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Summer Session Kansan Friday, July 15, 1966
Don't knock the kids
Perhaps some of our more astute readers (those who glance at the editorial page for something besides the "little man on campus" cartoons) noticed something different about our last issue.
On pages two and three of the Tuesday, July 12, Summer Session Kansan, 16 editorials, written by students of the journalism division of the Midwestern Music and Art Camp appeared.
I HAVE HEARD some unfavorable comments on this practice, and I wish to make my opinions on the subject heard here and now.
The hard-bitten college students with philosophical and intellectual leanings who mentioned that perhaps high school students were not really old
enough or mature enough to write anything that they (my college friends) would consider worth reading, would do well to look at these pieces.
It's true, the subjects included some which would not be of interest to most collegians. One editorial, on camp practices, doubtless did not have much appeal. And those students who feel themselves to be emancipated, clothing-wise, from the petty standards of most high schools, would not be concerned with the few articles on dress.
BUT THERE WERE definitive articles of interest. LSD, integration, rights, auto safety, and LBJ, are all topics which should concern any average reader.
And the ideas expressed on these subjects were not bad, not
bad at all; in fact my hard-hearted college friend, you might do well to read some of the bright and intelligent young opinions.
Maybe high school students have no right to be heard in a college newspaper, but I feel that if they have the courage to stare their frank and sometimes unpopular opinions, then they have the right to be heard.
AND YOU, my old mature college friend, if you think their opinions are so foolish, why don't you write a guest editorial and give me your own ideas.
But you'd better send it special delivery, or I'll never see it; I would probably be too busy talking to some of these "adolescents" and learning how they feel about things.
Barbara Phillips
Civil rights shifts to North
(UPI)—Pressure is fast building to compel the well-heeled suburbs outside the South to share the Negro problem with the great central cities.
For example: North Shore communities suburban to Chicago would be pressed to re-zone areas for subsidized, low-cost housing, and the suburban schools would be expected to absorb the children of Negro families attracted to the area by subsidized housing.
WE ALTHY WESTCHESTER and Dutchess counties, which are typical of suburban wealth near New York City, would be pressed to do their bit in absorbing the impact of Negro intellectual and material poverty.
Detroit's Grosse Point, and the satellite communities around Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere finally must endure the coming pressure, or else.
Last month's conference of U.S. mayors endorsed such a program in general terms. The 1966 civil rights bill now pending in Congress was a step toward the generally indicated purpose of the federal government to press for suburban help in dealing with the problem of the northern Negro.
THE 1966 BILL contained an open housing provision which would have forbidden a home owner or a dealer in homes to discriminate against a would-be Negro purchaser.
Startled congressional champions of civil rights recognized a Great Society effort to outlaw outside the South the prevailing discrimination against Negroes which is not enforced by northern law, but which is based on habit and most of all is dependent on a subtle exclusion of Negroes from the good life, the good education and the good homes of suburbia.
THERE IS NO ROOM in white suburbia for impoverished Negroes. They cannot afford it. Hence, a beginning might be made with subsidized low-cost housing. Suburban communities could zone against any such intrusion, and that is a fact. But the federal government could withhold all federal funds from such a suburb.
Consider what may come to pass in the light of a recent statement by Dr. Tinsley L. Spraggins
of the U.S. Office of Educational Opportunities. He said:
"Money is power and the government intends to use this power as a lever to pressure school systems, both North and South, to eliminate the last vestiges of segregation."
SCHOOL SYSTEMS in the wealthier suburbs are lily white or almost so, there being no Negroes in the neighborhoods to be integrated into such schools. The long-haul program is to change all of that by making sufficient Negro children available, pretty much regardless of how the suburban whites feel about it. They won't like it.
Suburban and other outside the-South whites did not like the open housing provision in the pending civil rights bill. So they junked most of that part of the measure. They obtained a compromise on the open housing question. The compromise limited the open housing provision mainly to the sale and-or rental of large apartment and home developments.
NO DANGER NOW of your suburban next-door neighbor being compelled to sell his home to some well-heeled Negro, if your neighbor sells at all. Many of the whites who opposed the original open housing provision have been providing political support for punitive civil rights legislation directed at southern states.
Summer Session Kansan
Outraged civil rights leaders accused the turncoat northerners of hypocrisy in refusing to accept
Radio-TV classes prepare scripts
Each class member wrote a script and submitted it to the class for review. Then the class voted for the best ones. The selected plays range from a take-off on Gunsmoke to a trip through a jungle. Each has several actors, a director, and an engineer. After enough rehearsal, each will be put on tape and played back for the cast.
Glenn Price's camp class in radio and television has been busy for the past three weeks preparing radio scripts.
For 76 Years, KU's Official Student Newspaper
KANSAN TELEPHONE NUMBERS
Newsroom—UN 4-3646 Business Office—UN 4-3198
The Summer Session Kansan, student newspaper at The University of Kansas, is represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York, NY. Students in the summer session may take a class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan., every Tuesday and Friday during the Summer Session except University holidays and examination periods. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised in the Summer Session Kansan are offered to all students without regard to color, creed, or nationality.
