Page 2
University Daily Kansan Tuesday, May 8, 1962
The ASC Committees
Student body president Jerry Dickson has called for a more active system of All Student Council committees, which he says will lead to a stronger student government.
There is little doubt that his statement is true, and that it is a good idea. The ASC committees of the past have often served as nothing but a place for a student to hang his name so he can say that he is active in student government.
THE PRESENT ASC committees have a great deal of potentiality, but so far this has not been realized. Groups such as the Student Liaison committee have come flaming into existence only to quickly die down to ashes and never be heard from again.
Dickson has said that this spring he will make over 150 appointments to committees following the interviews for the candidates by boards representing both campus political parties.
He plans to re-organize the Statewide Activities committee, and to give special emphasis to the Peace Corps, Disciplinary, Social, Current
Events, Campus Chest, and the six Homecoming committees.
The steps toward activating the ASC committees must include, of course, eliminating the dead weight—getting rid of the committees that have no function, and the personnel who have no interest.
THE COMMITTEE appointments the student body president makes are one of his most important tasks. The appointees must be people who are sincerely motivated, and who are interested in doing a competent job.
Dickson has said that a report will be required from each committee at least once next year. This is a step in the right direction, but a once-a-year report means nothing unless it says something. The key toward an improved committee system for the ASC is not simply reports, but the selection of personnel for committees that have a function.
These two factors must be met if the ASC committees are to be trimmed down to an operative and effective part of the University.
—Karl Koch
A Letter On Turner
Editor
I wish to congratulate our friend, Tom Turner, for publicly apologizing for his journalistic misdemeanors. I deeply regret that his apology does not apply to ALL of his writings on racial matters.
I say this because he apologized for one untruth and in the same letter he told two more: He said Kivie Kaplan was the chief fund raiser for the NAACP and that the elder Spingarn founded it. Neither statement is true. Kaplan, like Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Jackie Robinson, Dr. Robert C. Weaver and others, is one of about 75 members of the national NAACP board of directors. Other NAACP board members who are well known to all citizens include the President's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon.
MOST OF THE NAACP's money comes from the annual membership drives carried on throughout the country. One going on now in Kansas City, Kansas has netted several thousands of members at from $2.50 to $10 each.
Several Negro entertainers take out $100,000 life insurance policies with the NAACP as beneficiary before they go to Alabama, Mississippi, and other southern states. If the NAACP has a chief individual fund raiser, it is Jackie Robinson, Nat (King) Cole or Harry Belafonte.
What Mr. Turner really is attempting to do, I believe, is to drive white students out of the Civil Rights Council. What he fails to understand is that there are people in ALL races who deplore injustice.
JUST LIKE Cruspus Attucks, a Negro ex-slave, was the leader of the patriots upon and was one of the first three to die for American liberty in the Boston Massacre, so there are millions of white people who actively oppose and detest wrong, regardless of its source. I know many of them.
Judging from the conduct of Senators Hill and Sparkman of Alabama, not many of these people reside in the state of Turner's recent exposure to professional journalism
It will probably distress Mr. Turner to learn that the NAACP had its origin in the dreams and words of William E. B. DuBois, a Negro Ph.D. from Harvard University, who in 1805 founded the Niagara Movement. At this time he expressed a goal still cherished by the NAACP.
FOUR YEARS before the NAACP was born, DuBois said:
"We shall not be satisfied with less than our full manhood rights . . . We claim for ourselves every right that belongs to a free-born American—political, civil and social—and until we get these rights, we shall never cease to protest and assail the ears of America with the story of its shameful deeds toward us."
In 1908 William E. Walling, a
...Letters ...
white man, wrote an article in The Independent, attacking racial discrimination and, according to the highly respected New York Post journalist, Mary White Ovington, "Out of these two statements the militant NAACP was born." Miss Ovington said further:
RECORDS SHOW that only a few years passed, however, until full memberships were given to white people. For over 45 years the NAACP has been non-discriminatory.
"Full membership in the Association was limited to Negroes. White men and women could be associate members, but the DIRECTION OF THE MOVEMENT BELONGED TO THE COLORED."
Arthur B. Spingarn, who has contributed much to the NAACP and who Turner said was one of its founders, did not join until 1911—two years after the organization became active.
This information may be obtained by writing to the NAACP, by consulting various library sources or by seeing pages 100 to 110 of the book, "The Walls Came Tumbling Down," by Mary White Ovington. It is in the KU Watson Library.
The NAACP functions like the Chamber of Commerce in that its president is a "name" person who is otherwise employed and not intimately concerned with the details and tactics. The National Board sets general goals and broad policies. Details and administration are left to the executive secretary who is the top paid official. DuBois had this position at first, and then came Walter White and Roy Wilkins.
race. There are white office workers in the NAACP headquarters and since Thurgood Marshall was appointed to a federal judgeship by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the top lawyer has been a Jew. This results from the fact that the NAACP does not discriminate on the basis of race in its hiring and upgrading of employees. It believes that the ability and performance of the person are more significant than his race.
