ustxtxb_obs_1961_05_27_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

‘A SUMMER NIGHT IN JUNE Rabbi Speaks Out From his casual birth and his casual growth to a summer night in June, from his cell in jail to his day in court to the faceless clutch of death, a Negro boy has lived his twenty years. R.D. ‘They Never Know’ Is he scared now? “I’m not scared,” he said. “I was scared at first, sure I was. I just trusted in the Lard. Even if I die, I know I’ll go to heaven, I know that. “Sure I was scared. No man wants to die. I didn’t commit that kind of a crime and I won’t want to die. But it ain’t a man’s wants, you know.” He lit a Pall Mall. “I lay here on my bunk. I get to thinkin’ how people doin’ me. I get mad. Mad doesn’t do no good, you’re here. I just read my Bible and try to get to sleep. “It’s best for a man down here like I am is try not to think about it an’ keep your mind off somethin’ else. But a man can’t hardly keep from thinkin’ about somethin’ like that.” How does he feel about capital punishment? “My opinion wouldn’t make too much. “I’ll say capital punishment is not jus’. Because there’s no tellin’ how many guilty men have died back there, an’ there’s no tellin’ how many innocent men have died back there. “They didn’t see me rape no woman. They just got my word an’ her word. I know an’ God knows that I didn’t beat no woman or rape no woman. “They never know when they got an innocent man. “I hope, I hope, I hope they give me a new trialI jus’ hope that they will give me some kind of justice.” Does he feel a white man in his situation would get a similar penalty? “Over where I came from I don’t believe he woulda got the death penalty . . . “I don’t wish nobody get the death penalty. I don’t care who he is, white, black, blue, who he is.” Fields and Julian say you did not tell them anything about beatings before the trial. “I did tell ’em too. The day that my trial was comin’ upMonday morning, same morning, same morning.” Julian says you told them of enticement. Did you tell them you wanted to testify to that? “Yes sir, I did. I ask ’em could I take the witness stand. Those people over at Rusk already told me if I took the stand they were gonna shoot me off of it . .. The lawyer told me her brother would probably start some shootin’ in there or cause somebody else to get hurt in the courtroom. “I ask him what would he do. He said there’s not too much I could do. “I told him I wanted to take the witness stand and he talked me Fields told me if you get up on the witness stand and make the woman out a liar, you’re gonna make the jury mad. “They were more for the state than they were for mekep’ askin’ me if I had any money anywhere. Those lawyers weren’t for me at all. “I told ’em I didn’t do it. He didn’t say anythin’ to the jury that I didn’t do it.” Did you offer them any evidence of enticement? “I told ’em I was with the woman but I didn’t rape the woman. They said no witnesses. I told ’em she didn’t have any witnesses either. I told ’em.” THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 8 May 27, 1961 not mine.” At the end of that week he went to see his grandmother in Houston, he said. He was gone about eight months. His aunt had a stroke so he had to go back. Saturday, June 27, two friends of his and he kicked around. “We buys some beer and about a half pint of Hill and Hill whiskey.” The evening of June 28, Sunday, he got a hair cut at a friend’s house. He was in a car with a friend and they stopped for a minor repair; Mrs. Jones drove up and told him a car tire was flat, and when he got out, Williams said, she said she would see him that night. The other fellow in the car did not see her, he said. At her house, he said she invited him in, but he would not go, “the light was on,” so they got into the car. He suggested they drive off, he said. He said she told him “what I could have did to me. I told her I knew what I could have did to me, because nothing I’d say anybody believe. She said, ‘You’re right’.” They drove off, parked, and had intercourse twice, he said. He said they passed one place he speeded past “so nobody wouldn’t recognize” them. He said leaving her he said, “‘I’ll see you’,” and she replied, “‘I imagine you will. Don’t let me see you first’.” At 1 o’clock the officers and a relative of hers came to where he was sleeping and got him, he said. One of them, the Sheriff, told him, ” ‘If you want to live, do as we say do’,” Williams said. He quoted a highway patrolman saying they had “better get me away from there before some of ’em shoot me.” Denies Confession That night, he said, no one asked him about signing anything, and he did not sign anything. He said the knife was in his suitcase he had brought from Houston, not between the mattresses, and was a long, rusty knife we used for “fishin’ or huntin’ or somethin’.” They used it at a lake for “muddin’ with horses,” shooting fish in shallow places with a .22 rifle while on horseback. In jail, “I asked about a law.” Although an old man came to the jail to see him, he was not heard from again. “I didn’t see a law until the day I came up to trial,” he said. He gave his affidavit’s account AUSTIN Sen. David Ratliff, who apparently doesn’t like to see one of Texas’ famous sons chastised just because he is suspected of being a John Bircher, this week won passage of a resolution commending and defending Maj. Gen. E. A. cently relieved of his command in Germany after being accused of ultra-right wing activities. Ratliff’s resolution called for “unqualified support to the reinstatement of Gen. Walker as commander of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany” and urged the Defense Department to “make known the results of its investigation of Gen. Walker and so reinstate him.” But the “unqualified support” of the Senate found 10 voting a solid no to the pro-Walker resolution. The no votes, which in effect said these senators feel the Defense Department knew what it was doing when it banished Walker, came from Sens. Aiken, Colson, Fuller, Gonzalez, Kazen, Krueger, Patman, Roberts, Schwartz, and Secrest. of