ustxtxb_obs_1955_08_30_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

‘I’m Dreaming of a White Ch ristmas 0:exas Ottsrteurr Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art. JEFFERSON .110.olon 100L \(/mad The shuttling of the Indian Ambassador to the United States into a segregated dining room at Houston International Airport last week is one of those international incidents at once illuminating and disastrous. One thing is certain : Houston looks bad. The incident is tailor-made for the communists. What better piece of propaganda could have been handed them on which to plunk away again on the old refrain of race discrimination ? The Ambassador is one of the few Indians now in this country who is very firmly pro-American. The incident must be regarded as a score for communism in its war for the minds of Asians. Mayor Hofheinz’s conduct in .Schizoid The schizophrenia in the Attorney General’s office over segregation was rather pitiful at Big Spring. With the Attorney General confined to an Austin hospital, one of his assistants argued at Big Spring that state school funds could not be paid to integrated schools; and another assistant said that state agencies had no choice but to pay out these funds. School districts planning to integrate can be fairly sure, at this point, that state money will not be withheld from them. It is unlikely that the Texas Supreme Court will be able to hear the appeal such monies can be paid out before school starts in a week or so. Schools which now integrate in good faith will be proceeding within the supreme law of the land, as even Governor Shivers has acknowledged the court ruling for integration to be. We all learned from the Big Spring episode that the Texas Citizens’ Council and the Attorney General, John Ben Shepperd, are working hand in hand, regardless of what the official policy of the state government is, and that Shepperd’s statements on the issue hereafter will have to be weighed in that context. ueoilon 4′ … nor shall any person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ,, Salary checks are property. AUGUST 31, 1955 Incorporating The State Observer, combined with The East Texas Democrat Ronnie Dugger, Editor and General Manager Bill Brammer, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Office Manager Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 10c each. Quantity orders available. Entered as second-class matter April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the aet of March 3. 1879. We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of .democracy ; we will take orders from none biit our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. the matter also raises other questions. After apologizing to the ambassador, he announced that the employee had really been giving him the V.I.P. treatment. It would have been far more tactful to accept the employee’s account of the matter, make it public record, and add that the apology still stood because of the embarassment caused by the whole matter. The apology was in order, not only to the Indian, but to every Negro in Houston. Why is it worse to discriminate against an Indian than against a Negro ? It was made much of because we don’t want the world to think we discriminate in this country; but the cold fact is, we do. What better illustration could we have of discrimination’s folly ? eect WOrt The Federal program for minimum wages for Mexican braceros working on Texas farms should be strictly enforced. A measly 50 cents an hour, $20 a week, is what is required, yet a Texas AFL report declares that many Valley farmers have been paying 30 cents an houror $12 a week for a 40hour week. Such is the greed of some among us. To survive under these conditions, braceros have to work longer hours and put their children in the fields. We have mixed feelings about the end of “the wetback era.” “Wetbacks” are hungry Mexicans trying to find work in a rich country. It is better that they come to this country as braceros, legally protected by both the Mexican and American governments ; but if the bracero program is to be constricted until only a trickle of people can come over here to work, the issue is posed : is it either good international relations or the humanitarian thing to exclude from the U.S. starving neighbors in need of work ? A moderate approach to the bracero program will permit braceros to enter this country to work at good wages in numbers that will not seriously challenge the security of U.S. workers but in numbers also sufficient to be of real assistance in alleviating the suffering of the Mexican peon families. If we hope to arrest communism to the south, if we hope to live up to our own generous national ideals, we must remember that wetbacks and braceros are just as entitled to work and eat as native Amerians. Staff Correspondents: Bob Bray,, Galveston; Anne Chambers, Corpus Christi ; Ramon, Garces, Laredo ; Clyde Johnson, Corsicana ; Mike Mistorich, Bryan ; Jack Morgan, Port Arthur ; and reporters in Dallas, Houston. Beaumont, El Paso, Crystal City, and Big Spring. Staff Contributors : Leonard Burress, Deep East Texas ; Minnie Fisher Cunningham, New Waverley, Bruce Cutler, Austin ; Edwin Sue Corer, Burnet; John Igo, San Antonio ; Franklin Jones, Marshall ; George ,Tones, Washington, D.C. J. Henry Martindale, Lockhart : Dan Straws, Kenedy ; Jack Summerfield, Austin ; and others. Staff cartoonist: Don Bartlett, Austin. Cartoonists : Neil Caldwell, Austin ; Bob Eckhardt, Houston ; Etta Hulme, Austin. MAILING ADDRESS: Drawer F, Capitol Station, Austin, Texas. EDITORIAL AND BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: 2601 Ce`awford St., Houston, Texas \(Mrs. R. D. Randolph, director, subBartlett Appears Exetusively in The Texas \(An interpretation of the local back ground of the Big Spring suit against school desegregation by the Observer’s Bif Spring correspondent.See BIG SPRING The Big Spring Citizens’ Council, with only four members, called in the assistance of the Texas Citizens’ Council to avert an attempt at partial desegregation here. A majority of the school board , here felt that they should comply with the ruling of the United States Supreme Court. Although the local opponents of desegregation are respected citizens, criticism of their actions is heard sotto voce in high quarters. The board’s decision called for integrating the two races in the elementary grades only. Integration of the upper grades was reserved until better facilitieq for a large number of students could be constructed. _ The four Citizens’ Council petitioners here are R. E. McKinney, a school board member and insurance man; Ted 0. Groebel, oil jobber; Roy Bruce, city commissioner and service station operator; and John MT. Currie, State National Bank official. These men are believed to have been encouraged by Attorney General John Ben Shepperd’s remark that if Texas laws on segregation are eliminated, the state school laws will collapse. At the time of the school . board decision, McKinney pleaded for a year’s delay. Ile now explains his action by saying the school district has just provided a new NEW WAVERLY COTTON, having both social and economic aspects, involving both national and international politics, and carrying a heavy load of tradition on its back, is and probably always has been a problem crop in this country. That being the case it is fair game for amateur comment and advice, and many a pompous specialist, so-called, who wouldn’t know a cotton leaf when he saw it or have the least idea of how a cotton gin works, -favors the cotton farmer at this season, with his opinions carefully phrased in the best “gobbledegook.” Because it’s cotton pickin’ time in Texas. In the fields where the blossoms at the top of the stalk used to rival the bursting bolls at the bottom, the old and traditional methods of picking are being shoved aside by the new and inevitable machine working with new and incvita Observer Negro “school and that the bond issue for it would not have passed if voters had known desegregation would follow. Groebel, too, pointed to the new Negro school and said: “I don’t see any use in throwing that $200,000 down the drain.” He thinks the board should follow the suggestions of the Governor and Attorney General” and await a thorough study of the problem. He criticizes the board for not holding a public hearing before ordering partial desegregation. \(As far as can be learned, no one has ever been turned away from a school board meeting Currie said that “on the tidelands, the Supreme Court ruled against the schools, and we beat them. If we just set back on this, we will lose by default.” The Big Spring suit, filed by the Texas Citizens’ Council, alleges in substance that the school board order violates Section I of Article 2922-13, Vernon’s Civil Statutes, allocating professional \(teach ,ance computed separately for white and Negro students; and Section 7, Article VII of the Texas Constitution providing for the maintenance of separate schools for Negroes and whites. It seeks to stop state school funds from being paid to integrated schools on this basis. Big Spring has never practiced segregation in its junior college. founded in 1946. No racial incidents have been reported there. The Negro school population represents 5.9 percent of the total, and almost all of the Negro population is in one school district. Officials estimate that there are only a dozen or 15 Negro residents in all the white school districts combined. ble varieties on which the bolls all ripen at once, and ‘defoliation’ is a new word in the cotton farmer’s vocabulary. Time was when Mrs. Jones’s cook and Mrs. Smith’s house girl used to lay aside the skillet and the dust mop and go singing to the cotton fields in August, while the grass in Col. Hartopp’s lawn went unmoved as ‘George’ slung the long sack over his shoulder and tried out a few high notes of an old spiritual as he followed after. There’s little singing in the field where the red monster charges down the rows leaving bare stalks behind. It pleases the newspapers to greet the bounteous harvest this year with gloomy headlines like: “Cotton in Trouble,” “Acreage Control Fails,” and so on. Using the fact that per acre production has jumped from 188 to 278 pounds as evidence of the failure, they set me wondering what manner of men they are who think soil building is failure? Is not the prosperity of our nation built on productive land? M.F.C. 44 THE BIG SPRING SUIT There’s Little Singing 7 1.5,-1: 1 rs L 5 .1 ..1. I”