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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Nov. 17, 1960
Southern Gerrymandering
A record number of American voters went to the polls in the elections this year. But in Tuskegee, Ala., only nine of the city's 5,397 Negroes were allowed to vote.
The others were barred from the polls. In 1957, when Alabama's State Legislature passed a statute to permit Tuskegee's boundaries to be redrawn, fifty per cent of the city ended up outside the city limits in Macon County. The city was transformed from a square to the shape of a sea dragon. No white voters were excluded, but the Negro residential districts and the well known Negro college, Tuskegee Institute, were.
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to consider the constitutionality of the statute this season. It is one of the most significant cases on the court's docket, for it represents a political question as well as a civil rights problem.
The statute was sponsored by State Sen. Sam Englehardt Jr., a leader of Tuskegee's White Citizens' Council. For years Tuskegee's Negroes, who represented 70 per cent of the city's population, had tried to register to vote. Each time the board of registers thought up reasons not to accept them. The gerrymander statute was considered to be the solution to all future problems.
IN THE PAST, THE COURT HAS PRACticed restraint in political questions, but it has been sensitive to the plight of Negro voters. How will it handle this case? Will it regard it as essentially political in nature, or will it regard the case as a restriction upon the Negroes' right to vote?
We predict the court will reverse the decisions of Alabama's lower federal courts, which have upheld the statute.
Englehardt said he took action to prevent Negro control of public affairs in Tuskegee. And if the gerrymander statute did not prove effective, he proposed to draft a bill to abolish Macon
County itself and divide it among the five neighboring counties.
Tuskegee's Negroes reacted bitterly to the statute. They quietly but determinedly boycotted the stores of pro-Englehardt businessmen.Because the Negroes provide the principal economic income of the Tuskegee merchants, the stores were quiet, the cash registers did not ring, and clerks were fired.
THEN A SUIT WAS BROUGHT BY A group of Negroes who charged that the purpose of the statute was to deprive them of their right to vote. The suit was dismissed without trial of the charges. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal on the grounds that states have complete control over city boundaries not subject to control by federal courts.
The case presents the strange desire of a city to tear itself down rather than to build itself up. The city has been cut in half, and if Macon County is dissolved, Tuskegee will lose its position and resulting trade as a county seat. And the reason for it all is to deprive the Negroes of their voting privileges, a right guaranteed to them in the Constitution.
Last March, Solicitor General J. Lee Rankin filed a memorandum as a frigid of the court, urging review of the case. He said the gerrymander statute had effectively reduced the Negroes "to a ghetto" and that it violated the 14th and 15th amendments.
WE PREDICT THE SUPREME COURT WILL interpret the Tuskegee statute as an infringement on Negro voting rights, and declare it unconstitutional.
Then perhaps America's voting record will be higher than ever in the next elections, when Tuskegee's Negroes and others like them are equally admitted to the polls.
Carol Heller
KU's Splendid Band
One day last week the intramural football playoffs were postponed because the weather was too cold. That same day KU's marching band spent more than an hour practicing formations and numbers for Saturday's half-time and pregame performances.
This determination and willingness to work has been reflected in the band's sterling performance at each of KU's home football games this year.
There's a saying, "If you're going to be big time, you've got to act big time." KU's football
team has started the jump to national prestige. If such things were measured, the same could be said for the band. Seldom are pre-game ceremonies as impressive as those conducted here and seldom are half-time programs as appealing and entertaining.
Russell L. Wiley, band director, his assistants and the members of KU's marching band deserve the student body's wholehearted congratulations and backing for their splendid representation of the University.
- John Peterson
By Gayle Kissick
Painter Depicts Life's Poverty
The bitterness and emptiness of poverty is revealed in both the nude and religious paintings of one of France's most successful young artists. The balance, unemotional, and colorless compositions of Bernard Buffet depict man in a miserable state.
Buffet takes a grim view of the world. By character, he is a recluse and cares only for his painting. His disinterest in people may be seen in his scenes of New York and Paris, which he shows without people or movement on the streets. Buffet grew up during the war years and his post-war style of anguish and
despair has been accepted as a way of viewing and remembering contemporary life.
