that he could have stopped his friend, but would have hated to try. The leader of the rescue party said that they had worked from the top, facing "terrific danger from the rock—wet and slippery."
A piece indicates that when the North Carolina Legislature would come to Charlotte on Wednesday, it would be the first time in the history of the state that the governing body had ever been airlifted. Not all of the members of the legislative party would come by plane, as 40 members and their wives would travel by bus. The trip was sponsored by the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. The legislators would view many important projects in the community on their way from the airport to Ovens Auditorium, where they would meet.
Julian Scheer and Jerry Reece of The News report that the County Commission this date had gone on record as being "bitterly opposed" to four sections in the proposed bill for City-County school consolidation. At the same time, a meeting of a joint school board committee with members of the Mecklenburg General Assembly delegation, had found the lawmakers in general agreement on most points of the bill.
Emery Wister of The News reports that sun and warm air had brought spring back to the city this afternoon after a surprise snowstorm had given the city a late taste of winter during the morning. The Weather Bureau predicted continued improvement, with gradual clearing of skies during the afternoon and this night, with the following day being only partly cloudy. It had been 32 degrees during the morning and the mercury would fall again to that level the following morning, with a high of 58, six over this date's forecast 52. The Bureau blamed a low pressure area which mixed with cold air from the north to cause the snowstorm, which had deposited 1.3 inches in an eight-hour period prior to mid-morning. Raleigh, Greensboro, Columbia, S.C., and other cities had reported some snow but none had as much as Charlotte. Asheville and Knoxville had escaped without any snow.
Chase Walker, in this date's edition of "Lenten Guideposts", indicates that Dr. Benjamin Spock's long career in the training of children had given parents some of their best guidance. He had asked him in Cleveland: "Why do teenagers from apparently good homes get into such terrible trouble?" He replied thoughtfully: "I'm glad you specified 'apparently'. There can be a difference between a good home and a respectable home, you know. In a respectable home, there may be little love—or none at all. Teenagers from a truly good home, a home full of warmth and affection, will rarely get into serious trouble." He had asked him whether the definition included religion and he said that it certainly did, that, "A family that loves God is usually made up of people who find it easy to love one another—and the opposite is also true." He had asked him why teenagers had a tendency to turn away from religion, and he had responded that they actually did not. "They turn away from authority and draw the line at what they consider hand-me-down rules of life. Today, abandoning religion is considered the 'intellectual' thing to do among college students, but this attitude passes. When I was in school several of the fellows refused to go to chapel, and I used to think I was surrounded by atheists. But when I met them later as husbands and fathers, they were all pillars of the church." Mr. Walker had asked whether withdrawal from religion was therefore a passing phase in teenagers, and Dr. Spock had responded that it usually was and often happened if parents used religion as a source of authority over the child, as teenagers resented strict supervision and tricks used to impose it. He also found that most teenagers were pleased that their parents cared enough about them to be prudently strict, but that the firmness ought be explained. "The daughter whose boyfriend is constantly criticized for having a bad reputation is apt to think: 'It isn't Tom they don't trust; it's me. All right. I'll give them something to worry about.' And then she may well go ahead and do something foolish. But when the firmness is explained in a family spirit of love, trust and understanding, there aren't parental headaches when the children go out more and more on their own." Mr. Walker had asked how a father could influence a child's religious attitudes, and Dr. Spock had responded that a father who was loving, patient and understanding, would teach his children by his conduct that obedience and discipline were a part of love. The child would accept that axiom and also accept it in his relation with God as he became more aware of religion in his life. He said that until age six or seven, the average child was rather willing to accept the authority of his parents and believed at that age that his father was the greatest man in the world. The remainder is on an inside page.
On the editorial page, "The New South: Some Came Running" begins with a quote from author James Baldwin: "This is a criminally frivolous dispute, absolutely unworthy of this nation; and it is being carried on in complete bad faith, by completely uneducated people."
It indicates that the Confederacy was suffering a second invasion by Northern armies, with the soldiers being writers, as hardly a week had passed that some journalist from the North did not turn up in the newsroom with a notebook, pencil and plans for an installment, offering it to the rest of America regarding the South, with each trauma needing to be meticulously recorded.
But it finds that Mr. Baldwin had been different, as he was not a reporter but a distinguished novelist. "He seemed less interested in miscellaneous facts than in broad impressions. Also, he managed an amazing detachment when discussing the role of the Negro in Dixie's social ferment. This could not have been easy, for James Baldwin is himself a Negro and also an extremely thoughtful and sensitive individual."
