Page 2
University Daily Kansan Friday. Jan. 13. 1961
How Far... How Fast?
A SHORT DISTANCE UP THE KAW FROM Kansas City sprawls the town of Lawrence . . .
Lawrence, Kansas. Nothing special about the name. Just Lawrence, Kansas. And nothing really special about the town either. The high school—Lawrence High—has a good football team. The farmers from the flat wheat-producing plains drive into the town every Saturday, spend some money, return to the farm. The workers from the Co-op gather in various taverns throughout the city to drink beer most nights. The churches, as might be expected in an area called the Bible Belt, are full each Sunday . . .
Lawrence, Kansas.
IF THERE IS SOMETHING THAT SETS Lawrence apart from other Kansas towns, it is the University on the hill. Kansans and particularly those Kansans from Lawrence-speak of the University with pride. The native of Lawrence marvels at the beauty of the campus in his childhood, walks hand-in-hand along its sidewalks with a girl in his youth, and, in his old age, sits on his porch and watches the flags atop Fraser Hall flapping in the breeze. The University and Lawrence are one to the native of Lawrence. Historically, it has always been this way.
TO THE STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY that same University that is a source of pride to the town of Lawrence—Lawrence and the
University are one also. This is true-for four years. But four years is very little time. It is very little time for the student at the University to learn to appreciate the town as the town has learned to love the University.
BUT FOUR YEARS IS NOT TOO SHORT A time—in some cases—for the student at the University on the hill to become disenchanted with Lawrence. And then he becomes convinced that he has a stake in shaping the history of Lawrence. But is the town of Lawrence his? Or does it belong more to the Co-op worker, the farmer who comes in on Saturday afternoons, the Lawrence churchgoer?
FOUR YEARS. FOUR YEARS FOR THE student to throw himself into the struggle . . . and then his place is taken by another student with just four years. But the history of Lawrence is not measured in terms of four years to the Co-op worker, the farmer, the man who attends Sunday School in a Lawrence church as a boy and watches his children married in the same church years later. Can victory be achieved in four years—or is that trying to go too far too fast? At the end of four years, the student leaves, perhaps to carry on the Struggle elsewhere. But Lawrence is anchored to the Kansas plains. It has not left the scene of battle in the past. Lawrence cannot leave the scene of battle now.
Dan Felger
Text of ASC Resolution
Resolution on Racial Justice
Be it resolved by the All Student Council of the University of Kansas:
1. We, the All Student Council of the University of Kansas, recognizing that racial discrimination exists in both the North and South, condemn any such violations of human dignity.
2. We believe that racial discrimination conflicts with basic religious and moral principles.
3. We as students especially condemn discriminatory practices in the area of education, such as biased admission policies and expulsion of students who exhibit support of integration.
4. We urge state and national legislators to initiate strong measures which will lead to racial justice; and we pledge our support of these measures.
5. We recognize and condemn shameful conditions of discrimination which exist in labor hiring and wage rates, voting registration, housing and services of merchants.
AMENDMENT I
A. We believe that persons and merchants open to the public, operate in the public domain and can be justifiably enforced to obey public laws and ethics.
B. However, we believe that the private domain* is separate from the public domain and here racial justice can be enforced by superb good example, but cannot be mandated by sheer force.
C. We believe that prejudices rooted in a person's inner conscience can best be solved in the private domain by heroic good example.
6. We encourage leaders in business and education to realize their moral obligation to resolve racial discrimination by actively cooperating with representatives of minority groups.
AMENDMENT II
A. We encourage action in the
form of selective buying and through the use of boycotts by students who are interested in the equality of all races and creeds. B. We also encourage publication of names of merchants and other persons operating in the public domain who are now supporting discrimination in their establishments.
7. We sympathize deeply with students who are being persecuted for attempting to exercise their rights as human beings through methods which endorse the principle of peaceful resistance.
8. We deem it unfortunate that the minority groups are forced to demonstrate for those rights which are due them and are freely accorded to other Americans.