Discovered in 1948
Buffet was discovered and made famous in 1948 by Dr. Maurice Girardin, a dentist and art dealer. Dr. Girardin found Buffet in poetry, painting on old bed sheets. He bought four of his paintings and inspired the art dealer firm of Drounant-David in Paris to put Buffet under contract on a chance.
For every attack on Buffet's paintings there is a defense, and
The gamble paid off and Buffet and the art dealer have both made fortunes.
these arguments for and against his paintings have helped to build his career. He arouses the curiosity of the public at his yearly showings in Paris. Many people come to laugh but many to appreciate his work.
Buffet's paintings are among the most fashionable today and in great demand throughout Europe and America. It is unusual for a 32-year-old painter to have many of his paintings in museums, national galleries, and private collections.
In Great Demand
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The University of Kansas Museum of Art is fortunate to have received as a gift one of his paintings, "Still Life." The abstractness of Buffet's painting can be visualized in the three dimensional objects. The lemon and pears are realistic in shape but are abstract in form. The bottle and bowl of fruit which have dimensions are shown against a flat background of the tablecloth.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray Miller ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Peterson and Bill Blundell ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
Floating Objects
Mark Dull ... Business Manager
Certain objects appear to float in their setting. Buffet uses his signature to help balance his composition, but it is large enough to become more dominant than one of his pears.
The linearism of his painting is indicated in the rigidly placed objects, defined by black lines painted around them. His use of paint varies from thick, heavy impasto areas to sections barely covered with paint. The few colors that Buffet uses are rather somber and mournful in tone.
"IT'S ALL RIGHT DEAN WILSON—WE'RE SHOWING A MOVIE."
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
FAMOUS AMERICAN PLAYS OF THE 1920s, selected and with an introduction by Kenneth Macgowan. Dell Laurel Books, 75 cents.
Can one establish a pattern of American drama in the 1920s? It was a time of brilliant coming-alive, of thrilling theater. But is there a theme? Does such a theme correspond to the currents in the novel: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald and Dreiser?
LAUREL BOOKS HAS initiated a series of three play anthologies with this volume on the 1920s. The works included are O'Neill's "Moon of the Caribbees," Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings' "What Price Glory?," Sidney Howard's "They Knew What They Wanted," Du Bose and Dorothy Heyward's "Porgy," Elmer Rice's "Street Scene" and Phillip Barry's "Holiday."
A diversified group. The first is an early one-act play that in production antedated the 1920s. The second is the most famous of all war comedy-dramas. The third is a sentimental story of an Italian wine-grower in California who gets himself a mail-order bride and a pack of trouble. The fourth is the basis of the great opera "Porgy and Bess." The fourth is a realistic but rather shallow melodrama of illicit love and murder in the big city. The sixth is a brilliant high comedy that presents the interesting thesis that the time to retire is youth, that one should enter the mundane world of business and finance after he has had his fling.
But for this one cannot condemn Macgowan, for he did his best to obtain "Desire Under the Elms" or "Strange Interlude." One likewise cannot criticize his other choices, though "The Front Page" belongs, to my way of thinking, in any such collection for it symbolizes so well the wild twenties that we read about and a few of us remember.
THE COLLECTOR IS KENNETH Maegowan, a moving spirit in the Provincetown Players that produced O'Neill, a critic in the period under concern, and a film producer in Hollywood and professor of film arts at UCLA. He stresses Eugene O'Neill in his introduction, and then offers only the thin little sketch of life on an oil tanker. The honored guest does not attend the dinner.
THE OTHERS ARE ALL important in the history of drama in the 1920s. "What Price Glory?" opened the floodgates and let shocking reality enter the theater; if it seems pretty ordinary today it is because Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen (as Quirt and Flagg) and James Cagney and Pat O'Brien fought in and brawled in so many films since that time.
"The They Knew What They Wanted" is a warmly human tale, and it has had a recent reincarnation as "The Most Happy Fella." No defense has to be made of "Porgy," which is practically an American monument. The realism of "Street Scene" was a forerunner of "Dead End." And "Holiday" led to more such comedies from Barry, and from Behrman, and if it lacked serious purpose it was not atypical of the times in which it was written.
Worth Repeating
It is very far from clear that science and freedom are going to stay friends—McGeorge Bundy
James Joyce's work began in the merest lyric and ended in the vastest encyclopedia.—Richard Ellmann