He had gathered his broad impressions quickly and quietly and then gone to Atlanta. Now, many months later, he was sharing the results of his Charlotte visit with the readers of several upper-middlebrow and highbrow journals. That which he had written for publication thus far was as disheartening to sensitive Southerners "as the polished rant of a particularly adroit white supremacist."
He had written in the current issue of Partisan Review, the nation's leading "little" literary magazine (also contained in Chapter 6 of his 1961 collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, under its original title, "Letter from the South"): "Before arriving in Atlanta I spent several days in Charlotte, North Carolina. This is a bourgeois town. Presbyterian, pretty—if you like towns—and socially so hermetic that it contains scarcely a single decent restaurant. I was told that Negroes there are not even licensed to become electricians or plumbers. I was also told, several times, by white people, that 'race relations' there were excellent. I failed to find a single Negro who agreed with this, which is the usual story of 'race relations' in this country. Charlotte, a town of 165,000, was in ferment when I was there because, of its 50,000 Negroes, four had been assigned to previously all-white schools, one to each school… I saw the Negro schools in Charlotte, saw, on street corners, several of their alumnae, and read about others who had been sentenced to the chain gang. This solved the mystery of just what made Negro parents send their children out to face mobs. White people do not understand this because they do not know, and do not want to know, that the alternative to this ordeal is nothing less than a lifelong ordeal…"
It finds that his "impressions" were always firmer and more vivid than the "facts", for instance, the existence of chain gangs was "a fine, foamy impression. But it is not a fact. Likewise, it makes interesting reading that Negroes may not be licensed as electricians or plumbers in Charlotte. But it is not a fact." Those and other distortions would not bother it particularly if they had not supported a "superstructure of unreasoning racial prejudice." It finds that Mr. Baldwin was guilty of the same charges which he hurled at white men: "Blind hatred of another race. It is Jim Crow in reverse and the choices are truly black or white with no in-between."
It finds that, prior to his tour of Charlotte and Atlanta, he had taken the reader on a series of fairly incredible recollections to make it perfectly plain where his literary journey would lead, stating: "I remembered the Scottsboro case, which I followed as a child… I remembered the soldier in uniform blinded by an enraged white man, just after the Second World War… I remembered Willie McGhee, Emmett Till and the others. My younger brothers had visited Atlanta some years before. I remembered what they had told me about it. One of my brothers, in uniform, had had his front teeth kicked out by a white officer. I remembered my mother telling us how she had wept and prayed and tried to kiss the venom out of her suicidally embittered son. (She managed to do it, too; heaven only knows what she herself was feeling, whose father and brothers had lived and died down here.) I remembered myself, as a very small boy, already so bitter about the pledge of allegiance that I could scarcely bring myself to say it, and never, never believed it."
It suggests that perhaps the "dose of the white man's own medicine" was deserved, with hatred being returned in kind. "But 'the white man' is not all white men—no more than 'the Negro' is all Negroes. There are Southerners of both races who look with love and hope at their region. There are whites who are working quietly and courageously to advance the cause of social justice in the South—not out of any sense of superior benevolence, as Mr. Baldwin scornfully suggests, but because they are simply being faithful to democratic ideals. There are Negroes who share the same ideals and can work with understanding and in harmony with other Southerners to achieve them. There is a plurality of idealism and truth that crosses racial lines and it is the quintessence of democracy."
It concludes that the South had many problems and was inhabited by many different types of people, with there being present evil as well as good. "The good is worth preserving and it is worth encouraging. The blind haters of both races can preserve nothing but the evil."
Mr. Baldwin would return to Atlanta some 20 years later to investigate and write penetratingly of the child-murders case, involving the murders of 28 persons, in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, published in 1985, the case in which Wayne Williams was arrested in 1981 and subsequently convicted of two of the murders, both adults, in 1982, a conviction which Mr. Baldwin calls into question for it having been based primarily on fiber evidence and mixed, questionable eyewitness testimony.
Another of the essays from Nobody Knows My Name, appearing in the book as "Eight Men", a review of Richard Wright's book of stories
"Lovelorn
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Live and Learn", finds that but for a rhubarb between Florida's State librarian and Governor LeRoy Collins, they would not have known that Horatio Alger's books still were in print, let alone those of the Bobbsey Twins. It was not because it belonged to the callow school which insisted that hardly any Americans could read anymore, indicating that it could not afford to take such a view, being in the writing business. But it was fairly well convinced that no red-blooded contemporary read anything milder than Mickey Spillane. "And we did feel that since Mr. Spillane stopped writing a few years ago, the TV audience was bound to grow after people got tired of reading his books a third and a fourth time."
