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University Daily Kansan Thursday. March 2, 1961
CRC Should Stop
We have watched the Civil Rights Council for five months. During that period there has been a lot of noise but very little constructive action effected. The organization has dwindled in participating membership and effectiveness since its creation until it now meets once a week for the purpose of capriciously aiming its ineffective weapons at various commercial areas of Lawrence. Its manner of conduct has become ludicrous.
ON NOVEMBER 2,1960,THE NEWLY formed council issued a statement of purpose in which it said it would to work for "equal rights for all persons, regardless of race, creed, or national origin, through legal and non-violent procedures."
The CRC further stated members were going to achieve this purpose through the "acquisition and dispersal of information and the judicious use of publicity."
THEIR PURPOSE IS COMMENDABLE AND admirable.
Racial inequality, which has been the Council's main concern, is contemptible and odious in this day, 100 years after the war that freed the slave. Discrimination should be abolished legally and practically as is being done in state after state. Non-violent action is a powerful force for righteousness and has proven itself effective.
THE ACTIONS OF THE CRC HAVE NOT been.
On October 5, a committee was formed to investigate the University Housing.
On December 7, committee reports were made stating that discrimination did exist in taverns, eating places, and the University's approved list of rooming houses. The CRC then approved consideration of staging sit-ins and picketing the establishments.
On January 5, the Council resolved to have an "all-student boycott" of the two Lawrence taverns which were known to discriminate.
On January 15, a petition for a referendum on
the racial justice resolution before the ASC was circulated by members of the CRC. It needed 2,000 signatures for action by the ASC. A little over 1,000 students signed it in an exhaustive drive by the Council.
On February 15, the Council decided to investigate discrimination in another tavern and the Lawrence Roller Rink. It also considered further investigation of the housing problem.
On Feb. 22, the Council made plans to investigate the Lawrence barber shops to see if the barbers discriminated.
Last night they met and reiterated their plans.
Had this group solved the problem of discrimination in each area it focused on and then moved on to another, our attitude would be different. But nothing was achieved or solved. Had this group won support of a greater number of people instead of only the nine that met last week and the twenty this week, our attitude would be different.
Had this group acted with responsibility commensurate with its ideals, our attitude would be different.
But it is not.
WE THINK IT IS TIME FOR THE CIVIL Rights Council to disband.
We think nothing has been gained but the straining of relations between Negro and White, student and townpeople, and that a grossly distorted picture of the University now exists in the minds of people in the state and region because of the Council's activities.
There is a need for a responsible, sound organization to work for racial justice. Plans are being made at present by the city and the student government for the establishment of just such organizations.
We think these should be the bodies for the investigation of the problem of discrimination. Through these, concrete action can be taken. Members of the CRC would be of great service to these two groups. We suggest they channel their activities through one of the two.
The Editors
Housing Office Criticized Editor:
In September of 1959, my wife and I moved into a small, inexpensive, well located apartment. The property passed into the University's hands and, in June 1960, we were asked to vacate the apartment.
In doing so, we made certain that the University had our name in case the apartment should again be available. We considered the apartment so desirable that we contacted the University frequently to inquire about it.
In February 1961, the University leased the apartment to someone who would assume maintenance responsibilities (but live rent free).
My questions are:
... Letters ...
- When the apartment was made available, why was my continuously renewed application not considered?
- How did the new tenant (previously unknown to the University, theoretically) come to be considered?
- When reminded of a verbal commitment to me, why did the University not act in my favor?
Theodore Scott
Lawrence sophomore
Who's a Foreigner
Who's a Foreigner
In 1955, my wife and I left the farm for a different way of life. People were different; I couldn't understand why. People walked right by without a sign of recognition. But I didn't understand that they couldn't speak to 10,000
people; they had their minds on their studies which can get rugged they say.
I AM WRITING THIS IN regard to the article, "Foreign Students Say Americans are Cold." My wife and I have had 20 different nationalities of foreign students since we have been here. We hope we haven't been thought of as cold.
We have to admit we have all kinds of people in America and we are all foreign but the American Indian. In fact, I don't know just what nationality I am; just that I was born in America.
