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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Jan. 17, 1963
Evasions Will Fail
Prince Edward County, Va., won its battle to keep Negroes out of its white public schools. The schools were closed three years ago and the public school system was abolished.
A private school system has been established. The children go to school in churches, theaters, and club rooms. Taxes have been cut to the bone. The state has accredited the schools. The schools maintain libraries with more than 11,000 books—well above the minimum requirements.
THE PRIVATE SYSTEM is as good as the public schools which were abandoned to avoid integration. Everyone attends, and attendance records have been running at 94 per cent.
But the county's 1.700 Negro children have no schools at all. Except for the few who left the county, Negro children have had no formal education for three years.
An eight-year-old Negro boy, playing in front of his shack-like home, just "goes to the store" twice a day for his mother. He has never been to school. He cannot read or write.
ANOTHER BOY. 12, believes all laws in the United States are enacted by God. Another boy. 10, is illiterate. He does not know that Washington is the capital of his country or Richmond is the capital of his state.
This is the result of the battle "won" by Prince Edward County's white citizens. And they gladly and proudly accept "praise" for their success.
But the county is losing the war. An order
SOON THE SCHOOLS may be back in operation or the county may be held in contempt of court. All the segregationist South is watching Prince Edward County. The hopes of fighting integration will be tested in this Virginia county.
All the world will be watching Prince Edward County. The world, free or slave, committed or neutral, will be watching to see how America will treat these men who have been created equal.
prohibiting a county from closing its public schools to avoid integration is being reviewed by the fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.
Prince Edward County and the South are losing the war of human advancement. They are fighting only a delaying action by holding down the development of the southern Negro.
THE POTENTIAL POSSESSED by the Negro goes untapped as long as these self-appointed judges of humanity condemn a race because of its skin color.
These self-righteous bigots shout warnings about miscegenation and mongrelization. The "pure" blood of the white "race" must be untainted.
But the delaying action will fail. Man, regardless of his color, will triumph over bias. As Thomas Jefferson said. "The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, not a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."
— Jerry Musil
James Agee
"Things As They Seem To Be"
By Bob Hoyt
(Editor's note: This is the last article of a two-part series.)
In one of his letters (published this year in book form) to his life-long friend, Father Flye, James Agee spoke of his writing:
"Of my own writing have been as usual trying this, that and the other thing, finished little or nothing. Most of it has hung somewhere between satire and what I suppose would be called 'moralistic' writing; I wish I could get both washed out of my system and get anywhere near what the real job of art is: attempt to state things as they seem to be, minus personal opinion of any sort."
This may have been Agee's definition of art, but it is also the definition which many journalists use
for their craft, and probably one Agee used when he was working as a critic.
AS A BOOK REVIEWER and movie critic for Time and the Nation simultaneously most of the years from 1943 to 1948, Agee became one of the most incisive movie critics of the 1940s. He later went to Hollywood as a screen writer, working mostly with John Huston.
Among his more notable movie scripts are "The African Queen," "The Night of the Hunter," "Green Magic," "White Mane," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" (in which he played a bit part) and "The Red Badge of Courage."
Agee also wrote a six-hour television script, "Young Mr. Lincoln," which was produced in four segments by CBS on Omnibus.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
His list of books is not long: "Permit Me Voyage" (poetry written while he was still at Harvard); "The Morning Watch" (life in a religious school), and the two mentioned previously — "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and "A Death in the Family."
HE WROTE SEVERAL SHORT stories for the more literary mass circulation magazines. Some of these stories were later incorporated in "A Death in the Family." One of his short stories, "A Mother's Tale," was reprinted in Martha Foley's "Best Short Stories of 1953."
"ONE OF TH' FINEST FRESHMAN LITERATURE TEACHERS WE'VE EVER HAD!"
His contribution to American letters is not widely recognized. The volume of it is limited, and some, notably "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," is not easily understood, particularly by those who are wont to absorb their reading in fast-paced gulps. His powerful flowing rhetoric portends so much that it is puzzling to those who see no purpose in probing so deeply into something which can at best never be understood except in the barest sense.
A two-volume collection of his work under the title "Agee on Film" was published after his death. One volume contains scripts he wrote for Hollywood, and the other is a collection of the criticism he wrote for Time and The Nation.