So it blesses the young for reading Horatio Alger, the Rover Boys and Tom Swift, and it was glad that Governor Collins had not let the State librarian ban them, as they led to better things. It finds that only one writer could drive a young reader more quickly to Vanity Fair or Huckleberry Finn, that being James Fenimore Cooper, who had tried to bore a nation with Natty Bumpo. "Culture still has a future—in Florida, too."
Drew Pearson indicates that one factor behind the increased number of near collisions between airplanes was the failure to equip the airports with up-to-date radar facilities, that other factors included crowded airways and the intrusion of military planes. But officials who controlled air traffic stated that the air traffic control centers did not have the radar facilities to ensure maximum safety. It was true of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Indianapolis, Detroit and Atlanta. Nine of the Federal Aviation Agency's 26 traffic control centers were not equipped with radar. The FAA control center in Washington at National Airport, one of the busiest in the nation, was still using a radar scope viewing screen, known as a VG-1, which had been produced for the Navy by General Electric for use on airplane carriers and battleships during World War II. It was so obsolete that G.E. no longer was making tubes for the device.
Early in January, the FAA had installed a completely new ARSR-1 radar device in Washington produced by the Raytheon Corp. The new receiver, antenna and transmitter equipment were excellent, but had a vertical viewing screen so that the little plexiglas markers which showed where planes were located would slide off. Control towers could keep those markers on horizontal screens, but not on vertical screens. So the ARSR-1 radar viewing screen, which had cost $15,000 each, remained largely idle.
FAA controllers in Washington had to fall back on the obsolete VG-1, which had a horizontal viewing screen on which the plexiglas markers could be moved about to chart the location of aircraft in flight. The situation was not confined to Washington, as FAA safety controllers had the same problems and inferior equipment to work with all over the country.
One reason for the outmoded radar equipment had been the heavy emphasis on military aviation while the unique radar needs of civilian aviation had not kept pace with the enormous increase of air traffic at all altitudes and in all directions. One air safety engineer had said that even with the best radar equipment, it was unlikely that they could guarantee maximum air safety, recognizing that there was a human factor in safety, but that the main problem at present was that there were too many planes in the air for them to maintain constantly under control. Added to that was the increasing number of military jets in the air which were difficult to track on a radar scope, particularly the fighter-type jets, plus the peak-hour flying volume by the commercial airlines, geared to passenger convenience rather than traffic conditions.
Doris Fleeson indicates that the problem of nepotism had arisen to bother the new Congress. The practice, prevalent for some time, was not so much the issue as the negative publicity which attended it. The publicity had resulted in an emotional speech on the floor by freshman Representative Steven Carter of Iowa, who had placed his 19-year old son, a student at George Washington University, on his payroll as his principal assistant at a salary of $11,873 per year. Mr. Carter had announced that he was cutting his son's salary in half and apologized for any inconvenience which the publicity had caused the other members, explaining that he had been diagnosed with cancer, which had clouded his judgment.
Representative Leonard Wolf, also a freshman Congressman from Iowa, had announced that he was reducing his wife's salary from $13,334 per year to $12,000.
In the case of Mr. Carter, it had been his son's youth and inexperience which had attracted attention, but the Congressman had still authorized payment for his son greater than normal salaries in his district and likely greater than that of most of the reporters who were covering the story.
The House revealed its payrolls while the Senate did not. There was also nepotism in the Senate, equally as scandalous as that revealed in the House, but the truth was often hard to obtain from the latter body. Hurried reporters had scanned the House payrolls and copied down family names, similar to those of Representatives. Usually, they had been correct in suggesting a relationship, but sometimes they had been wrong. Representatives with such names as Smith and Brown were cited as exercising nepotism, when the persons of like surnames on their staffs were of no relation. Reporters had also missed many examples of kinship when sons-in-law, nephews, nieces, and cousins had surnames different from the Representative. She suggests that it would take the whole press corps to turn up all of the relationships.
Both Washington and the country at large admitted that the practice was bad, but it was hallowed by tradition and there was no likelihood that Congress would do anything about it. Each member regarded his salary allowance as his to dispense without question and that only the voters could naysay him. The fact that more Democrats had been turned up as nepotistic was a mere reflection of the heavy Democratic majorities in the present Congress. Members of both parties, conservatives and liberals, were guilty of the practice at present and had been in the past.
