ustxtxb_obs_1956_10_31_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

IF YOU BUY A CAR, A HOUSE; If any of your policies expireCALL `Bow’ Williams Automobile and General Insurance 624 Lamar GR 2-0545 AUSTIN, TEXAS Represents ICT Insurance Co. and other standard stock companies LET’S ABOLISH THE POLL TAX’ DALLAS SCHOOLS ORDERED TO PLAN DESEGREGATION DALLAS Pro segregation f or c es girded for legal warfare here after the U. S. Supreme Court u p h e l d an appeals court ruling that Federal Judge William H. Atwell must hear the plea of 27 Negro children for admission to Dallas ‘white schools. Judge Atwell, on Sept. 5, dismissed as “premature” a complaint from the 27 Negro students that the Dallas Board of Education had denied the admission to white schools. The appeals court in New Orleans held there was “no basis in the evidence for the action taken by the district judge, nor none in law for the reasons given by him in support of his action.” The Supreme Court refused to review the appeals court decision, thus referring the case back to Judge Atwell to hold the full hearing on the demand for integration of Dallas public schools. The Dallas school board, through Supt. W. T. White, issued two reports in a desegregation study showing that the majority of Negro students were “underachievers” and that integration would lower educational standards. White said that integrated schools would result in much frustration among pupils and students, that there would be a large number of schools in Dallas attended by a “relatively” large number of both white and colored A Bryan man, C. T. Vaugh an, was given a year and a day after he was found guilty of drenching’a shoe shine boy, John Holt, with lighter fluid and setting him afire “as a joke.” The Pharr city council has put an 11 o’clock curfew on persons under 18 through May 31 of next year. Parents of offenders can be fined $1 to $100. Joseph Mashman, a Dallas pilot, says he is the first man to fly across the highest Andes range between Chile and Argentina in a helicopter. R. State commanders of the American Legion, V F W, DAV, Amvets, and Jewish War Veterans endorsed the proposed constitutional am en dm e n t to boost the veterans’ land program to a $200 million program. W. Lee O’Daniel’s six insur ance companieswhich showed combined insurance premiums in force of less than $200,000 before the 1955 Texas insurance law requiring at least that much went into effectare now up to snuff. All companies which had been in business before the law went into effect attested to the Insurance Commission that they had not less than 100 policies and $200,000 insurance in force. students, and that a greater percentage of white students were capable of doing work in their grade than are Negro students. He reported that achievement tests of white and Negro students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades showed that more than 50 percent of white students were achieving at or above their normal grade placement while a much lower percent of Negro students were at or above normal grade placement. Rev. Carey Daniel, pastor of the First Baptist Church of West Dallas and vice president of the Texas Citizens Council of Dallas \(and a cousin of Senator Price and its three buildings be used for an all-white school if the Public schools were forced to integrate. Daniel said the school would teach evolution “as a damnable heresy and not as scientific fact” and that the “one world ideology” of the United Nations would be condemned. “The children would be taught such love and respect for Old Glory that they could never stand to think of any other flag, national or international, flying above them,” he said. The move of the West Dallas church followed that of the First Baptist Church of Dallas where pastor Dr. W. A. Criswell announced a similar action several weeks ago. “We are doing this with the hope and prayer that thousands of other Southern South Park High School of ficials disapproved of imitations of the Elvis Presley hairdo and garb by boy students. The principal, J. Ross Jones, asked the boys to “leave the fancy hairdos to the girls” and please not “wear their shirts open to the belt buckle.” Especially upsetting to him: hairdos he called “busy dog” or “foldover.” OHouston police nabbed 31 addicts and charged them under the state’s 1955 addiction law, which makes addiction a felony punishable by a three-year penitentiary sentence. A federal judge in Houston convicted ten persons of operating a dope ring by telephone, telegraph, and telegraph money order in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, and New York after heroin and cocaine valued at more than $100,000 retail was introduced in evidence. An attorney for the Moody Estate says the government’s tax claim of $1.6 million will be contested. He claims that Only about $200,000 is at issue. OA propane gas explosion killed a school janitor and the star football halfback at Southmayd, Texas, school, and but for the quick thinking of two teachers and a principal, who led 50 children. out of the building when they smelled escaping gas minutes before the explosion, a major catastrophe would have occurred. OThe Houston zoo received gifts of a 20-pound capybara \(the largest rodent species in the 550-pound Galapagos tortoise. OOklahoma and Texas high way commissions approved construction of new bridges over the Red River near Denison and Burkburnett, Texas. churches will join us in following the noble example of Dr. Criswell …” said Daniel. In Texarkana, Rep. John Bell Williams of Mississippi, addressing a White Citizens Council meeting, said there was an “excellent chance” of a congressional investigation into alleged communism in the NAACP. Williams, a member of the House Subcommittee which recently conducted hearings in Washington on the integration of public schools, said the testimony was “even more shocking than we anticipated.” He warned that integration in Southern schools must be “prevented if the present level of achievement is to be maintained.” He said testimony during the hearing showed that student achievement in desegregated schools “declined in direct ratio to the number of Negroes in the student body.” In Houston, the segregation question became a principal issue in the school board election where one Negro candidate, Rev. Robert E. Hayes, entered the race. Hayes said he wanted the job because he believes “we could work out a long-range program, and I think long-range planning would have better effect.” He warned that conservative candidates who have firmly declared against integration. “are courting suits, and if they continue to court suits, they will have them.” Election of bitter pro-segregation candidates would constitute a “dare to the Negro people,” he said. OA Valley delegation of farm ers and others asked the government in Washington to make its cotton loan program conform to Valley’s early growing season and to let farmers exchange