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NEWS
TUESDAY. FEBRUARY 21. 2006
10A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
GM closes first of 12 plants 2,200 laid off at facility
BY TIM TALLEY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
OKLAHOMA CITY — Some workers brought cameras to General Motors Corp.'s Oklahoma plant to take photographs of their work stations and coworkers before the last vehicle rolled off the line Monday, photos that will become treasured keepsakes in scrapbooks.
Others just brought their sadness.
"It's a rough day," said GM spokeswoman Nancy Sarpolis in Detroit. "It's hard to see your co-workers go."
Orlin Wagner/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
After 27 years, the last vehicle produced at the plant, a white Chevrolet Trailblazer EXT, rolled out Monday evening as GM shut down production in the first of 12 facilities the company plans to close by 2008 as it struggles to match production with market demand.
Detroit-based GM plans to cut 30,000 jobs. The Oklahoma City plant employs 2,400 — 2,200 hourly and 200 salaried
A statue of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower is seen on the grounds of the Eisenhower Center in Abilene on Tuesday. Some presidential papers held by Eisenhower's presidential library and recently opened to the public indicate Eisenhower's staff, and the president himself, sometimes strung along with the civil rights movement.
but economists said as many as 7,500 jobs could be affected including those at GM suppliers and secondary jobs, like hotel and restaurant workers.
Civil rights movement weighed on Ike
POLITICS
"It's obviously a sad day for the state of Oklahoma," said Mike Seney, senior vice president of The State Chamber, a statewide business and industry group.
Gov. Brad Henry said the state will help displaced employees and their families find new jobs through job assistance, retraining and educational opportunities.
BY JOHN HANNA
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ABILENE — Fifty years ago, a boycott of Montgomery's buses was underway and a black student had tried to take classes at the University of Alabama. A black teenager's murder in Mississippi was still fresh on many American minds.
President Eisenhower and his staff at the White House couldn't avoid civil rights as an issue, and a big question nagged at them that winter. How could they take advantage of the social ferment, split Northern and Southern Democrats and lure black voters back to the party of Lincoln?
Memos, letters and notes from the time are among the 26 million pages of documents now held by Eisenhower's presidential library in Abilene. Earlier this month, the library opened an additional 40,000 pages to the public, and it has an additional 400,000 pages of once-classified material to be reviewed.
Some of the papers indicate Eisenhower's staff — and the president himself — sometimes struggled with the civil rights movement. His aides also pondered its political ramifications.
"There are lessons to be learned from the Eisenhower archives," said Karl Weissenbach, the library's deputy director. "I think sometimes we think nowadays that the world was created in the past four, five or six years."
For Eisenhower's administration, taking steps to ensure blacks' civil rights were bound up in the question of whether the president would pursue legislation in 1956. But Ike's team also was looking forward to the November 1956 elections, when Eisenhower faced
re-election.
Democrats had fared well in off-year elections in 1954, recapturing control of both houses of Congress and winning a majority of governorships.
And in a February 1956 memo, Maxwell Rabb, an associate counsel to the president, complained that an "iron curtain of silence" on civil rights by the administration could prevent Republicans from splitting Northern and Southern Democrats "right down the middle."
Writing to Sherman Adams, a former New Hampshire governor who was Eisenhower's special assistant, Rabb suggested "a real effort to bring some men into government who can do a real 'public relations' job on this."
ute to an atmosphere of unease and tension throughout the nation." Rabb wrote.
The same day, Rabb had received a letter from Rep. John Heselton, a Massachusetts Republican, asking why Ike wasn't more aggressive.
"The increasing agitation and sporadic outbursts of violence in the South will contrib-
"I do not know anything about the pro's and con's being advanced to the president, but if congressional action on civil rights means anything to the Republican Party, it had better start doing something about it." the congressman wrote.
The previous summer, Emmet Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy, had been murdered over a remark he made to a white store owner's wife while visiting Mississippi.
In early February 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court forced the University of Alabama to enroll Authorine Lucy, its first black student. However, harassment by rock- and egg-throwing
white students led the university to suspend her after only one day.
"Certainly, President Eisenhower and others were aware of all the same things," said Dennis Vasquez, superintendent of the national historic site in Topeka dedicated to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional.
Eisenhower did push for civil rights legislation in 1956. A year later, Congress approved the first civil rights bill of the 20th Century, creating a new commission and a special division within the Justice Department.
But his administration wouldn't cut off federal funds to communities where segregation still was practiced, something Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, suggested in a letter to Bryce Harlow, an
Eisenhower aide.
Harlow wrote to Dingell early in 1956 that the federal courts would determine what represented compliance with the Brown ruling.
"The course of action which you ask the president to take would be, therefore, inconsistent both in act and in spirit with the decision of the Supreme Court," Harlow wrote.
Eisenhower himself had misgivings about Brown, according to speech writer Arthur Larson.
In October 1957 — after Eisenhower used troops to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in compliance with a federal court order — the president told Larson, according to the speech writer's notes, that Brown went too far. Larson quoted Eisenhower as saying the court should have guaranteed equal opportunities but "to require integration was not necessary."
"For this reason, he preferred to avoid any show of pushing integration as such, beyond doing his constitutional duty of seeing that lawful court orders are obeyed," Larson wrote.
One page of Eisenhower's own handwritten notes from the period said: "Troops — not to enforce integration but to prevent opposition by violence to orders of a court."
Just before he left office, Eisenhower complained about the GOP's lack of success in wooing black voters. In notes from a December 1960 meeting, Harlow said Eisenhower told other prominent Republicans that black voters didn't care about GOP efforts on civil rights.
"The President pointed out that we have made civil rights a main part of our efforts these past eight years but have lost Negro support instead of increasing it," Harlow wrote.
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KANSAN.COM
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