The Charlotte News

Monday, April 27, 1959

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Christian Herter was beginning to forge a closer working link with Democratic members of Congress than former Secretary Dulles had maintained. Departing the state for a meeting with British, French and West German foreign ministers in Paris, Mr. Herter was leaving behind arrangements to keep key Democrats abreast of developments. The personal liaison which Mr. Herter had established with Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would be handled until his return by Assistant Secretary William Macomber. In his final meeting with Senator Fulbright, Mr. Herter had agreed to report in person to the Committee as soon as he returned from the meeting. In the meantime, the understanding was that any significant developments at either the Paris meeting or the East-West foreign ministers conference in Geneva, scheduled to start on May 11, would be relayed through Mr. Macomber to Senator Fulbright. As principal Democratic spokesman on foreign affairs, Senator Fulbright had made it clear that he looked forward to dealing with Mr. Herter on an intimate basis fostered by their friendship while they had been members together in the House. While Mr. Dulles had made many trips to Congress to explain his policies and had acted to keep Democrats and Republicans informed of what was occurring, most of his contacts had tended to be on the formal side. By contrast, Senator Fulbright and Secretary Herter knew each other well enough that they could toss ideas about on an informal basis, and in the current situation, the Senator obviously believed that his ideas would receive more attention than some of them had from Mr. Dulles.

In Poplarville, Miss., it was reported that a Circuit Court judge had said this date that the kidnaping of the black prisoner charged with raping a pregnant white woman had "opened the floodgates of hate and hell" on the people of Mississippi. The judge was to have presided at this date's scheduled trial of the defendant, a 23-year old truck driver who had been dragged from his jail cell at the Pearl River County Jail early on Saturday morning by a group of masked and hooded men. The prosecutor asked for a continuance of the trial because of the absence of the defendant. The defendant and his abductors had been objects of a two-state search led by special teams of FBI agents. The judge said that a fair trial had been denied to the defendant and he believed that had he been tried, "the record would have brought a kinder feeling toward the people of Mississippi." He said he did not know at present what to expect and that "laws will be passed against us." He said that Mississippi had been sinned against by the action of the raiders in dragging the defendant from his cell. About 50 or 60 spectators were present when a Methodist minister had intoned a prayer at the opening of the Circuit Court's term this date. Three black citizens huddled in the balcony and lawmen and reporters jammed the first floor. The judge wore a blue suit with a red pocket handkerchief and a red tie, the trademarks of the late Senator Theodore Bilbo, the state's apostle of white supremacy, who had called Poplarville home and was buried just south of the town. The search for the defendant and the kidnapers continued through southern Mississippi and eastern Louisiana. A statement by the head of the Mississippi Highway Patrol showed that hope had vanished of finding the defendant alive. He said that they were present until every lead was exhausted and every clue was run down, that they were searching for the body as well as for the perpetrators of the crime. The defendant had been charged the previous February with raping a 24-year old white mother who was pregnant. The FBI, acting under the personal direction of director J. Edgar Hoover, had sent more than 50 agents into the area. Combining forces with sheriff's deputies and the more than 60 Highway Patrolmen, they had split into groups of two and three men to cover the area. One group had found John Reyer, 63, who owned a 40-acre truck farm about 4 miles north of the town, who said that he had been about 25 feet away when the raiders had left the courthouse, dumped the defendant in a car and drove in a westerly direction. Being apparently the most important witness to the getaway, he indicated that two to five other cars had left in different directions. He said: "Nobody didn't speak. Nobody said nothing to me. I saw all the men wore masks. I realized I was in the wrong place. I went on. I didn't look back." The jail had no guard on duty. As indicated, the dead body of the prisoner would be found in the river about a week hence. Though there were eyewitnesses who admitted participation in the abduction and who identified several others as the abductors and that the man had been shot twice in the chest at close range before being thrown into the Pearl River from a bridge, no prosecutions were ever brought by the state and the FBI abandoned the investigation, finding no basis for Federal jurisdiction based on its finding that there was insufficient evidence that the abductors had crossed into Louisiana from Mississippi while the victim was still alive. Just why no Federal civil rights charges were instituted pursuant to either or both 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242, as in 1967 in the case of the accused slayers of the three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, killed in June, 1964 near Philadelphia, Miss., was not explained, though it was likely the unspoken notion that it would be politically unwise to do so in an election year, that it might inflame passions the more in the South and set back the cause of race relations, following the Little Rock crisis and the outrage sparked by it among some Southerners. Legally, there was no bar to undertaking such a Federal prosecution, even if the resulting prison term under Section 241 could not have been more than ten years at the time, though both statutes were amended in 1968 to allow for the death penalty when death resulted. Section 242, which had a maximum of a one year sentence, requires the deprivation of constitutional rights to be undertaken by a person acting under color of law, e.g., a deputy sheriff or some other government official or a person authorized by a government official to act. Regarding a Federal kidnaping charge, there remained the factual issue of whether the abductors crossed state lines before the death occurred. The Pearl River Bridge, where the murder allegedly took place, was right at the border with Louisiana, and the question of crossing the border depended on whether the car carrying the victim crossed over the bridge into Louisiana to avoid a truck coming in their direction, and then doubled back after turning around on the Louisiana side, or whether the murder occurred on the bridge before crossing into Louisiana. In all likelihood, a Mississippi jury at the time, renowned for nullification, as in the case of the acquittal of the half-brothers who murdered 14-year old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955, would have given their neighbors, even in Federal court, the benefit of the doubt if the case hinged on a technicality of whether they crossed a nearby state line.