PERHAPS IT disturbs Turner to know that white people participate extensively in NAACP activities. The organization is integrated and is undoubtedly a success, as the Supreme Court decision of 1954 evidences.
The discriminatory clauses over which Mr. Turner gloats are becoming outmoded in areas of higher enlightenment. Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin and other state universities have prohibited them.
Unlike the Dixiecrats, some fraternities and individuals, the NAACP does not single out any group of people for special scorn and condemnation because of their
THESE CLAUSES are nothing more than habit-forming intoxicants which exhilarate the user with a false sense of superiority, thereby distorting his conceptions and frustrating his own efforts to become an objective thinker and enlightened citizen.
They single out the Negro for special condemnation, just as Hitler singled out the Jew.
The most damnable effect of these clauses is not that they prevent Negroes from becoming fraternity members. This can be done by simple black-ball. Their main evil is that they endorse and perpetuate a snobbishness and a lop-sided set of values which are conducive to misunderstanding and conflict in a changing world.
I say in reference to Turner's denial of writing Costich's letter that I prefer to take the word of a man who is professionally recognized for his keen judgment and accuracy than the claims of a confessed panderer of "flippant" misstatements.
With the above information I hope Mr. Turner will confine his transparent misrepresentations to the unenviable clan of displaced Dixiecrats. Perhaps they will applaud his filibustering and help him find solace in their ghastly klawers of hate and misrepresentation.
J. E. Alsbrook Lawrence junior
Daily Hansan UNITED STATES
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room 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.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Bon Gallagher ...
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Bill Mullins ... Editorial Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Charles Martinache ... Business Manager
THE PATHFINDER, by James Fenimore Cooper (Doubleday Dolphin, 95 cents); THE PIONEERS, by James Fenimore Cooper (Doubleday Dolphin, $1.45).
The magic appeal of James Fenimore Cooper cannot be overrated. In an age that prefers realism and sophistication it is refreshing to turn to this man of the past who saw his characters and the forces connected with them in the simplest of terms.
"The Pathfinder" came late in Cooper's career, but it deals with Leatherstocking in his younger days, when he was fighting against the French in the Seven Years War. "The Pioneers" is Cooper's first Leatherstocking tale, but it describes Leatherstocking as an old man in a small frontier community in New York state.
IT IS BETTER TO SNYTHESIZE Leatherstocking tales than to try to summarize them, for they are pretty elementary stuff. Briefly stated, "The Pathfinder" is Natty Bumpo at his most romantic, and the setting is perhaps the loveliest of the five novels. Cooper is able to use his love of, and knowledge of, the sea, in giving us a rousing story of treachery and heroism in the Great Lakes country.
The novel also gives us Leathersstocking in love, with the daughter of a frontier post sergeant. He gives up his sweetheart (name of Mabel) to the dashing young man who sails the inland sea, and he and his faithful Mohican friend, Chingachgook, disappear into the sunset.
"The Pioneers" is involved and fantastic and good fun for all. It also presents the hero in the noble guise that he would give to literature and posterity—the man of the forest fighting the encroachment of civilization.
Leatherstocking here is, at first, a thick-headed old man who is just a bit hard for almost anyone—even us Cooper-lovers—to take. But he takes on stature as the novel progresses. Of particular interest is a chapter describing the destruction of the passenger pigeon—a fictional representation of a tragedy to be repeated all over America in the years to come.—CMP
At the Movies
By Murrell Blain
"State Farm," at Charles Brackett, At the Granada.
Bv Murrel Bland
The poor acting in the movie proves a point. Rock'n' Roll singers have no business playing roles in a screen adaptation of a Broadway musical. The movie was originally presented on Broadway by Rodgers and Hammerstein and was quite successful. Poor acting keeps the film version from being a success.
THE TWO singers are Fat Boone and Bobby Darin. Boone plays the part of a 22-year-old Texas farm boy who is more interested in driving his race car than working on Dad's farm. He enters his custom made sports car in the auto race at the state fair. Bobby Darin plays the part of a flirting television announcer who is covering the state fair. Darin falls in love with Boone's younger sister, played by Pamela Tiffin.
Tom Ewell, who plays Dad, is quite concerned about his prize hog, Blueboy, winning first place in the
swine division of the fair. Mother, played by Alice Faye, also has an entry in the fair. She enters mince meat, which has been seasoned with bourbon, in the foods division.
PAT BOONE does a poor job of playing the part of a Texas farm boy. He looks more like the typical boy who was raised in a suburban home and who would not know the difference between a Hereford and a Black Angus. Alice Faye, who appears as if she just stepped out of Vogue magazine, certainly does not leave the impression that she is a typical farm wife.
Darin and Ewell save the movie from being a complete failure. Darin does a reasonably good job of playing a television announcer who is always chasing women. However, Darin's poor singing ruins his role. Ewell does a fair job of playing the part of a man who is overly concerned about his hog winning a blue ribbon. Unfortunately, he also makes a mistake and sings.
E
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"DANG RUSSIANS!! ALL THIS TALK OF THEIR TECHNICAL ADVANCES IS INURNING THIS PLACE INTO A HOTBED OF EDUCATION."