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University Daily Kansan Tuesday. May 23, 1961
The Case Against Alabama
The call by Alabama's government for federal aid yesterday is the direct result of a situation that Alabama's government allowed to get out of hand.
The group of "freedom riders" who were riding through Alabama on buses and testing segregation was attacked at bus terminals in Birmingham before it went to Montgomery. Despite this, no preventive measures had been taken in Montgomery against possible violence at the bus terminal there. As a result a mob gathered and attacked the freedom riders. Montgomery's police commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, arrived on the scene after the violence began and said that "We respond to a call here just like we would any place else. But we have no intention of standing guard for a bunch of trouble-makers coming into our city making trouble."
IN EFFECT THIS MEANT THAT ALthough Montgomery's officials knew there might be violence, they refused to take any action to prevent it. Yet in answer to a telegram U.S. Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy sent to Montgomery and Alabama officials, he had been assured that "all necessary steps had been taken and that no action on our part was necessary" to protect the freedom riders.
Despite these previous instances of violence, a mob was allowed to gather in front of the church in Montgomery where the freedom riders had gone and an attack was made on U.S.
marshals guarding the building. It was only after the attack began that Montgomery police began breaking up the mob.
It is interesting to note here that Atty. Gen. Kennedy had earlier asked for an injunction against the Ku Klux Klan and the National States Rights Party to prevent them from interfering with the freedom riders. These are radical elements which are violently opposed to integration in any form. If they are behind the violence in Montgomery, then the federal government is faced with a challenge to its attempt to enforce desegregation by an organized group that has plainly demonstrated its vicious and violent nature. Under such circumstances, it may be that federal troops will again have to be used, as they were in Little Rock, Ark.
BUT THE POINT IS THAT FEDERAL forces should not have been necessary. Had the Montgomery police department or Gov. John Patterson taken the necessary steps to prevent violence from erupting, the attacks on the freedom riders would never have taken place. Whether they agreed with what the freedom riders were attempting to do is irrelevant. It was their sworn duty as public servants to uphold the law. That law does not condone mob violence. They obviously failed in that duty. Police Commissioner Sullivan's statement clearly shows that he had refused to take preventive action.
William Mullins
Protest Too Late
Many students who have doubted the need and purpose of student government have become, in the last week, very much aware of its presence and influence. Interest and criticism of the All Student Council has greatly increased since the decision, made last week, to initiate a reserved football seating plan.
ALMOST AS MANY STUDENTS HAVE signed petitions protesting the council's decision as voted in the student body elections last March. Student opinion is high, and student opinion seems to be running against the council.
But where was student opinion in the three weeks that the council was considering the plan? The resolution passed by the council was approved after lengthy consideration and extensive investigation. Student opinion had adequate time to develop, but was not heard until after the plan was approved. Twenty five hundred students
were not aware of what the council was doing until after it had already been done.
Every student has had opportunity to be informed of the plans concerning football seating. The athletic seating board started work last semester on the plan they presented to the ASC. And football seating has been an issue in two campus elections.
THE REACTION TO THE COUNCIL'S DECISION is healthy and indicates KU students have risen above the apathy they have sometimes displayed about student government. It has been a long time since KU students have been so loud in their protest of anything. It is regrettable that the protest was not organized before the council's action.
The signatures of 2,500 students have been signed in vain,they were signed too late.
Ron Gallagher
Editor:
Editorial Illogical
I am afraid that the editorial "Straight from Grimm's..." Wednesday, May 17 UDK, failed in its attempt to make its point — other than that the CRC's huffing and puffing is doomed to be ineffectual. Why? Evidently because the "homogeneous" fraternities are not to be moved. The true place for the CRC to operate is in housing "where it can do some good." But since when have fraternities had nothing to do with housing??
Let us look more closely at this editorial. 1) "Discrimination should be fought wherever it exists." 2) Fraternities discriminate. 3) The CRC should fight against discrimination in housing. 4) The CRC should not do all the fighting, for "the Greeks themselves are better
... Letters ..
qualified." 5) The CRC is "wasting energy and time in investigating fraternities." 6) Conclusion: the CRC "gets only a Cub Scout badge." I see!!
Now let us attempt to use some plain reason and come to some non-foolish conclusions. 1) Discrimination is evil. 2)—especially in housing. 3) The fraternities make up a part of housing. 4) Conclusion: discrimination must be fought in fraternities.
It is not foolish to expect the Greeks to dent their own feeling of superiority by fighting against their own homogeneity? You are are right, the CRC will be ineffectual. Therefore, the administration must act!
John L. Hodge Lawrence senior
Daily Hansan
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
John Peterson ... Managing Editor
ENTERTAINMENT DEPARMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Thanks!
Frank Morgan and Dan Felger ... Co-Editorial Editors
Editor:
We want to express our thanks to the many students who have already contributed clothing to refugees. We will make the last collection on Saturday, June 3. The clothes will then be sent to the Philadelphia warehouse of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) and sent overseas.
We appreciate the use of the Daily Kansan as a means of reaching students who are not living in the dorms where the collection boxes with red and black stars are located. We urge anyone who has some good useable clothing which he can afford to give to people in need to take such clothing to the lobbies of Corbin, Gertrude Sellards Pearson, Joseph R. Pearson, Carruth O'Leary, Grace Pearson, Templin residence halls.
Sincerely,
Anne Moore
for the Oread Friends Meeting
Backs the Administration Editor:
I think we have an obligation to stand behind the administration, which I'm sure is committed to free speech as Chancellor Wescoe said, against the short-sighted ones who would limit open discussion on the campus.
What I think is needed is an open show of support for KU's leadership. With it, they will feel all the stronger in stating the university's historic position as a forum for free discussion.
L. T. Shaw Topeka freshman
the took world
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
THE TOWN, by William Faulkner. Vintage, $1.25.
The most complex in style of Faulkner's recently completed trilogy on the rise and fall of the Snopeses is "The Town," second volume of the three. In a handsome new volume from Vintage books, it accompanies the earlier "The Hamlet," and we now may hope for the emergence of "The Mansion."
This book describes the rise of Flem Snopes, and it can be taken as an allegorical statement of what has happened to the South in the past few generations—the fine old aristocracy giving way to the Cracker class, or whatever the Snopeses would be called in Mississippi. It also is genuine comic drama, an aspect of Faulkner which seems to me too little appreciated.
For Flem and the whole Snopes clan, with their spotted ponies of "The Hamlet" and wild, half-breed Indian children of "The Town," and people bearing names like "Eck" and "Mink" and "Wallstreet Panic" and "Bilbo" and "Vardaman," are comic characters. One gasps as he sees how Flem has conned someone else, but one has to admire him, as he admires all such sharp traders, be they southerners or Vermonters.
"The Town" has its bittersweet aspect, too, the lawyer Gavin Stevens, transferring his love from Eula Varner Snopes to Linda, the daughter. It has, in addition, those wildly discursive tall tales by V. K. Ratliff, the sewing machine man, which, in all likelihood, some doctoral candidate in English will leap onto one of these years and put into the tall tale tradition of the frontier and Mark Twain. (And he wouldn't be far wrong, either.)
Worth Repeating
College teachers should be recruited in terms of realistic criteria the ability to think, skill in imparting knowledge and stimulating thought, and that ineffable quality of enthusiasm without which the classroom becomes a mortuary.—David Boroff
The Packards, the Galbraiths and the Schlesingers are getting through to college students. And somebody has to set the record straight.-Hazen H. Morse Jr.
It is quite obvious that time is running out. . . In a very short time no less than fifteen countries will have the scientific and industrial capacity to join the nuclear club.-Howard C. Green