Editorials
Southern Justice
All the vituperative phrases that have ever been applied to miscarriages of justice are inadequate to condemn the outcome of the infamous trial in Lowndes County, Ala., last Thursday.
The acquittal of deputy sheriff Thomas Coleman, charged with manslaughter in the killing of civil rights worker Jonathan Daniels, is more than a sham, farce, travesty or mockery. The magnificent symbol of justice, a majestic woman balancing scales, has been bound to the rack of unbending prejudice and lashed with the sharp, swift whip of hatred and ignorance.
WHERE DOES THE blame for this brand of "justice" lie? Was it due to circumstances—an all-white jury, whose members were described in news dispatches as friends of the defendant? Does it lie with the judge, who denied a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to postpone the trial until more Negroes were on the county jury roles. The judge also turned down a petition from Alabama's attorney general asking that the trial be delayed in order to try for a murder indictment, rather than a charge of manslaughter.
In all probability, judge, jury and Southern heritage are equally culable.
Does the blame rest with the jurors, whose birthright was a tradition of hatred, ignorance, prejudice and vigilante justice?
AND CITIZENS across the nation, if they accept the verdict apathetically, are culpable, not in this case perhaps, but in future cases that will surely spring out of the racial revolution. Every citizen must share the blame next time if the wave of horror and indignation spreading across the country does not result in a purging of what passes for justice in the South.
— Karen Lambert
Freedom in Faith
What ever happened to Madalyn Murray?
After a global disappearing act, which received quite a bit of attention from both press and police, she recently turned up in a San Antonio jail. She has been released on a habeas corpus writ and is fighting extradition to Maryland, where she is charged with assault and disorderly conduct.
Mrs. Murray is perhaps the world's best-known atheist. It was her court suit which led to the Supreme Court decision banning compulsory prayers in public schools. A sympathizer in western Kansas offered her land on which to build a college where her beliefs—or disbeliefs—could be taught. If she hadn't gotten into a fight with the police and run away to Hawaii, then Mexico, to avoid arrest, Kansas might have become a haven for free-thinkers.
OR IT MIGHT have worked out this way if she had built that college:
Several hundred students, raised by their parents to be good atheists, arrive at Godless University where they are exposed to the required freshman subjects, Sacrilegion I and II, Pagan Ethics, and Blasphemy (prerequisite Profanity, credit may be allowed through Advance Placement). Inevitably, some students begin to think for themselves—discard old ideas—pick up new values, different ideas. And then GU is really in for trouble: demonstrations every day (God knows who's attending classes); dirty yells at football games (Go to Heaven, Cornhuskers!); a sit-in at the Chancelloress's office (where some rabble-rousers demand compulsory chapel attendance).
IT'S TOO BAD GU never got started. A good way to make something seem desirable is to forbid it. But perhaps Mrs. Murray accomplished that even without her college. Because of her court suit, a lot of people in this country (including the Supreme Court) re-examined and re-affirmed the idea of religious freedom—the inalienable right of every man, be he Christian, Jew, Hindu, Moslem, Buddhist, or atheist.
- Yvonne Willingham
They Loveth All
Recently, in the course of finding this year's lodgings, we were directed to the off-campus housing office, located, or perhaps hidden in the basement of Strong Hall.
There we were greeted with a warm smile and with two complete copies of the regulations and policies on student off-campus housing, which, before the office could help us, we had to promise to love, honor and obey.
LATER. WE READ those ten commandments of off-campus living, finding them, to our surprise, very pleasant reading indeed, though perhaps a bit quaint, like the occasional inclusion of hominy grits on the Union menu.
Particularly intriguing were the rules forbidding the "possession or consumption (of alcoholic beverages) by students in their rooms in private residences," and the one labeled "Guests," which bars "visitors of the opposite sex in the sleeping rooms of students, or in any part of the living quarters after AWS closing hours." The latter was so delicately and so wholesomely phrased that even Thomas Bowdler, were he still alive, might have praised the wording and its author.
BUT RULES MUST be enforced, and here we confess we have no idea of how the administration policies the policies it makes. Each night, after putting the cat out, we carefully search in the closet, under the bed, and behind the draperies to see if a dean or two has secreted himself (herself?) away, while making his (her?) routine rounds of inspection.