In Little Rock, Ark., it was reported that the constitutionality of the state's school closing law, promulgated by Governor Orval Faubus, regarded as his last major defense against integration of the public schools of Little Rock, had been upheld this date by the Arkansas Supreme Court. In a 4 to 3 decision, that court held that the legislation did not violate the U.S. Constitution, holding that the issue fell within a sphere which allowed the court judicial discretion in dealing with state police powers. The Governor had used the law to close Little Rock's four high schools the previous fall against a Federally-approved integration plan. The law still had to be approved by a three-judge Federal Court scheduled to hear the case a week from this date. (Not surprisingly, on June 18, that Court would enjoin the Governor from the closing of any schools to block Federally-mandated integration, as violative of Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny.) The majority opinion of the Supreme Court, written by Associate Justice Paul Ward of Batesville in northeastern Arkansas, noted that the U.S. Supreme Court had said that implementation of its desegregation decisions would depend on local conditions, adding: "From a strictly constitutional standpoint, the legislature has the same right to authorize the governor to take charge of schools as it has always exercised to authorize school boards to do so." The opinion had said also that it "deeply" deplored the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court had ignored earlier legal opinions holding valid separate-but-equal school facilities under the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine. The dissent, incidentally, found that Governor Faubus in closing the four high schools, did violate the State Constitutional requirement to maintain a system of public schools in the state, though throwing some red meat to the hooded mother-muckers, by qualifying its position, stating that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown "was most unfortunate, and which many believe to be entirely unconstitutional", and concluding: "Two wrongs do not make a right. Let the Supreme Court of Arkansas stay within the Arkansas Constitution, even if the United States Supreme Court has not stayed within the Federal Constitution." (N.B., to the little hopeful Magats: The Court, in its majority opinion, stated that, "in substance", the Fourteenth Amendment says: "(a) ... (b) ... (c) No state shall deprive such citizens of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and: (d) No state shall deny such citizen equal protection of the laws." [Emphasis supplied.] The actual words, however, of the Fourteenth Amendment, in the last two clauses of Section 1, state: "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." [Emphasis supplied.] While there was not in the case at bench any issue of citizenship, the Court did misstate the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, so often misunderstood by the Magats today when discussing due process rights of non-citizens already in the country. They do enjoy, by virtue of being in the United States, the full panoply of due process and equal protection rights enjoyed by every citizen of the United States. See Yick Wo v. Hopkins, as cited in the opinion, from 1886. The only exception is when immigrants are still in admissions processing at centers for that purpose, as in earlier times at Ellis Island, and are not yet, therefore, considered to be within the territory of the United States, though technically on U.S. soil.) In any event, the subsequent Federal District Court decision in June would effectively render moot the Arkansas Supreme Court decision, making it noteworthy only to provide insight to some of the convoluted reasoning of some of the deep Southern states employed to circumvent the requirements of Brown, through the machinations of delay and indirect discrimination, based on the pretextual necessity to preserve "law and order", effectively caving thereby to the obstructionist tactics of the worst racists and White Citizens Council vigilantes of the post-Brown era, content to prevent desegregation faweva to prese've ouwa way of life down heya.