9. We commit ourselves, as students, to attack discrimination and to work toward establishing social justice.
*The private domain includes all country clubs, brotherhoods, fraternities, etc.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
"PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINES? SOME STUDENT IN HERE HAS THEM ALL CHECKED OUT."
If young men keep going into law for the money there'll be no one left to defend the poor guy found sleeping under a bridge. R. C. Heege
Short Ones
UNI PRITT
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
annually 1924.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
University of Kansas student newspaper
Extension 711, news room
Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service. 18 East 50 St., New York 22, NY. Represented by National Mall. Mail submission rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays. University holidays and examination periods. Entered as an act of Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray Millet - Managing Editor
Carol Heller, Jane Royle, Priscilla Burton and Carrie Edwards, Assistant Managing Editors; Pat Sheley and Suzanne Shaw, City Editors; John Macdonald, Sports Editors; Peggy Kallos and Donna Engle, Society Editors.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Blippendl
Bill Blipendl
Bill Blundell ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull      Business Manager
NORTHERN LIGHTS.
From the Newsstand
Richard Wright Recalled
I was far from imagining, when I agreed to write this memoir, that it would prove to be such a painful and difficult task. What, after all, can I really say about Richard? Everything founders in the sea of what might have been. We might have been friends, for example, but I cannot honestly say that we were.
There might have been some way of avoiding our quarrel, our rupture; I can only say that I failed to find it. The quarrel having occurred, perhaps there might have been a way to have become reconciled. And, in fact, I think that I mysteriously and stubbornly counted on this, the way a child dreams of winning, by means of some dazzling exploit, the love of his parents.
HOWEVER, HE IS DEAD now, and so we never shall be reconciled. The debt I owe him can now never be discharged, at least not in the way I hoped to be able to discharge it. The saddest thing about our relationship is that my only means of discharging my debt to Richard was to become a writer; and this effort revealed more and more clearly as the years went on, the deep and irreconcilable differences between our points of view.
This might not have been so serious if I had been older when we met—if I had been, that is, less uncertain of myself, and less monstrously egotistical. But when we met, I was twenty, a carnivorous age; he was then as old as I am now, thirty-six; he had been my idol since high school, and I, as the fledgling Negro writer, was, very shortly, in the position of his protege. This position was not really fair to either of us, since, as writers, we were about as unlike as any two writers could possibly be. But no-one can read the future and neither of us knew this then.
WE WERE LINKED together, really, because both of us were black. I had made my pilgrimage to meet him because he was the greatest black writer in the world for me. In Uncle Tom's Children, in Native Son, and, above all, in Black Boy, I found expressed, for the first time in my life, the sorrow, the rage, and the murderous bitterness which was eating me up and eating up the lives of those around me. Richard's work was an immense liberation and revelation for me. He became my ally and my witness, and, alas! my father.
I remember our first meeting very well. It was in Brooklyn, it was winter. I was broke, naturally, and shabby and hungry and scared. He appeared from the depths of what I remember as an extremely long apartment. Now his face, voice, manner, figure, are all very sadly familiar to me. But they were a great shock to me then. It is always a shock to meet famous men. There is always an irreducible injustice in the encounter for the famous man cannot possibly fit the image one has evolved of him. My own image of Richard was almost certainly based on Canada Lee's terrifying stage portrait of Bigger Thomas.
RICHARD WAS NOT like that at all. His voice was light and even rather sweet, with a Southern melody in it; his body was more round than square, more square than tall; and his grin was more boyish than I had expected, and more diffident. He had a trick, when he greeted me, of saying, "Hey, boy!" with a kind of pleased, surprised expression on his face. It was very friendly, and it was also, faintly, mockingly conspiratorial—as though we were two black boys, in league against the world, and had just managed to spirit away several loads of watermelons.
(Excerpted from "Richard Wright: A Personal Memoir" by James Baldwin in the Jan. 1, 1961, New America.)