ustxtxb_obs_1956_01_04_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

FROM ALL OVER TEXAS From the Plains and the Panhandle; The Gull Coast and the Valley; Centex and the Piney Woods. From North, South, East and West From Cities and Towns; from Farms and Hamlets Hundreds of Liberals; Democrats, Admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelf and the New Deal Have Already Made Reservations for the All-Texas 1956 ROOSEVELT DAY DINNER to join In Honoring the Memory of America’s Great President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and in presenting The Testimonial of Teias to THE FIRST LADY OF THE WORLD Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt Honored Guest and Principal Speaker of the Occasion YOU AND YOUR’-FRIENDS Will Want To Be Present On This Great Occasion which, from advance reservations already received is certain to be one of the largest and most significant liberal events of all times in Texas. For Reservations: Please fill in the coupon on the right and mail it, with check \(at $5 the coupon. You will promptly be mailed a Dinner ticket for each of your paid reservations unless all reservations have been taken before yours are receivedin which case your money will be refunded. \(Please make checks payable to: North Texas Committee for Request for Reservations -North Texas Committee for Roosevelt Day P. 0. Box 12113, Dallas 25, Texas Please reserve places in my name for the All Texas 1956 Roosevelt Day Dinner. I am enclosing check in the reservations I am requesting Name Address Sponsored by: NORTH TEXAS COMMITTEE FOR ROOSEVELT DAY Kenneth F. Holbert, Co-chairman Otto B. Mullinax, Co-chairman 3210 Fairmont St. Dallas 4, Texas Phone : RAndolph 5633 In Association with National Committee for Roosevelt Day Auspices : Americans for Democratic Action and Dallas Chapter, ADA A Spokesman’s Credentials \(The Associated Citizen s’ Councils of Texas, Davis Building, Dallas, are mailing all over the state an article by Zora Neale Hurston, a Negro woman, reprinted from the Orlando, Fla., Sentinel. In this , article Miss Hurston deplores the Supreme Court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them.” The wide distribution of this reprint provoked James W. Byrd of the Department of English at East Texas State Teachers College to write the following artier for Miss Zora Neale Hurston, a Negro writer of Florida, recently sent het views on the Supreme Court’s segregation ruling to the Orlando, Florida, Sentinel, and these views, obviously pleasing to the editors, were published for the enlightenment of Texans by the Dallas Morn News under the title “Self-Association as Negro Policy.” The News gave Miss Hurston a plug as a Negro novelist and play . wright, a Barnard graduate and the holder of both Rosenwald and Guggenheim fellowships. Miss Hurston has acquired some fame as a folklorist and novelist. Her research in the folklore of the Negro has been centered mostly in Alabama, Louisiana, and her native Florida. Three novels by Miss Hurston reveal her capacity for appropriating folklore to the purposes of fiction. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine Their Eyes Were Watching God there is a competent handling of folk material. Seraph on the Suzvance logical novel about Florida poor whites. White and Negro critics have praised Miss Hurston for her ability in portraying the dialect and folkways of the Negro. She has never been Zora Hurston’s Doctrines . Please the Dallas News analysis of . social problems in her books. Racial difficulties never disturb the .even tenor of the novels, and “the Negro peons of her stories are resigned to exploitation and oppression,” according to one critic. Nothing in her literary background, then, qualifies her to speak for the Negro on such an important matter as the recent ruling by the . Supreme Court. As a matter of fact, her last attempt to speak for the Negro on a social and political issue makes her look rather ridiculous in this era of Eisenhower; in an article entitled “Negro Voters Size Up Taft,” the Saturday Evening Post \(December 8, lengthy views that Senator Robert A. Taft had a good chance of winning the nomination with the support of U. S. Negro voters. These views were simplified and reprinted in Reader’s READERS of Miss Hurston’s recent views may be left with the idea that she is personally in favor of separation of the races in education, business, and social life. Her life, however, does not substan -tiate this. Her education was in Northern integrated colleges. She was secretary-companion to white novelist Fanny Hurst, who wrote a glowing preface for Their Eyes Were Watching God. Tell My Horse is dedicated to Carl Van Vechten, a godfather to many Negro writers of the twenties, whom she calls “God’s image of a friend.” She is reported “\(by Nick A. Ford, in The Contemporary Negro Novel, her white neighbors in Florida, which is substantiated by the fact that Seraph on the Suwa-nee is dedicated “with loving admiration” to the late Florida novelist, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, AUSTIN