In New York, it was reported that supervisory personnel had gotten NBC back on the air this date after a sudden strike by television engineers had disrupted operations. A vice-president of the network said that normal programming had resumed at 10:00 a.m. EDT. As he made the announcement, however, the striking union, the National Association of Broadcast Employes and Technicians, said that the stoppage by its members had spread to "a complete national walkout", involving Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The director of network affairs for the union said that the writers, producers and newsmen belonged to that AFL-CIO affiliate in cities outside New York. The shutdown had begun when engineers refused to air the "Today" program at 7:00 a.m. because it had been pre-recorded by non-union workers abroad. The director of network affairs for the union said that broadcasters had been rapidly increasing their use of videotape in foreign operations and that personnel were hired overseas at rates "completely substandard to rates in the United States." He said they feared it would cause a severe reduction in the people employed in those fields in the U.S. and that they could not and would not permit it.

In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that the Textile Workers Union of America had rejected a request that its members stop congregating outside the strike-torn Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. Mayor Carroll Singleton had said that two union local presidents had refused the request at a closed-door meeting on Sunday night with the Mayor and police officials. The union officials maintained that the union was involved in a lockout and not a strike and rejected a request that pickets be kept from the scene. After the meeting, the Mayor told newsmen that the session had been held in an effort to get the union to cooperate in keeping down the violence. He explained that the union had sent a telegram to Governor Luther Hodges expressing its desire to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in keeping down violence. He said that he had asked that the union be responsible for keeping all strikers out of the thoroughfares leading to the mills, and the union had told him that it would do everything possible to do so but that it could not guarantee it. The Mayor and police officials had asked that strikers refrain from bringing bricks, sticks or bottles to the picket lines, and the union representatives said that the members would be instructed to abide by that request. The union rejected proposals that it not assume the responsibility for posting bonds for persons involved in alleged strike violence and not to furnish counsel for them. The Mayor said that the union representatives were asked to be present, one at each mill, during shift changes and they had replied that they could not guarantee their presence at each shift change because of possible conflicts, but offered to designate an assistant to act in their place.

In Atlanta, it was reported that a 41-year old unemployed father of seven this date had denied that he had poured a pot of boiling coffee over his nine-year old daughter. He said: "Good gracious alive, I couldn't do such a thing. What kind of father would I be to burn one of my babies?" He was charged with suspicion of assault and battery. The girl had suffered first and second-degree burns over the left side of her body, indicating that her father had poured the boiling coffee over her the previous night as she cowered behind a stove. She said that he had then locked her and a younger brother in the bathroom but they had smashed the door open and run to the home of a neighbor. Two detectives quoted the girl as saying that her father had been drinking and that her eight-year old brother had made fun of him. After whipping the boy, she said, her father threatened to whip her and poured the hot coffee over her when she hid behind the stove and failed to come out at his command. He a nice ol' feller. Just got carried away a mite with the drink, ye know, and these damned chillens all 'round. How's a feller to get rest after a long day drinkin' without a job? They's lucky it wa'n't batt'ry acid.

Bob Slough of The News reports that voting had continued to be light to average through noon this date as Charlotte had gone to the polls to nominate a mayor, City Council members and two members of the City School Board. Most registrars had expected voting to increase during the afternoon. By 11:30, only 5,473 people had voted.

Ann Sawyer of The News reports on the women who worked at the precincts from 6:30 a.m. for 12 hours and then stayed to count the votes, having been well-prepared with food and hot coffee. At the Eastover School precinct, things had been quiet, with a dog sleeping at the school door, as City Council member Steve Dellinger talked with a friend. She provides quick looks at other precincts also. (Don't they impose rules to keep the candidates a certain distance from the precinct?)

A few county residents could also vote legally in the City School Board race because those people lived in the Charlotte City School Administrative Unit, but outside the Charlotte city limits. The executive secretary of the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections said, however, that there were not too many such voters.

In Tulsa, Okla., it was reported that a man told a judge that he could not afford to buy a driver's license because the city kept him broke with fines. The judge fined him nevertheless $25 for operating a vehicle without a permit.

Alfred was not on the previous night, having been preempted by this program. That's all gooey stuff. We prefer Alfred. We can pick up CBS better now, though, as we are now in Shelby, within range of both Charlotte stations, no longer reliant for the nonce on Greensboro's inadequate transmission facility to the rabbit-ears back at the dump...

On the editorial page, "Consolidation of Schools Won't Wait" indicates that even as Charlotte residents had gone to the polls this date for the municipal primary, great forces had been at work to perfect the community's vision of metropolitan progress. The consolidation of the City and County Public School Systems, long a dream, moved a step closer to reality. It was essential that the merger, authorized by the Legislature the previous week, be completed smoothly and without needless delay.