braceros in certain situations. ORight-of-way for 2905 miles of federal-state highway will cost $272 million. It will be paid by state and federal funds instead of local communities. OThe Texas Farm Bureau asked Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson to let farmers and ranchers buy surplus feed grains at the same rates that dealers now enjoy exclusively. OState Highway Commissioner E. H. Thornton Jr. says that an express highway from Orange to Brownsville, running through Houston and down the Gulf Coast to Mexico, will cost hundreds of millions but is necessary to the rapidly expanding Gulf economy and may be a reality “in parts” within the next four years. OMore than 300 cases of sleep ing sickness have been reported in Texas this year, compared to 400 in 1955. ORep. Joe Pool of Dallas says he will introduce a bill next session of the Legislature to include solicitation of any legislation, whether for profit or not, under the barratry statute that is figuring in the NAACP case brought by Atty. Gen. J. B. Shepperd. OApparently Washington con fusion isn’t limited to Democrats. Postmaster Raymond .Hruska of West, Texas, has been trying without success to get the Post Office Department to build a new post office building. Last week he got an official request to send a picture of his new post office to Washington. To the Editor: I applaud your denunciation of proposed constitutional amendment No. 8. It is remarkable that the people of Texas should be asked to approve a constitutional amendment which would permit denial of the ancient and honorable right of bail in certain cases. But it is puzzling to me that you do not evidence the same concern for historic liberties in your discussion of amendment No. 7. The right of bail is important, but the right to trial by jury is fundamental to freedom. It is true that the amendment is couched in terms of permitting waiver of jury trial, rather than making a jury mandatory, as it is today, in lunacy proceedings. But I apprehend that in practice the effect of the amendment will be virtually to abolish jury trial of this kind of case. The person in question cannot meaningfully waive a jury; by hypothesis he is sick. And his next-of-kin, who could waive jury trial for him under the amendment, are just the people against whom the sick person must be protected. History is filled with cases of sane persons who have been erroneously committed to mental hospitals at the instance of their family. I am ‘disappointed to find a libertarian journal. referring to trial by jury as a “humiliating procedure.” For a good many centuries Anglo-Saxon people have agreed with Blackstone that “it is the most transcendent privilege which any subject can enjoy, or wish for, that he cannot be ,affected either in his property, his liberty, or his person, but by the unanimous consent of twelve of his neighbors and equals.” The implications of your statement that juries are not schooled in what ‘constitutes insanity are deeply disturbing. Carried to its logical conclusion, it would. mean the abolition of the jury system. For almost every lawsuit today involves technical and complex issues in which jurors are not schooled. We have preserved the jury system though at present it is under serious, and possibly successful, attack by eastern intellectualsbecause we believe that if the experts have a good case they will be able to spell it out in terms which the jury can comprehend, and because it is our faith that law speaks without authority save when it reflects the common conscience of the community, as voiced by the jtuy. Doubtless we need reform of our mental health laws. And the motives of those who have proposed this amendment are surely of the best. But the way to achieve this reform is not to start by depriving these unfortunate sick people of their best protection. A “No” vote on Amendment Number Seven will be, in your own phrase, “a vote for the Anglo-Saxon legacy of individual rights.” CHARLES ALAN WRIGHT To the Editor: Proposed constitutional amendment No. 7 will make four basic changes in our procedures for commitment of persons to a mental hospital: be based upon competent medical thorizes an appeal from the judgment of the county court in comrequires that the proposed patient be given personal notice of the hearing and of his right to, demand a trial by jury. The passage of Amendment No. 7 will not deprive a person of any rights he now has under our existing constitutional or statutory law. On the contrary it will provide two very important safeguards of a person’s-civil liberties. Even though diagnosis of mental illness is strictly a medical or psychiatric problem, under our present laws a person may be indefinitely committed to a mental institution without the benefit of any medical or psychiatric testimony. And once judgment is entered by the county court, there is no right of appeal. Amendment No. 7 will eliminate these obvious defects and dangers in our present law by requiring medical or psychiatric testimony and providing for the right of appeal. Amendment No. 7 will not abolish jury trials nor eliminate the right to trial by jury. It does allow a person to avoid the embarrassment and humiliation of a public jury trial in order to obtain needed medical and psychiatric’ treatment. In order to waive trial by jury, the amendment requires that an express agreement be signed by the proposed patient, or his next of kin, and an attorney appointed to represent him. That means there must be a concurrence between at least two persons to waive jury trial. The question has been raised “Does the amendment, by allowing the next-of-kin and an attorney to sign the jury waiver, in effect deprive the proposed patient of the right of trial by jury?” The answer to this question is “No.” Amendment No. 7 explicitly preserves the right of trial by jury in such cases by saying: provide for a method of service of notice of such trial-upon the person under inquiry and of his right to demand trial by jury.” The effect of this requirement is that a trial by jury shall not be denied if it is demanded. A vote “Yes” on amendment No. 7 is a vote for human dignity. JACK F. COOK MISS EMILIE HEINATZ THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 8 October 31, 1956 Readers Discuss Amendment 7 \(Two weeks ago the Observer published comment on the nine proposed constitutional amendments. In a letter, Charles Alan Wright, associate professor of law at the School of Law at the University of Texas took sharp exception to the Observer’s position on Amendment 7. In consequence of a social discussion, partisans of the amendment got wind of this, and a defense of the amendment was written. Its authors: Jack F. Cook and Emilie Heinatz, both Austin attorneys and chief draftsman and associate draftsman, respectively, of the Texas Mental Health Code Drafting Project, among sponsors of which is the Hogg Foundation. The Observer agrees with Mr. Wright, on