The opinions expressed in the editorial column are those of the students whose names are signed to them. Guest editorial views are not necessarily the editor's. Any opinions expressed in the Summer Session Kansan are not free-of-charge. Of the University of Kansas Administration or the State Board of Regents.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD Youth Corps, a program under the war on poverty, gives teenagers jobs—but how hard they work at these jobs and what jobs they work on is a detail that seems to point to the inefficiency and waste of this program. For instance, in Dodge City, the NYC is directed by the Monseigneur of the Catholic Church. Of the dozen or so workers belonging to the program, over eight of them work on Catholic Church grounds, Catholic High School grounds, the Catholic college grounds and other Catholic-affiliated agencies. The trio of workers sent to the public schools were taken off the more difficult and exacting labor because of the laxness and inefficiency of their work.
all-out civil rights law for themselves while approving it for others. Many such northerners are indeed, cynical hypocrites.
The poverty program conceived by President Lyndon B. Johnson has long been in practice and has at least reached the equivalent of puberty in its stage of growth. This, then, makes it fair play for evaluation. But it is striking that the only evaluation of this program can be in the negative sense. For instance—
Blunders in poverty plan
It is a known and published fact that in the military there is only one foreman-type employee to every 1,100 civilians, while in the war on poverty there is one foreman-type employee—being paid as much as $24,000 a year—to every 18 employees. The military men are dedicating their lives to the nation and are risking their lives in Viet Nam while the War on Poverty people are being paid thousands more by the same government to run this particular program.
These are not the only things that I could cite as examples. State authorities have been forced to ask that thousands of Canadians and West Indians be brought into the United States to harvest the apple crop in Virginia and West Virginia. This took place while our "Job Camps" were bulging with Americans who would not pick apples. Sargeant Shriver has more than 400 staff members under him who are being paid $35 and up to $100 a day by the taxpayers to run this fisco.
Surely President Johnson has made a terrible mistake if he ever planned this program to bring him the undying good will of the American people.
Scott English
Salvage Operation
BOOK REVIEWS
The disc jockeys each summer pull out the records that remind us, via Nat Cole and Robert Goulet, of the lazy, hazy days and the hours at the beaches and the picines and the girls in the bikinis. The book trade gives us light fiction. Saw a woman the other day reading Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and once saw a nut on a train reading "The Story of Philosophy." (World is full of people who get off the track.) Most sane folks, lolling in air-conditioned comfort, prefer summer reading.
Which means that perhaps John le Carre's The Looking Glass War (Dell, 95 cents) is not the best way to start the subject. A spy story, in the mood of the author's "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold." No pussyfooting around with Pussy Galore, or getting in the shower with Sophia Loren. Le Carre's people live dark ugly lives and are quite unheroic.
What has happened with this author is that he has made the spy novel a respectable genre. His books may even get on English Lit. reading lists sometime.
Of a different sort is one called Torn Curtain (Dell 50 cents), by Richard Wormser. The author is one of those chaps who writes novels from screenplays. "Torn Curtain" is the new Hitchcock movie. Wild, fantastic doings—a senator's daughter, a traitor, a countess, a ballerina, secret police, a U. S. physicist—call in Paul Newman and see if Mancini can do the sound track.
We take you back 30 years or more with three wonderful books in paperback, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man and The Glass Key (Dell, 50 cents each). Titles that, of course, you recognize. Memories of Humphrey Bogart turning in Mary Aster to the cops, William Powell and Myrna Loy madly drinking and solving mysteries, George Raft as front man for big crook Edward Arnold. Hamnett was great reading in the thirties, and he's still great read- ing. Tough guy stuff, sort of poor man's Ernest Hemingway. It is a pleasure to see these volumes.
Some Agatha Christie, too. The Man in the Brown Suit (Dell, 50 cents). You could have read this one back in 1924, when it first appeared. A damsel in distress, a mysterious gent with a scar.
So what else is there this month? Well, Edgar Pangborn a
West of the Sun (Dell, 50 cents), which we suppose you'd call science fiction. The planet Lucifer. Aspace ship wandering around 11 years. Horrible people and a wild world. "The Lost World" and "The Land That Time Forgot" gave us this kind of nonsense two generations ago. Let's see—Elizabeth Seifert's Doctor Samaritan (Dell, 50 cents) soapy romance about a dedicated doctor, his career, and a beautiful girl. Who will win? Will September follow August? And C. Y. Lee's The Flower Drum Song (Dell, 60 cents). Chop Suey in Chinatown. The clash of the races (wittily and delightfully done, of course; we can't mess around with meanings). What? You hadn't heard about this story? May a hundred thousand miracles never come your way.
Civil rights concern all
"Civil rights? buh! What's that?" "Oh, oh yeah, civil rights, sure, they're okay."
Does this reaction sound familiar? Or how about this one: "I absolutely never think or read about it. Those Niggers upset me too much."
Why should this type of comment be heard around our school? There aren't any Negroes attending Moscow High, and maybe there never will be, but that doesn't mean we should act as if problems concerning race are not of vital concern to the nation right now.
Someday everyone of us will in some way run into the problem of taking a definite stand one way or the other on civil rights. Yet many of us are going out of our way to remain ignorant of the issue. I don't mean to say that MSHSers should get busy demonstrating and having sit-ins, but they should not take the attitude shown by the above quote.
One thing we students should do is clean up the language floating through the school halls. The kind of language meant here is the use of the word "Nigger" or terms such as "black as a Nigger" and many other unprintable epithets all of us have heard.
If you don't want your skin color to become a dirty word, why use another's color for one?
— Margaret Weber