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■ -— - ; i East Side -By P. D. Whether "sit-in", "stand-in", "walk-in", "swim-in", or "fall in", some of the reactions have been nothing short of fantastic. One example was that of a Memphis, Tenn. television station having refused to carry a CBS program on the ' sit-ins , titled "Anatomy of a Demonstration." The story was reported in The New York Post and they quoted the program director of WREC-TV in Memphis as having said: "The station decided not to carry the show because it reflected propaganda rather than objective report ing and would serve no useful purpose." Well, maybe so, I can't say. But I suspect that if all the TV stations in the south refused to carry such reports the problem would go away — like problems cease to exist for the ostrich ah, yes, but the exposed part of the anatomy in such cases - yes. A MEMO TO ROY WILKINS OF THE N.A.A.C.P.: Dear Roy: It is my understanding that your organization is concerned a bout the recent incident here in The Magnolia Jungle having to do with the attempted integration of the beach at Biloxi. Well, Roy, I fear you don't understand our southern way of life, not fully. No, not at all do you understand it. Just the other day I tried to explain it to a friend, whose name you know if I mentioned it, and he didn't understand our way of life, so he came back at me with this: The recent racial incident in Harrison County leaves in its wake some question that, I believe, need answering.. In the first place, how did Harrison County get its 28 mile man-made beach? It was dredged up a number of years ago by the US gov ernment. Work was done under a federal statute that pro vides for protection of militarily strategic highways. US 90 was designated such a highway and as a result a million and one half dollars in federal funds were spent to build the beach for road protection. Recreation, supposed ly, was strictly a by-product. When completed, maintenance was taken over Dy nar rison County supervisors. This is paid for by a two-cent a gal lon gasoline tax on all fuel purchased in the county, regard less of the purchaser's racial origin. I don't know how many vehicle owners in the county are Negroes, but I imagine the number is substantianl. Now I'm toldthe beach front belongs to adjacent prop erty owners across the highway despite the fact that public funds were usqd to build and maintain it. That brings me to this: Under our separate but equal theory, why can t the pro portionate tax be figured and the Negro given access to such portion of the 28-mile beach his taxes keep up? Either that, or stop levying the two cent a gallon beach maintenance tax on the gasoline he buys. And, if the beach belongs to adjacent owners, despite the fact that a highway separates them from it, why was pub lic money used in the first place to build it and public funds used now to maintain it? . . . _ . .. If adjacent property owners have the right to bar tne beach to public use then said property owners should be as tossed to maintain it. And this final question: If we stand firm on separate but equal in theory, how can we logically substitute for It in practice a separate but no _i policy and bar Negroes from the entire 28 miles despite r (Continued on Page 2) Watch On The POTOMAC by Robt. G. Spiracle THOUGHTS ON THE WEST VIRGINIA PRIMARY — Some one, it seems, forgot to tell the voters of West Virginia that they were “bigots” and not supposed to vote for John F. Kennedy for President. Actually the sort of thing that was stirred up in West Virginia — the so-called “religious issue” — is not a matter to be taken lightly. The politicians who play ed with it were playing with e motional dynamite. But that is not the worst part of it. I think newspapermen exag gerrated this issue more than the politicians did. One nationally syndicated columnist wrote that Sen. Hubert Humphrey was, in effect, directing his appeal to poor white trash, that he was the beneficiary of the most be nighted elements in West Virgin ia society and that Kennedy was the victim of the worst sort of religious prejudice. Another writer for a big eas tern paper interviewed three or four people, maybe one or two more, and wrote a niece that ran for several colmns on how much bigotry there was in the state and how Ku Klux Klan senti ment lingered from the 20s and 30s. The fact is that the Democrats of West Virginia were scarcely influenced at all by religious pre judice, just as they were not back in 1928 when A1 Smith won a primary in that state. Otherwise Kennedy could not have scored his triumph. This should not lead anyone to conclude that prejudice might not yet emerge as an important factor between now and the Los Angeles convention; or after (Continued on Page 2) I HIGHLIGHTS FROM READING by Mary Einsel “Poverty was always a living and evil thing to me, and from the moment in my teens when I could scrape a few pennies to gether I tried, for however brief a time, to disguise the face of poverty as best I could. (From Moss Hart’s wonderful book: ACT ONE) I used to go without lunch for a week or ten days un til I had accumulated enough to eat in a restaurant that had ta blecloths instead of having a frankfurter or hamburger at a Sixth Avenue sidewalk orange juice stand, which was the usual. Or I would stroll into the lobby of a fashionable hotel and walk around for as long as I dared, making believe that I belonged there. If all of this had a faintly ignominious and snobbish air, I do not defend it. That is the way it was, and doubtless there must have been another side to me too — less foolish and perhaps more admirable. Perhaps all this ac counts in some measure for the extravagant way I have lived from the moment large sums of money began to pour in. I know (Continued on Page 2) North Caroliana Teacher Says - Segregation Is Moral Problem, Not Legal The current