You don’t know Brad Smith. He is the news director of K …. I worked for the station three months and have forgotten already. It is in Weslaco ; have you ever been to Weslaco, and do . you remember the main street and the palm trees, the soft stirring breeze at night,. the white store fronts down to the railroad tracks, the Mexican side you see across them, the pool hall that is the town’s touch with worldliness, and the immolating moving rectangle in the palm tree lobby of Hotel Cortez, the beer anteroom of the pool hall. How completely Jack Webb Dragnetted Weslaco Wednesday nights’ A subject for a Ph.D., this, the new rural domination. Brad Smith’s bald head and stern frail harried visage appears on the moving rectangle at six o’clock every night in the neat little houses and at the Cortez and the pool hall. His flat Midwestern voice crops tip in cars and streets through living room windows every day at noon, speaking inexhauStibly of the . latest break in .the the grapefruitand the weather, that. skin of us all, always news because always and always different, yet the same, and so easy ; .64 hundredths of an inch rain six miles north of Donna, the hottest July seventh in Valley history, the rain gauge at our K …\(what corded three-hundredths of an inch of moisture at dawn, Joe Knowles called in from Mission about a sudden shower … Weather, Weather, as though the very tides of birth and death flowed under its draw, as though citrus and not man is the tissue of life: Brad Smith, news editor of KRGV, TV, Weslaco, works all day and half the night. He plays the game : he once and to Mrs. Spessard L. Holland, the wife of a U. S. Senator, a former governor of Florida. It would seem that Miss Hurston has never avoided the company of whites, nor has she been rejected by them. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road she found no “inherent difference” in the white and colored human beings she met. Her recently-stated idea that segregation is good apparently applies to -Negroes other than herself, and one wonders why she wrote as she did. Whoth was she trying to please? A PPARENTLY Miss Hurston owes much. to white benefactors. She was born the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper who moved to Florida, where ,early in life she had “gotten used to grits and gravy for breakfast,” “found out how to be bored at prayer meeting,’ and known “poverty that smells like death.” Her rise to the life of a successful writer has been aided again and again by gifts, grants, and scholarships from white friends of the Negro. The Negro press has often -been critical of the controversial Miss Hurston, and it has been suggested more than once that she “sure knows how to get money from white people.” Some of her fellow writers have accused her of being a female “Uncle Torn” or a “handkerchief head,” a term she protests against in her recent “opinion.” Though it is human to think highly of those who tell us what we watit to hear, “You must … avoid the counsel of those who are your servants and therefore conduct themselves reverently toward you, for probably what they advise comes more from fear than from love,” wrote Chaucer. Though many white people will quote Miss Hurston because she says what they want to hear, the more discerning reader will not appoint her as a spokesman for the Negro. DR. JAMES W. BYRD THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 6 Jan. 4, 1956 A VOICE IN THE VALLEY gave me orders \(it was during the even a wire story, on the $425,000 profit Allan Shivers made on a net investment of $25,000, if that … I remember when I called. Brad on a Sunday and told him I was going to McAllen to the fenced camp for the caught wetbacks. -I came back and did a 20-minute broadcast on their hunger and their exploitation there. ‘Hedid not ask to see it in advance; he knew it was risky, but he knew it mattered and .let me go ahead, This is What makes me remember Brad Smith with warmth. He is still at KRGV in his dingy lit -tie hut-office off the mike studio, the AP and UP machines in a but off the hut, leaking when it rains, with spikes . for “Valley,” “Texas,” “National,” “World,” as though for so many .kinds of jobs to do. He is a newsman, bent on the story, protecting them when it’s time, but somehow, in the second clusters when he is not racing to prove he is, as they say, driving 1 -iimSelf to deathjnowing that it is sad, that Val ley. The. wetbacks are gone now, behind, below the fence of uniforms and . teams of hounds and helicopters, out of sight, out of their thoughts. But Brad Smith carries_ on for KRGV, for the listeners, the watchers, the owners, the men at the desks who fight him with an embattled telephone for the 15-minute margin of a Scoopand he carries on for whatever it is that makes him lonely and unsure, and therefore like most of us, Try to telephone him someday in Weslaco. He’lrbe in his station wagon on the way to a water meeting in Han , ling -en. But he’ll be back at 5:30 to tell them about it in the moving rectangle. R.D.