So far all we have seen are cobwebs, but that, we hope, does not mean the deans are not attending to their duties. For in an era of increasing depersonalization in higher education there is rarely seen an administration with greater concern for the private and personal life of the student.
It's nice to know that we're loved, even if it means drinking outside and buying an electric blanket. And in that spirit then we wish Chancellor Wescoe and all the deans happy hunting and advise the students to keep both their bottles and their bedrooms empty, for KU, like President Johnson, loves them, one and all.
Justin Beck
'Marriage on Rocks' Offers Standard Fare
By Larry Ketchum (Kansan Reviewer)
At last Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin have decided to act their age in a slightly comic film, "Marriage On the Rocks," Currently playing at the Granada.
Sinatra, 50, plays a balding advertising executive with a comfortable home and nice family while Dino, 48, sops it up with the girls in his beach house, neglecting his position as Sinatra's assistant.
IF A DRAMATIC piece is to get along at all it has to have a conflict. In this case Deborah Kerr tries to break up her domestic situation with sedate husband Sinatra. Dino's tie-in with the plot is that he once was Kerr's suitor in earlier years and she still thinks he's great (so does Dino).
With this situation throw in plenty of babes, booze, two spoiled brats and a bagpipe-playing mother-in-law and out comes a movie moderately funny.
"Marriage" hits the funnybone about one out of three jokes. Aimed at being a sophisticated comedy for common folk it emerges without much "ha-ha."
SINATRA AND MARTIN carry the ball most of the way through and play themselves well while doing it. Both have played Sinatra and Martin so long they will never forget how to go about it. They keep themselves alive by surrounding themselves with bikini-clad secretaries who can't type—an old joke, but one the audience seems to look forward to.
Hermione Baddley attempts the part of the Scottish mother-in-law with a great deal of false gusto. Towards the end of the film she lets up a little bit and we see she can act if she can get rid of all the decorations heaped upon her. She shows she can be a good comedienne in a seemingly effortless way but starts off with a loud raucous yell, "I'm funny, so laugh!"
AS FOR DEBORAH KERR—well, I think she would be better off retired.
"Marriage" will no doubt be on the late show next spring.
Dailli' Hänsen
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? Daily Kansan
Monday, October 4, 1965
Revolting Generation Spurs Hope
How are they to be described—these suddenly so-grown-up students upon whom, during their years of university education, parents have lavished so much care and love and attention . . . and money? I suggest that they are to be described as—and the inflection is crucial—a revolting generation.
There are some these days who employ the adjective "revolting" in such a way that it is loaded with pejorative content. These are the ones who assert that the 1964-65 manifestations of student unrest on our campuses are due to immaturity, to insecurity, to association with the more dubious members of the faculty, or (in an increasingly widespread variant) to some kind of Communist takeover of the student organizations.
NOW I AM SURE that some people share one or another of these variant assessments of a generation that seems revolting indeed, even though they may not like my dismissal of those who voice the objection. There may be others who yearn for the
old simplicities of the past, when, for example. Stanford students tried to paint the Berkeley bell tower red rather than act like reds.
Instead, let me try to focus on a more widelyvoiced objection, one that I have hard many times, and one that could be put in such terms as the following: "Why don't these students stick to getting an education, instead of getting involved in causes?
I THINK THERE is a rebuttal to this sort of complaint, and I think the present student generation has discovered that it is a rebuttal that denies the presuppositions of the question; it refuses to allow that the alternatives thus posed are real alternatives. It insists that an ability to read books lays upon one the obligation to share that ability; it insists that the chance to be in a university atmosphere does not exempt one from concern for, and occasionally involvement in, a revolutionary atmosphere such as Mississippi; it insists that in this day and age if your fraternity tells you you can't pledge a Negro, the only response you can make in integrity is that you are pledging a person, not a member of a race, and that race is a totally unsatisfactory and indeed immoral criterion for determining the worth of a person, let alone determining the possibilities of fraternities, brotherhood, with that person; and finally it insists that study about Southeast Asia and direct concern about what is now going on in Southeast Asia are intimately and directly related, and cannot properly be separated from one another.
Let's face it; a truly educated person must be a dissatisfied person. He will have been exposed to enough of the greatness of the past, and of the possibilities of the future, to remain permanently dissatisfied with the present.
Robert M. Brown Ramparts