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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, October 12, 1967
Symposium: Midwestern civil rights
Small town; no Negroes
By Patricia Pruitt
"Who is free, anyway?"
Last week Dick Gregory demanded that Americans admit and solve the unprecedented racial strife which sickens this country. Gregory put the question to whites and blacks as an individual moral decision unbounded by the racial scope.
It's a little different from the American classic-ideal whose tenets it claims, however, because Marysville has never had a Negro resident, only recently began to serve Negroes in its cafes, still has the non-white residents of the county numbered. And the residents say, "I got nothing against Negroes."
In the heart of this land and era, witness:
Ask the residents.
In the heart of this land and era, witness: Marysville, Kansas, is a Christian community and proud of it.
There used to be signs around Marysville: "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you in Marysville."
The signs are gone, and the people talk about them in condescending tones, shaking their heads. But the men at the baseball game say they'd rather not have industry come to Marysville if it brings Negroes.
Last summer, Negro children from the urban inner cities came to stay for two weeks with some area Lutheran farm families, as part of a program. They were accepted.
The acceptance must have been a conscious act. But on second meeting, perhaps it will not be conscious. For the white families and the Negro children found the children's visits to be adventures in human psychology, in family social structure—not an analysis of race difference or similarity.
Marysville, one of thousands of white communities in the agrarian West, has broken through a barrier to communication. Ironically,
this barrier has provoked a crisis in an era of instantaneous communicative methods.
Then we must ask: Is the barrier ignorance, or it is individual conscience?
U. S. News and World Report lists 1967 as the worst year of racial strife yet. Outbreaks of violence: at least 150. Cities hit by violence: more than 120. Property damaged: upward of 270 million dollars. People killed: at least 118. People injured: nearly 4,000.
Yet this is the era also in which movies like "In the Heat of the Night," books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and speeches such as Gregory's are not only possible, but can also be praised as evidences of social conscience. They tell how racial strife itself is seated in human psychology, how it can be conquered by men willing to know and conquer themselves.
In a recent interview, NAACP head Roy Wilkins said of improving racial relations: "I'm convinced that it must be together. The whole trend of the world is togetherness. If the Negro thinks he can go it alone and create a separate black economy, he's going against the whole international trend of mankind, the evidence of history. He's blind."
Towns like Marysville may be either the final stumbling blocks for integration or the scenes of intelligent coexistence. These towns are unique because they have been isolated from extensive interracial contact, and therefore the actions of individuals are initially more subject to personal conscience.
But Marysville and its experiment in integrated living are not so special. For it is inhabited by individuals who are as much a part of the literate, mobile, sophisticated America as any urbanite.
And, as Wilkins says and as Marysville found the communication and effort must be by individuals.
Kansas City slum life
By George Longenecker
"The Negro's plight is terrible! Why can't we give them more good jobs or better homes or something? I'd leave if I was a black man in Kansas City."
Sipping his favorite drink, Joseph Brewer Jr., age 39, successful suburbanite and executive, leans back upon the sofa and laments somewhat emptily as he reads the news. His name is assumed, but you know him well.
On a darker, hotter dirtier street but half a dozen miles from the Brewers' brick bungalow, Kemp Washington gulps his beer and stares glassy-eyed at the tale of white humor and affluence the picture tube spins. Kemp's name is also assumed, and you, the white suburbanite can never really know him.
Like Joseph Brewer Jr., Kemp Washington has three children. Unlike Joseph's, Kemp's children are not of the same mother, they do not live with their father, nor do they live under the same roof. His illegitimate son, seven months old, lives three blocks away and is left to scream alone three days a week, seven hours a day, while his mother works as a part-time laundress
The other two children, ages five and seven, are free to wander the city sidewalk each summer day while their mother, the former Mrs. Washington, watches daily television. Kemp Washington has no job, and he'd rather have none than spend his time painting walls, sweeping floors, or collecting garbage as he has done at times past.
Once, when he was newly wed, Kemp had hopes, but they were crushed early as so many
hopes are in the Negro world. Now 28, he is too old to care whether or not he has a job. A year and a half in prison followed a conviction for one of the many felonies in which he'd participated.
They'd told him in jail he ought to leave Kansas City for better places. Yet he knew the way whitey had treated him in the Negro world and could imagine how it must be in the suburbs, the white man's world. Fear held him back, confined him to the narrow Negro world he'd known for a lifetime. Frustration made him restless and boredom became a way of life. These are the things of the Negro world that most white men will never fully understand—fear, frustration and boredom.
In the darkness of my rented room I lay awake to the sound of drunken babble, to the pulsating Motown beat of the ceaseless record player next door, to the sounds of the television nobody cared to watch, to the ignored cries of Mrs. Washington's ignored and illegitimate child.
Living in the Negro world, as I did for some time last summer, one feels these things as he never could feel them in the quiet of the white man's world.
Lying awake can be frustration in itself. I wondered what it would be like to lie awake a Negro, resentments buried inside a mind wearied of empty promises and paper projects, to lie awake knowing there will be nothing to do tomorrow. I, a white man, can never know the frustration.
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The Rev. William McGroarty, Dean of Wheeling College, on the college's experiment of selling beer on campus: "There is a long-standing accepted tradition that college students do drink beer."
"You Wild Impetuous Wastrel!"
The probe began when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members reported discrimination against them in finding office space. This charge was followed by allegations of left-wing group members being "shadowed," of printers of a campus underground newspaper quitting because of some sort of University pressure and of parents receiving anonymous phone calls charging that their sons or daughters are involved in illegal or subversive activities.
On other campuses
The Michigan State student government association is investigating charges that members of left-wing campus organizations and persons affiliated with them are the victims of an organized harassment program.
Oregon student lobby
The organization, the Inter-institutional Student Committee on Higher Education, has set the improvement of undergraduate education as its primary goal, and higher teacher salaries and building programs are being investigated as possible avenues to this end. But such non-academic items as the Student Health Service and student parking facilities are also under discussion.
All student body governments of the seven state-supported, four-year universities of Oregon have sent delegates to a newly-formed student lobby association.
Left-wing harrassed?
One should hope the Class of 1967 is more intelligent that the Class of 1317. In a letter Tuesday, the Monroe Doctrine was used as an example of the United States' long history of protection of the weak without the additional help of other nations.
Secondly, when the United States became strong enough to claim its "realm of influence" it used this power SOLELY to protect American business interests. Examples are the Marines in Nicaragua and subsequent help of the Samoza family, which has ruled since 1932; the Marines in Haiti; the support of Batista in Cuba and the support of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.
Letters to the editor
Monroe Doctrine'67
To the Editor:
Firstly, when it was written in 1824, the United States had NO power to enforce it and relied totally on BRITISH naval power.
In all of these examples it is impossible to see where the
United States acted to protect democracy. Today, in Bolivia, the CIA is not defending democracy but an anti-communist regime and American tin mines. Every American should be ASHAMED of the way this country has used the Monroe Doctrine for selfish, imperialistic reasons.
It was mentioned how during our revolution those in favor of independence won out over the Tories because of their democratic convictions. After the revolution we chased the Tories into Canada. These were the wealthy landowners who fought on the side of colonialism. However, in Vietnam these are the exact people who we feel SHOULD RULE the country. Since 1954 the United States has supported one Vietnamese Tory after another—Diem, Ky and now Thieu.
Robert Cherry New York City graduate student