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
SATURDAY. OUR CAR wouldn't start. The water man took time to help us get it started but it went dead again in traffic. A college boy pushed us clear across Massachusetts St. to a filling station. I didn't know him and didn't have time to thank him.
Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription 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. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
Bill Blundell, Carrie Edwards, Lynn Cheatum and Ralph Wilson, Assistant Managing Editors; Tom Turner, City Editor; Bill Sheldon, Sports Editor; Sue Thieman, Society Editor.
John Peterson
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Frank Morgan and Dan Felger ... Co-Editorial Editors
Managing Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
F. Mike Harris, Advertising Manager; Tom L. Brown, Circulation Manager; Richard Horn, Classified Advertising Manager; William Goodwin, Promotion Manager; Marlin Zimmerman, National Advertising Manager.
Yesterday, we had a flat in front of the Acacia fraternity and a boy we never saw before came out and helped us. If they read this, thanks to both.
We see what we look for. We wish those students who said that in the article would come to see us some time.
Mr. and Mrs. T. B. Ford 1230 Oread
(Editor's Note: Mr. and Mrs. Ford have operated a rooming house for KU students for six years.)
Short Ones
Philosophy is the last refuge of a man with *a witty wife*.—George R. Walker
- * *
Freshmen are deprived rather abruptly of the luxury of thinking that reading is something they can finish, and are confronted instead with an infinite world of books.—William G. Perry Jr.
The Book World
The Child Buyer
By Roy D. Laird Assistant Professor of Political Science
John Hersey is a powerful writer with an impressive list of books to his name, books such as his account of Hiroshima, The Wall, The Marmot Drive, and the Pulitzer Prize work, A Bell for Adano. Now, with the addition of The Child Buyer, there is reason to believe that, one day, Hersey will write a truly great novel. Unfortunately this latest work still does not live up to the author's promise.
Up until this point Hersey's work is seemingly a bitter satire of a society worshipping, and fearing, false gods both old and new, but in the closing passages he too seems to have succumbed to the claims of the practitioners of scientism, his major target. Here the reader is led to believe that while the U.L. method may not be able to capture the superior machine residing in Barry's head, it can harness the machines of lesser geniuses.
Barry Rudd is a ten year old prodigy—his I.Q. is so high that it runs off the chart. One fall day, a Mr. Wessing Jones, Vice President of the United Lymphomilloid Corporation comes to Barry's New England town on a search for extraordinary talent. He is on a child buying trek. U.L. has developed a process, through the use of surgery, drugs, and isolation whereby the human brain (only youthful genius wanted) can be wiped clean, and then reactivated in the form of a human computer.
Unfortunately, in his effort to expose the growing belief that man too is nothing more or less than an extension of the material world and, thus, is always subject to rigid mathematical laws (man's brain is but a highly complex computer) Mr. Hersey stumbles in the final chapter of the book.
A good educator, and a good novelist, must be first of all a critic of his society. Hersey is a critic of a government that encourages the sacrifice of a single individual to the ends of the state. He is a critic of a society that elects as its representatives such people as comprise the majority of the Senate Committee. He is a critic of the materialistic outlook of a society dominated by the jungle law of business—all is reduced to profit and loss. He is a severe critic of the oversimplified view that there is only right and wrong, good and evil.
No wonder U.L. has a multi-million dollar contract with the federal government. No wonder the citizens of the state, including a majority of the Senate Committee investigating the incident, regard Barry and his patron, Principal Gozar, as unpatriotic, perhaps even pro-Communist, because Barry refuses to sacrifice himself for the cause. Under Dr. Gozar's tutelage Barry had hoped to be a classifying biologist, but the struggle against Communism is surely more important.
Perhaps, however, this reviewer is mistaken. Perhaps Hersey did not intend his work as a satire, but rather as a tragedy in which he attempts to depict the time when science will at last explode the myth of the soul. If this is the author's intent the work may well come to be recognized as truly great, although we are too much a part of our time to predict whether the book will be regarded as the last great human tragedy or the first great work of the human machine.