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Summer Session Kansas Tuesday, June 21, 1960
Slow Relaxing Seen On Segregation Front
BY JERRY KNUDSON
(Editor's Note; Jerry Knudson was an instructor in the School of Journalism in 1958-59. He holds a Thomas Jefferson Foundation fellowship at the University of Virginia.)
IN THIS PAST year, the white South has suffered major moral defeats on the racial front.
Last fall the "massive resistance" policy against school de-segregation in Virginia crumbled and left bitter enemies for Gov. J. Lindsay Almond. Token numbers of Negro students breached the schools in Norfolk and elsewhere in the state.
The Attorney General has initiated proceedings against southern voting discrimination authorized by the 1960 Civil Rights law, and disgruntled southern Democrats worry because Richard Nixon is an honorary member of the Monrovia, Calif., chapter of the NAACP.
AT CENTRAL High School this spring two of the original "Little Rock Nine" received diplomas, despite Gov. Orville Faubus and the Arkansas National Guard.
In Nashville, Tenn., ten white professors resigned in protest early this month because Vanderbilt University refused to re-instate a Negro divinity student dismissed for his participation in lunch counter sit-down strikes.
Two weeks ago department stores in nine southern cities announced they were dropping racial bars at lunch counters.
IN ATLANTA, Ga., an all-white jury acquitted Dr. Luther King Jr., of income tax perjury.
In Birmingham, Ala., there have been no bombings for more than a year, except for attempts made on two synagogues — a grotesque commentary on progress, but progress nevertheless.
The New York Times reports that hotels in only three southern cities Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans—still refuse to accommodate Negroes at conventions.
What has happened in the South within the last year or two?
IN VIRGINIA, I found a much more relaxed attitude toward the racial question than existed in 1957, when I was a reporter for the Suffolk, Va., News-Herald in the so-called Black Belt of southern Virginia counties.
Today, the possibility of another Little Rock seems remote, except possibly in Atlanta, where schools have been ordered to de-segregate in September.
Why this grudging improvement? The answer is complex, compounded of a last-ditch willingness to accept the inevitable, which characterized Gov. Almond's changed slogan from "massive resistance" to "practical realism"; the highly successful Negro policy of passive resistance which broke the bus segregation in Montgomery, Ala., and in 36 other southern cities, and is cracking lunch-counter discrimination; and perhaps the whisperings of a voice of conscience throughout the white South.
Let's stress that word, "whisperings," because Negro gains have been essentially token and fragmentary. Six years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision to de-segregate public schools, only six percent of southern Negro school children attend mixed classes.
IT IS SIGNIFICANT, however, that impatient Negroes, especially the angry Negro youth of the South, have changed tactics.
No longer content to rely on litigation and federal legislation, they have adopted the militant, yet non-violent strategy exemplified by the lunch counter strikes. This summer these tactics will be turned against segregated public beaches in the South, and in the long run the recently aggressive Negroes will win.
While moderates are leading the way in some fringe areas of the South, the situation remains fraught with danger in the hard core of resistance in the Deep South.
Birmingham, for example, seethes with explosive race bias. The New York Times found that in this deep southern city "every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus."
IN THE PAST 11 years there have been 22 bombings of Negro homes and churches in the Birmingham area and further violence seems deterred only because the last bomber was arrested and convicted.
Even in Virginia, which has escaped racial violence, public schools were padlocked in Prince Edward County for the entire 1959-60 school year, denying 1700 Negro students any education at all. The county threatens to sell its public school buildings at auction if the deadlock is not ended soon.
Public schools were partially closed in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia; Norfolk, and Warren County, and controversies in these sections will continue for many Septembers to come.
Tragically, religious groups in the South are as hopelessly split as the school systems. The Methodists decided early this year to maintain their segregated five white geographic jurisdictions and a sixth all-Negro jurisdiction with 500,000 members all over the country.
IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., one may choose between two Gods — one segregationist and the other integrationist. The university Episcopal church refuses to let white students hold segregated private classes on its property, while the downtown Episcopal church threw open its doors to the segregationists.
National attitudes have not improved the situation. Southern whites have faced the harassment of a northern press, which conveniently overlooks the fact that chain-store lunch counters are owned by northern businessmen, and that social, economic and geographic discrimination is a reality in many northern cities.
The Negro northern press, on the other hand, blatantly proclaims every prominent mixed racial marriage with banner headlines.
I AM CONVINCED that northern reporting of southern racial issues is hopelessly distorted. So is southern reporting of the same issues, for that matter. Ralph E. McGill, Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Atlanta Constitution, has said, "Certain Mississippi papers have encouraged violence and several South Carolina papers have done the same thing."
But there seems no excuse for the supposedly "disinterested" North to provide one-sided coverage. When a Negro jazz singer is mobbed in Birmingham, the news lands in northern headlines.