She finds it an unhealthy business in a democracy and one which Congress itself would never tolerate in an executive agency. Public office might be a public trust, as President Grover Cleveland had said, but the weight of the evidence was that members of Congress were neither more honest nor more grasping than the people who elected them.
Robert C. Ruark, in Kitale, Kenya, indicates that he thought it would be his last proper big safari and was grieved about it. While they had had great fun and enormous good luck, being out with old and good friends, the Africa he knew and loved so much a decade earlier had changed tremendously even in the bush areas. He did not shoot much anymore for trophies because he had done all of it previously, though it was still fun to be a kind of unpaid hunter for friends. There was still plenty of shooting in East Africa and in the Sudan, with millions of animals to observe and photograph in the parks and the preserves.
That which mainly troubled him was the loss of the old wild freedom, when one could take off in almost any direction and find something exciting to see or do without having to check a sheaf of papers, fill out questionnaires and worry about the time limits in any single area. The people had been wild, the animals had been wild and the living was wilder. Some of the people still were wild and he would not dare argue with a cow elephant with calf, even in Queen Elizabeth Park, or become unduly close on foot to a lioness with cubs. And some of the less housebroken tribesmen would still run a spear into a person in an argument over a calf.
But the people were increasing now, with so many of nature's balances having been removed by what was called civilization, as the people pushed deeper into the bush. The bush would go and with it the wildness which had once made the country a vast animal kingdom, dotted but sparsely by humans. In just a few years, tremendous changes had been wrought, tremendous controls effected. Ten years earlier, one drove to an area which looked likely and pitched camp, hunted outward for a couple hundred miles in all directions. If another safari arrived and spotted the other, they would push on to another area based on hunting etiquette.
The push of burgeoning people and flocks had forced the game into tighter pockets, such that national parks and restricted areas, and in some cases, wholesale slaughter of the game to make room for the people, had occurred. A thousand-plus rhino at Makueni, for instance, 6,000 kudu in Rhodesia in one year, 500 elephants in one corner of Kenya, 5,000 beasts in Uganda had been moved or killed to eliminate the fly-breeding bush in which the animals lived or to protect the native farms from marauders. Now in Kenya, a safari had to reserve an area for a certain number of days and then move on when the next booking arrived. The veterinary department had just closed one of his favorite areas in Tanganyika for some obscure reason, involving the transmission of rinderpest to native cattle, although millions of cloven-hoofed animals had been using that area as a focal point of migration for time immemorial.
He finds that there were too many people and too few hyenas everywhere, too many farms and not enough tsetse-bearing bush. He realized that it was necessary to the passage of time and progress and that things were never the same as they once had been, but in that instance, it was not an old man's maunderings but rather fact. Roads and airstrips got one to places in a hurry when one used to have to drive through frightening bush and over sweeping grassy plains. There would be a day when a person saw a dozen lions in the shooting country and 50 in the non-shooting country, whereas now, one almost never saw a lion in the daytime except in the very center of established protectorates.
They now had kerosene refrigerators when they used to have camp water bags and the vehicles never broke down, and the talk was more of politics than of bullet weight or game. He says it was beginning to rain and was a fit time to end the series. "Rain or no rain, we'll go out on the road. Ten years ago we might have been here a month."
Aletter writer indicates that he had read that Charlotte Mayor Jim Smith had moved his business to Gastonia, leading him to guess that he and his cohorts had raised Charlotte taxes too high even for him. He indicates that Charlotte should be thankful that it did not have more leaders than it already had, not confining his definition of "leaders" to politicians but also referring to the Chamber of Commerce, newspaper editors, "do-good commissions" and the like, suggesting that they would be better off without them.
A letter writer prints a letter which he had sent to State Representative Frank Snepp of Mecklenburg, indicating in the letter that before he had sent it, he had contacted hundreds of businessmen throughout the state and without exception they agreed with him. He congratulated Mr. Snepp on his stand against the City going into the aviation business with a helicopter service. He thought the service was a good idea but that the City should not operate it, as all city, county and state governments should get out of all physical businesses. He believes that by doing so, the government abridged the rights and privileges of the people in violation of the Constitution, as it had not intended for government entities to enter business against taxpayers. He suggests to the Representative that he introduce a bill to repeal the laws to give back business to the taxpayers.
A letter writer indicates that a judge in the state had ruled that Southern Railway employees had to join the railway brotherhood and pay to it dues, which he finds an abridgment of freedom. He indicates that the rioting in Henderson was the same as in all strikes and yet the union never accepted any responsibility for such actions. He regards the collection of dues for workers to be a "great racket".
Framed Edition
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