Negro protest a gainst refusal of service at chain store lunch counters is primarily an attack on Southern custom and tradition rather than Sou thern laws. This underscores a fact too long neglected, both North and South: that the real heart of the segregation problem is a moral issue, rather than a legal one. It will never be satis factorily solved until that fact has been faced with candor. Northern integrationists, fol lowing the government’s lead of 1954, have generally taken the line that compliance with the law of the land is all that is essen tially required. This legalistic ap proach has also been accepted by most Southern moderates, who view integration as something re gretable but unavoidable. It’s go ing to come, they say, and we might as well get used to it even if we don’t like it. But peaceful integration will never be achieved on the basis of the banal “my country, right or wrong.” It will be achieved only when and if most of the peo ple of the South come to feel that it ic tho ricfht nath tr> take, a path compatible with American ideals which they hold as dear as anyone else. Social customs rest on values which people che rish; and if there is to be an ac ceptable change in customs they must be seen in a new light in relation to those values. Racial segregation is long-standing cus tom in the South. The question now demanding review is whe ther it is good custom. So Lillie Discussion I think it unfortunate that there has been so little discussion of the problem in these terms. American democracy depends a bove all on free and vigorous discussion of what the people want — what they think is mor ally good and right. It is gen erally accepted, for instance, that it is healthy and proper for A I merican students, from grade school through college, to dis cuss important social problems as part of their education. Yet my impression is that the moral aspect of segregation have been little discussed in public schools, perhaps especially in the South; that on the contrary these as pects have usually been avoided. Even at the college level, discus sions of the problem are often too legalistic and technical — bristling with points about the Constitution and states’ rights — to get at the heart of the mat ter. What happens when a thorough discussion of segregation as a moral problem is conducted a mong Southern students? A few vears ago it was decided at North Carolina State College that all senior engineering students must take a course called “Contem porary Issues.” The idea was to have them read background-ma terial, hear lectures and debates, and participate in discussion on a series of controversial issues which soon confront them as citi zens when they went out to take jobs in American industry. Clear ly, one of the most important and controversial issues of all was that of segregation; and despite some misgivings, the staff teach ing the course agreed that it must occupy a prominent place. Since then about four weeks of the course have been given to a thorough examination and dis cussion of the whole problem. Down The Middle Since 90 per cent of the stu dents at North Carolina State are Southerners born and bred, and since several members of the Contemporary Issues staff hap pen to be from the North, it was felt that an extra effort must be made to conduct the investigation of segregation in a fair, unbiased way. In addition to ample reading matter on both sides, and an ab solutely open forum in the class room with no threat of reprisal in terms of grades, weekly de bates by staff members are used as a device to raise every rea sonable argument both pro and con. Staff members assigned to argue the segrationist side of the issue jpare no pains to present as good a case as can possibly be made short of falsification of fact. (Once, when the staff conducted such a debate on television, the man who took segregationist side was widely congratulated in this area for his presentation). ±iie reruns iicive uctrii micicst ing. On the basis of polls taken in representative sections, it ap pears that, semester after semes ter, a majority of the senior en gineering class has slowly, pain fully, sometimes grudgingly, worked around to the conclusion that, despite longstanding Sou thern tradition to the contrary, segregation of the Negro cannot be reconciled with the basic de mocratic principle of justice. And, in relation to the problem as it faces the nation today, the salient fact is this: while there has been in the course an ample discus sion of the legal and technical as pects of segregation versus inte gration, the point that finally seems to sway most Southern stu dents is not the necessity of o bedience of federal law, but the necessity of obedience to moral law Whal Is Justice? Sometimes included in the background material of the course has been Robert Penn Warren’s book, “Segregation,” and a re mark he makes illustrates the ap proach to the problem many of the instructors have used. Mr. Warren writes that “desegraga tion is just one small episode in the long effort for justice.” The enveloping problem, then, the context for the discussion of segragation, Is an age-old, very simple (and very difficult) ques tion: What is justice? That ques tion, thrown point-blank to a roomful of college seniors, elicits a variety of strange and interest ing answers, as well as a good deal of silence pregnant with puzzled thought. But the impres sive thing is that after kicking the question around for a while, the average class is very likely to come up with an objective de finition of justice closely resemb ling that given some 2300 years ago by Aristotle. Justice, they decide, is equal treatment for equals. It prevails when men are treated without difference or discrimination with respect to any ability which they have to an equal degree. If their ability is unknown, they obvious (Continued on Page 2)