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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Nov. 14, 1963
Law, or Convenience
The Student Court ruled Tuesday that traffic tickets issued by KU policemen and not signed by the ticketing officer are invalid. Such tickets, the court said, violate the Constitutionally guaranteed right to meet an accuser face to face.
The ruling should be allowed to stand, for two reasons.
FIRST, OF course, is the question of constitutionality of unsigned traffic tickets. Seven men, each recommended for their position by Dean Logan of the School of Law, have ruled that unsigned tickets do violate the due process clause of the United States Constitution. That, plus the fact that every ticket issued by city police in Lawrence and every other city in Kansas is signed by the ticketing officer, plus the guarantee that an accused may meet his accuser, seem sufficient to throw serious doubt on the constitutionality of unsigned tickets.
Second is the question of the autonomy of the student court.
The Kansas Legislature has given the State Board of Regents the authority to run the University of Kansas and every other state school. This includes the right to decide traffic violations.
NOW, WHERE are the lines of authority? Do they move downward from the Regents to the Chancellor to his administrative assistants and finally to the Student Court? Apparently so.
Does this give the University administrative officials the right to review student court decisions and throw out those which might toss a small monkey wrench into the smoothly operating business which is the University of Kansas?
Even more pertinent, does this give University officials the right to throw out student court decisions when those decisions are constitutionally correct, just because it would force a troublesome change in procedure?
IT MAY, but it should not. Attendance at a state university should not be equated with immediate abrogation of rights guaranteed to every citizen.
If the student court decision is thrown out, either by decree or because student justices are "encouraged" to reconsider, it will be a clear sign that we, as students, are governed not by the laws of the land, but by, and at, the convenience of the officials of the University of Kansas.
— Blaine King
Cold War At Home
The Year of James Baldwin, Symbol of Ferment
By Calder M. Pickett
Professor of Journalism
In late 1959 or early 1960 the Negro novelist James Baldwin visited the great Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, and in writing about the visit described his fantasy of a movie he'd like to produce.
"My film would begin with slaves, boarding the good ship Jesus; a white ship, on a dark sea, with masters as white as the sails of their ships, and slaves as black as the ocean. There would be one intransigent slave, an eternal figure, destined to appear, and to be put to death, in every generation.
"In the hold of the slave ship, he would be a witch-doctor or a chief or a prince or a singer; and he would die, be hurled into the ocean, for protecting a black woman. Who would bear his child, however, and this child would lead a slave insurrection: and be hanged.
"During the Reconstruction, he would be murdered upon leaving Congress. He would be a returning soldier during the first World War, and be buried alive; and then, during the depression, he would become a jazz musician, and go mad. Which would bring him up to our own day—what would his fate be now? What would I entitle this grim and vengeful fantasy? What would be happening, during all this time, to the descendants of the masters?"
In this fantasy, Baldwin thinks as much about the masters as he does about the slaves. In Baldwin's three novels, and his three books of essays, his absorption in the white man is as much a theme as his concern for his own race.
This year has been the James Baldwin year, and the softspoken young Negro who has addressed collegiate groups all over the nation even became cover man for Time Magazine. He has been almost as symbolic in the Negro ferment of 1963 as Martin Luther King or James Meredith. Many who have not read his thoughtful, frightening, shocking, penetrating books have heard the name.
Baldwin is a northern Negro, born in Harlem in 1924, the son of a sometime Negro preacher. The boy hated the father, and he still hates him, but he knows how much the father marked the son. It was a big family—nine children—and the memories of Harlem life recur constantly in the Baldwin books.
The father wanted the boy to go to work at an early age, but Baldwin refused, as he put it, "even though I no longer had any illusions about what an education could do for me; I had already encountered too many college-graduate handymen." At 22 he wrote a book, all about the Negro problem, "concerning which the color of my skin automatically made me an expert."
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Not until 1952 or thereabouts, with "Go Tell It on the Mountain," did Baldwin achieve celebrity. The book was an excellent first novel, one that holds up well, that surpasses his later and better-known "Another Country," and that compares favorably with Richard Wright's "Native Son" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man."
"Another Country," despite its presence on the best-seller lists, can be disposed of rapidly. It says nothing about the Negro in America that isn't said better elsewhere, and it has some embarrassingly bad passages in which the reader is treated to descriptions of homosexuals making love. There are other purple passages, heterosexual in nature, one of which a Reporter critic described as "pure McCall's." The reader who encounters only "Another Country" has been cheated.
In one of the books, Baldwin says Negroes are taught "really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black." Baldwin's world was the world he describes so compassionately and vividly in "Go Tell It on the Mountain" — the Negro preacher, a stern, lecherous fanatic whose family hates him; the long-suffering wife; the ever-critical sister; two sons and an adopted son.
His other books are "Giovanni's Room" and "Another Country," the novels, and "Notes of a Native Son," "Nobody Knows My Name" and "The Fire Next Time," the essays. The essays are best, and they leave almost any reader with troubled thoughts about himself and his own attitudes and behavior toward the Negro.
The Harlem home is a place which the hard-working mother toils unceasingly to keep clean, and never succeeds. The other home is the place where the boy John—or the boy James Baldwin—sang and went to church, a crude store-front building, The Temple of the Fire Baptized. The novel tells of the boy's conversion, as Baldwin himself became a boy preacher in the thirties.
The conversion came to Baldwin himself, he says, "For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parceled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone's bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail."
And he considered whether anyone could become a moral human being unless he divorced himself from "all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. . . . If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more living. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him."
The church for Baldwin was a place of continual excitement, excitement of "the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord . . ." But Baldwin left the church, for his father had instilled in him nothing but fear.
Strong words these, and the books are full of strong words. We read about how the Negro child, growing up, learns he must face each day "the man," the symbolic white man who will dominate his life. Baldwin was taught to hate whites, and not to trust them. He learned his heritage of blood, of sisters turned prostitutes, brothers and fathers killed.
There was, he says, "no man,
preaching, or cursing, stum-
Baldwin was a young rebel, a rebel years before most other Negroes were rebelling. He lashed out and flung a coffee cup at the mirror in a New Jersey lunch counter—the American Diner—when he was refused service. He had just seen a wartime American film called "This Land of Mine."
ming his guitar in the lone, blue evening, or blowing in fury and ecstasy his golden horn at night, who had not been made to bend his head and drink white men's muddy water."
The boy early decided he might become a writer. He knew the Negro myths, and the fantasies, the stereotypes of watermelon, crap games, razor blades, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom. But he had no shame, for to him it meant something to be a Negro. "We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key—could we but find it—to all that we later become.
He read literature, and analyzed it, from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Native Son." Like other American youths in 1940 he was impressed by "Native Son," but he broke years later with its author, Richard Wright, for reasons critics are still trying to plumb. It seems reasonable to assume that Baldwin was trying to escape the influence of Wright, a writer whose works were more attuned to an earlier image of the Negro in America.
For Baldwin believes the Negro novelist must escape the strictures of sociological interpretations and consider the Negro as a human being, to get away from the "endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes." And Wright's hero of "Native Son," Bigger Thomas, was to Baldwin an Uncle Tom turned inside out, a vicious stereotype of the Negro that the white world easily could accept—a killer who became mixed up with Communists and committed two brutal murders.
For pure James Baldwin read the essays, though not all of