Monday, December 11, 1967
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
9
'KU unprejudiced'
Joe Knight, freshman from the small town of Quinter and president of the campus Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, settled his slight frame at the table in the Union and politely offered a cigarette.
Knight discusses SNCC
After using a piece of the Daily Kansan to clean his old-fashioned unrimmed glasses and jokingly commenting on the status of reporters, Joe Knight then settled his glasses neatly on his nose, fingered his curly half-goatee and peered out.
By Alison Steimel Kansan Staff Reporter
"I don't know if I'm a hippie or not," he said. And it was hard to tell. The black hair with long sideburns and the curious old glasses belied the neat paisley shirt and dark trousers. He used a soft, calm tone of voice, his dignified conversation sometimes interspersed with hippie jargon.
"I got interested in SNCC, I guess, because I am a Negro," he said. "It's just the thing."
"I cut class today to write poetry," he smiled. "This poem keeps branching out — it may turn into an epic."
SNCC image to change
"However, the organization at KU won't be SNCC per se. Second semester when we really start being active it will be an independent civil rights organization in sympathy with the goals of the national SNCC.
"SNCC is too structured for my own point of view," he explained
"I hate white people," he said, eyeing me for my reaction, then I urrying to say, "I mean it's not like I look at a white person and think 'I hate you.' But I hate the symbol that 'whitey" represents."
However he asserted, "I don't like riots. There's no logic in rioting. It's emotional. But man is violent and when you can't do anything you become angry and do—well, not-so-nice things."
He was vague about SNCC activities on campus; he repeatedly said that this semester he had to make his grades. Then next semester he could concentrate on organizing SNCC.
Finds KU unprejudiced
He said he didn't think there was much prejudice on the KU campus, and prejudice hadn't embittered him in his home at Quinter either. He had said earlier that life in Quinter had been pleasant and usually unmarred by discrimination.
His voice became angry only when he talked about slum conditions in cities and in the South. Then he described in laborious detail the feeling and tensions of the jobless Negroes and their resentment against the squalid, rat-infested conditions of their housing.
"I'm essentially a student. I feel that if the time and grade restrictions of the University were removed a student who actually wanted to learn could do so." His eyes implored belief.
When he spoke about the University and college life, his eyes grew bright and he gesticulated like an overly ambitious orator.
"I found that students were objects the administration crammed facts into. And the slaves we studied about—some of them were the people I inherited life from. Then I looked around to see that
for all purposes black people were still slaves."
"The breaking point in my radicalization came when James Meredith was shot on his civil rights march in Mississippi," he said.
"I was one of the first 100 people to go to Mississippi with the march after Meredith was shot. There I first met and talked to Stokely Carmichael and other people in SNCC."
His hands waved again, trying to grab words to express his feelings. "This upset me horribly," he finally said. "I became active, so to speak.
He composed his face again and with a mystical, knowing air, said, "I don't think it will take forever to solve the race question."
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Big Eight reprimands NU
The Big Eight conference has reprimanded Bob Devaney, athletic director and head football coach at the University of Nebraska, and prohibited George Kelly, one of his assistants, from recruiting for one year.
The action was taken for recruiting an athlete who was given part-time and subsequently full-time employment in an effort to encourage him to enroll at Nebraska. The athlete was not named by the Big Eight office..
Big industry methods discussed
Appelman, an executive of North American Rockwell Corp.'s Autonetics Division in Anaheim, Calif., in lectures to engineering and business students.
The management and marketing methods of big industry in dealing with government agencies were discussed this week by Jules
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