HIS POLITICS ARE BAFFLING in this day when a man must, whether he likes it or not, have a political label. Agee was a political agnostic. True, he was once a Communist, but like many of the intellectuals of the 1930s he outgrew it. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not spend the rest of his life maundering over a youthful illusion and rationalizing why he had been swept up in the movement.
Ideas, the best of them, pale or die or outlive their usefulness, and the political squabbling of one generation is often gibberish to the next. But the way men live day by day has an enduring interest.
Historians examining the mid-20th Century will find in the work of James Agee an "attempt to state things as they seem to be" and a writer who asks only that his reader celebrate with him a secretive splendor, a reverent gaiety in the puzzling grace of the phenomenon of life itself.
Final Week
Hate Your Enemies From a Deck Chair
STUDY IS A RATHER TIME-WORN way to prepare for finals. Of course it is often successful, but it is not our fault that it originated before planned obsolescence. What we seek here is a New Frontier—or something like that. If we are going to be Harvard on the Kaw we had better come up with some Kennedy-type progressive ideas.
The New Frontier of final week preparation is mental attitude. This term may sound like something foisted off on us by sociologists, astrologists or some other pseudo-scientists. but two examples should give the term some understandable meaning.
Theoretically, everyone develops his own approach to preparing for finals. But a lot of us are still groping for a sure-fire formula to beat the strain and the grading system. Whether you are a freshman ready to walk out into the bull ring for the first time or an upperclassman still looking for a new angle, you might be interested in a suggestion or two—not the beat-your-brains-out kind of suggestions but some with a little appeal for those who are tired of fighting it.
Although these examples deal with competing athletes instead of students facing final examinations, there are some definite parallels. Anyone who thinks final examinations are not competitive has a few things to learn. We must compete with the other students in the course, the standards set up by the instructor or the personality of the instructor himself. The content for the almighty grade point is just another competitive situation—not unlike athletics in principle even though it differs in physical manifestation.
It's here again—time for Dexedrene, No-Doz, coffee, books tranquilizers, and no sleep; booze, television, movies, novels and extra sleep, or whatever method you use to prepare for final week.
THE FIRST EXAMPLE CONCERNS an American olympic broad jumper. Although his name does not come to mind, he is a real person. Anyway, it's the mental attitude aspect of the example that is important.
Most of the American athletes trained diligently during the leisurely voyage to the host country, but the broad jumper chose a less strenuous approach. His idea might best be described as the deck chair theory of mental attitude preparation.
OF COURSE THE HATE THEORY is not as universally applicable as the deck chair theory is to final examinations. The hate theory is more dependent on the personality of the instructor. While most instructors have some offensive characteristics, only a few are completely repulsive. On these few the hate theory could be quite effective.
On the first day of the trip he stuck a strip of tape on the deck, measured off the existing world's record broad jump and stuck another strip of tape on the deck. He then drew up a deck chair nearby and contemplated his handiwork during the remainder of the voyage. He did not prepare in any other way. He just sat there, cultivated his suntan and thought about that stretch of deck between the two pieces of tape. His teammates thought he had been out in the sun too long, and perhaps he had. But his approach has strong appeal for those of us who prefer a comfortable deck chair to sweat on the brow, nose to the grindstone, etc.
After collecting enough offensive mannerisms and incidents, the sprinter then gradually worked up an intense personal hatred for each of his competitors. When he raced against them he was competing against personal enemies, at least in his own mind. Winning a race assumed new significance—defeating a hated personal enemy.
These two examples are conclusive proof of absolutely nothing. However, they do merit some thought, or at least we deck chair people like to think about them while we work on our sumtans.
INCIDENTALLY, OUR HERO SET a new world's record in the broad jump.
All this brings to mind another theory: "All things cometh to him who waiteth if he worketh like hell while he waiteth." This also gives us something to think about.
The sprinter's approach might best be described as the hate theory of mental attitude preparation. He practiced with the other athletes, but whenever he had a few free moments, he watched his competitors practice. He just sat there, quietly watching and listening for any of his opponents' mannerisms that he did not like. If he watched and listened long enough, he could find something to dislike about each of them.
The other example is a spinner. His approach was a little different, but mental attitude was still the major ingredient.
Contradictions, contradictions, we may never catch the Russians. Donnie Brennan $ ^{2} $
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
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