When the Negro baritone William Warfield received the only standing ovation awarded any performer at the University of Virginia last year, the press was characteristically mute.
THE UNIVERSITY of Virginia has been desegregated at the graduate level since 1950. This past year 18 Negro students lived in regular dormitories and ate at regular cafeterias. Northerners know all about Autherine Lucy's ill-fated attempt to enter the University of Alabama, but who knows that Negroes attend six Virginia state colleges and that nine white students attend the Negro school. Hampton Institute?
Nansemond County, Virginia, employs ten Negroes, including two full-time and two parttime Negro deputies. How many Negro county employees, how many Negro deputies are there in Douglas County, Kansas?
Slowly but noticeably the white South is rediscovering its conscience.
ROY WILKENS, executive secretary of the NAACP, has seen the spark which may in time destroy the race conflict in the South and lead to national moral regeneration.
Wilkins said: "The white people are strangling themselves. They know and you know that they have done wrong."
Forget the Scare In Storm Alerts
Once upon a time dark clouds rolled out of the southwest and sage observers would nod knowingly and comment: "It looks like we might get a storm." Or, "Looks like a squall line moving in."
Some people got wet. Sometimes limbs or entire trees were blown down. Sometimes people were injured. It would not be amiss to label such stgrims as "severe" weather.
Today, with improved methods of detection and communication, the weather bureau and the radio and television stations take the place of the sages of old in commenting that there might be a storm. Such warnings have been known to cause a greater disaster than the storm.
In Topeka last year, for instance, one man was killed while scurrying to "safety" from a storm that came no nearer than 30 miles to the city.
Some criticism has been directed at weather bureau officials for placing so much stress on storm warnings these past few years. Generally, however, a careful filtering of the screaming hysteria of the radio or TV announcer indicates that the bureau has issued an alert. And thus far in our society an alert has not been considered a forecast of doom.
The number of such warnings will be on the increase in the next several weeks if past situations are any indication. These warnings primarily are to make you aware of the possibility of severe weather—not necessarily a tornado, either.
Don't be disappointed if such weather fails to materialize, thus falling for the weather "wolf" story. And remember that such reports are intended as warnings, not as a cause for panic.
Clarke Keys
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
NEWS DEPARTMENT
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News Room ... Phone 711
Editors ... Dick Crocker
Clarke, Kevs.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
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Business Office ... Phone 376
Business Manager ... Clydene Brown
Short Ones
MOBILE, Ala.—(UPI)— Circuit Judge Hubert M. Hall sentenced two youths to 30 days in jail and fined them $50 each after one admitted he tried taking a driver's license test for the other but got caught mis-spelling his buddy's name.
Crossword Puzzle
ACROSS
1 Edge of street.
5 In pieces.
10 Polaris.
14 Tract.
15 Landed estate.
16 Where Zanes-
ville is.
17 Key men in U.S.
Congress: 2 words.
20 Feminine suffix.
21 Netherlands
commune.
23 Man's nickname.
24 Mountain —
24 Nominal capital
of Bolivia.
26 Cease!
28 Spent the summer.
31 Office worker.
34 Country of Africa.
35 Lovely child.
36 Southern
delicacies.
39 Skin.
41 Italian wine.
42 Leaves out.
44 Former king of
Transjordan.
46 Former African
Premier.
47 Dec. 25.
51 Old World
lizards.
53 Jostle.
54 Faint.
57 Top of a hill.
59 Wrath.
59 Pedagogical organization.
60 Voting results: 2 words.
64 Decree ___, in law.
65 Run for office.
67 Jumping stick.
67 Haberdashery.
68 Aquatic birds.
69 Viewed.
**DOWN**
1 Dressing gown.
2 Seventh planet.
3 Throw away.
4 ___ Dai.
5 Surrounded by.
6 Food made of goose livers.
7 At all.
8 Cycled.
9 Much-quoted poem.
10 Turf.
11 Scenes of action.
12 "Londonderry" and others.
13 ___ Hashana,
Jewish New Year.
18 He told one of
the "Canterbury Tales"
19 "Plain people."
25 Swedish Parliament.
26 Famines.
27 Secrecy.
28 Ampersands.
30 Nautical rope.
32 Cashew.
33 Sash.
35 City in Colombia.
36 Edge of skirt.
37 Alabama: Abbr.
38 Certain Italians.
39 Damage.
43 Pass a law.
43 Desirable thing.
47 Noted author.
48 Actress Marilyn.
49 Exact satisfaction for.
50 Flavor.
52 Humid.
53 Resulted.
54 Et —
57 Unbending.
58 Communists.
61 On this side of:
Prefix.
62 European country: Abbr.
63 Raises.
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54 55 | | 56 | | 57 58 | | 59 | | |
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