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Tuesday, August 27, 1974
University Daily Kansan
Fires, primary election dominate summer news here
By STEVE FRY Kansas Staff Reporter
Fires and elections were stories that dominated the Lawrence news during the 1980s.
Fires damaged or destroyed three Lawrence businesses. The Dillon's food store at 1740 Massachusetts St. and the adjacent Calhoun's clothing store, 1744
Segregation controversy unresolved
Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast!
By AUSTIN SCOTT The Washington Post
-The red queen in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass."
TOPEKA, Kan.-In the wonderland of Topeka, home of both Brown and the Board of Education members who ran all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1844, there is indeed a sense of having huffed and puffed at home where they started out 20 years before.
The high court's landmark desegregation order certainly didn't move the young black men out of school to grade when her father first filed the suit in 1951. Linda had gone through one all-black elementary school and on to a second all-black school by the time of the decision, but she was not black.
Though Topeka repealed its segregation law a year before the Supreme Court order, the city didn't move very swiftly to rectify matters once the decision was handed down; nine black children were placed in a special day school last year, and a few more the second year.
In fact, public controversy over school segregation had just about died out over the past 20 years—until last September, when a new suit was filed, charging that Topka schools are still "systematically segregated. Topka is thus facing the possibility of another painful integration with students in battle lines drawn quite differently and with enough ironies to bewilder even Lewis Caroll's red queen.
In 1951, when Brown Board of Education was first filed in Kansas courts, for example, one underlying issue was that legal segregation prohibited some black children from attending their neighborhood schools. But the new suit charges that Topeka schools are still segregated in part because they are not neighboring schools that school segregation is an extension of the city's de facto segregated housing patterns.
Similarly, Charles Scott, the black attorney who filed the original Brown case, signed his name several years ago to another suit which fried, in his words, to the plaintiff. He was told which would give black boards of education in black neighborhoods control over all black schools, and comparable set-up for whites." integration is no longer a priority issue in black Topkea, Scott says. "It's about 20 years of disillusionment can do you to."
Topeka's black citizens, whatever their private feelings, have not publicly supported the latest suit, filed in U.S. District Court last Sept. 10 on behalf of a 10-year-old boy who has been accused of raping a white Baptist minister who has 13 children and a congregation totaling 63.
Linda Browna, who gave her name to the historic 1954 decision, is among the many blacks who have been quiet about the new suit. Now 30, she has been married and divorced. Her two children started their own businesses in school that her father used to get her out of.
She seems to be taking the latest legal battle with a calm fatalism. She has not paid attention to it, she says. But then she sees that the real problem is housing, not schools.
"I think if they don't find an answer to that, we are still going to have segregation," she remarks. "Topeka today is more segregated in housing than 20 years ago. . . . It seems more crowded now, more concentrated than it was."
To Topka is more segregated than it used to be, with the high school and new neighborhood is as easy to go as in the rigidly segregated housing market where then Linda Brown is one of the exasperators.
Then she moved, and the children spent three years in a public elementary school that was only 20 per cent black. She moved again, and the children spent less than a year in a suburban public school that was 98 per cent white. She moved a third time, and for the past five months the children have worked on a new apartment per cent black and only a block from the middle-income integrated apartment complex where they live.
His son, Charles, now in 5th grade, and her daughter Kimberley, a 4th grader, started their kindergarten education in Monroe, the school their mother was attending. It was all black when she came, and she was 88 per cent when her children started.
As a child, Linda Brown had to travel 30 blocks to school, passing several all-wild schools along the way. "Sometimes the weather was so cold it was unbearable for a small child, she recalls, 'I’d shark crying in front of the walk, turn around, and come back.'"
"I happen with Chuckie in the school he's in now? Yes, I am, because it's more like the world that he's going to grow up in, helping him adjust to the world around him."
Massachusetts St., were destroyed by fire May 31. Five fire department trucks answered the alarm at 2:03 a.m. and fought through four hours before it was extinguished.
Damage to the two stores was $73,000. The cause of the fire wasn't determined.
A FIRE CAUSED $5,000 damage to the Holiday Inn Restaurant, 2303 Iowa St., on July 14. The fire, limited mainly to the attic and roof area of the restaurant, did $75,000 damage to the building and $20,000 damage to contents, firemen said.
The fire started in an air conditioner above a grill in the kitchen.
One fireman who suffered minor burns was treated at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
LAWRENCE VOTERS approved on June 26 a referendum in School District 497 to raise the tax levy by 1.8 mills. One mill is $1 on $1,000 assessed valuation. They levy
increase will provide approximately $80,000 for special education programs and $165,000 for a 3.16 per cent increase in salaries. As a result of the increased cost, a receive an additional $65,250 in state aid.
The Aug. 6 primary election attracted only about 7,800 of more than 31,000 voters in Douglas County, according to D.E. Mathea, county clerk and election commissioner.
Matthia attributed the low turnout to a lack of competition in local races.
He said he anticipated a light vote in the general election this fall although voting should be heavier than voting in the primary election.
WINNERS IN THE Douglas County primary included county commissioner, first district—Peter A. Whitenight (R), John Bingham (D); state representative, 43rd district—John H. Vogel (R), Democrat candidate; and state
County voters may decide in November whether to accept a bond proposal to replace 51 county bridges, including the Kansas River Bridge at Massachusetts and will be placed on the ballot if estimates are received from cost consultants in time.
representative, 45th class-Lloyd Buzzi (R), Francis L. Kennedy :D).
Art Heck, county commissioner, emphasized the need for the replacement of the bridges, especially of the Kansas River Bridge.
THE BRIDGE ISN'T totally unsafe but it is rapidly deteriorating, Hek said.
Construction of a 186,000-square-foot addition to the Lawrence Memorial Hospital in the location of a wing built in 1924 will cost $17,285. cesthills' costs estimated release July 17.
Construction of the new wing will cost about $65 for each square foot; 14,000 square
feet of remodeling to the 1969 wing will cost $30 for each square foot.
FEES FOR THE architect and consultant will be 6.5 per cent of construction costs, and the estimated cost of new departmental equipment will exceed $1.5 million. A contingency reserve, which would be used in an construction delay, was set at 7 per cent.
funded program were filed in violation of Kansas travel reservation and KU policies
Other costs, including soil service, site service and printing, were projected at $18,000. An estimated $1,277,000 net interest will money will bring the total cost to $17,295,000.
The attorney general's office is investigating possible financial discrepancies in a KU audit of the Follow Through System. The follow-through system Woodland Elementary School in Lawrence.
THE AUDIT, released July 9 and con ducted by the Office of the Com mittee on the federally
According to the audit, $3,000 worth of work was done on March 1, 1972; by March 31, 1974 never recovered.
The report, sent to the state legislative post audit committee, was referred to the attorney general.
JUDGE FRANK GRAY, Douglas County permanent injunction sought by the body tax department to prevent an area resident from holding the annual BiB Eat festival from opening.
The tax department tried to prevent the resident, Robert Schall, from providing sales taxable services because Schall was a real estate dealer on tickets he sold for festivals since 1962.
Judge Gray said the matter wasn't in his jurisdiction and that the tax department had adequate administrative procedures for recovering back sales taxes.
Campusbank...closest bank to the K.U. campus.
JUI MICRO SAFETY N