the beatings at Rusk in detail. Returning him to Houston County, he said, officers kicked him and knocked him down, “trying to make me run,” and threatened to kill him and throw him in a -4ver, but he did not run, figuring he would be killed if he did. Patton brought him the paper to the pan hole in his cell, would not let him read it, and told him it would help him get out on bond, he said. He signed it, Williams continued. Julian, about a week before the trial, was with him about ten minutes, along with the sheriff, asking him “who knows me,” and Fields conferred with him the day of the trial “about five minutes,” Williams said. The day of the trial he also told Julian “everything,” he said. “He said, ‘Well Charles, I was appointed to defend you and to tell you the truth I don’t think you got a chance’.” Julian advised him to plead guilty and ask for mercy, Williams said. “I sit up there and studied a long time. I said, well, I don’t think I’m gonna take it” \(the He said he asked them what they would do If they were in his shoes. “They said they wasn’t in my shoes.” He pleaded not guilty. Williams charged “the prosecuting attorney” went into the jury room with the jury and came out about ten or twenty minutes later. He said when the death sentence was passed on him, “I don’t have a law anywhere in the courtroom. Nowhere, period.” How did he explain Mrs. Jones reporting him? “That’s what I can’t figger out. I heard several people said her brother saw us.” The Observer subsequently put to Williams these four issues and got these answers: Patton says you confessed that night, without any beating, and said nothing about her enticing you. Williams: “I was in there three weeks and three days before I even signed anything. I know I seen some writing on there. I haven’t saw it since.” Baker, Hudson, and Weinert were absent. All other senators supported Walker, whom Ratliff commended in his resolution for heroic action at Heartbreak Ridge in the Korean War and at Anzio and Casino in World War II. But what was apparently uppermost in Ratliff’s mind, since he mentioned it first, was the fact that Gen. Walker “is a native of Center Point, Kerr County, where his mother and brother still reside.” The Observer asked Ratliff if he personally knew the man he was defending. He said he didn’t. Walker was first accused of having John Birch ties by The Overseas Weekly. Sen. Ratliff was quick to point out the Yankee implications in that the weekly is “a Delaware Corporation,” and he countered the weekly’s charge with one of his own, saying it “has been accused of anti-American leanings.” Sen. George Parkhouse, Dallas, agreed that “this newspaper just puts U.S. soldiers in a bad light” and, besides, “it prints pornographic pictures.” DALLAS Packaged conclusions about communism are being taught in Dallas schools to the great detriment of the student body, Rabbi Levi Olan charged in a pulpit address last week. “The greatest threat to freedom is not communism but the inability of free people to think, analyze, criticize and decide,” he said. By not teaching the tenets of communism in an objective way and letting the students come to their own conclusions, he said, “they will be poorly prepared” to cope with it when they “get out into the world and really confront communism.” He said the students are only taught “superficial weaknesses of communism.” Olan also decried the great fear of federal aid, especially aid for education. “It sometimes seems that we are more afraid of Washington than of Moscow. We don’t want Washington to give money to the schools, yet we don’t do it ourselves. We end up not doing anything to improve our schools.” He called government control of the schools a “bogie-man” and said it looks to him like some peo AUSTIN The industrial unions of Texas are working for a more closelyknit relationship and a more powerful voice in state AFL-CIO affairs. But Paul Gray, South Texas director of the Communication Workers of America, who called the preliminary organizational meeting of union representatives in Austin last week, told the Observer, “Contrary to what some people thought and maybe still think, this was no effort to subdivide or re-divide the AFL-CIO.” Nevertheless, he conceded the new movement is “a pretty clear cut expression of those who make up the industrial unions of the state that they feel the need for some kind of continuing organization or forum.” There have been recent reports of unrest among industrial union men because they feel they are not having enough voice in the determination of AFL-CIO policy, and because they do not think the AFL-CIO gives enough emphasis to problems peculiar to industrial unions. Gray said, “I think we probably made a mistake in not retaining a forum for the industrial unions” when the AFL and CIO merged. He said the industrial unions had “lost contact” with each other and had thereby lost power. Meet Again Last week’s conference in Austin was the first time since the merger that the industrial-type unions have met together, strictly on their own, in Texas. A similar conference will be held the day before the state AFL-CIO conference convenes in late July. It is reported that at that time the industrial unionists will decide whether or not to apply for their own state charter, such as is held by the metal trades unions, the building trades unions, the maritime unions, and the union label department of the parent group. But for the industrial unionists to receive a charter would be much more significant, because the industrial unionists are by far the strongest. A charter would give them semiautonomy. The subcommittee named by Gray to plan the next meeting is made up of Mrs. Velah Daniels, Sugar Workers Union; Vincent Lena, Oil, Chemical, and Atomic ple would rather be defeated by a foreign nation than submit to government improvement of the schools in order to stave off such a defeat. UH Approved AUSTIN The bill to make the University of Houston a state school was helped through the House by Speaker. James Turman this week just as it had been pounded through \\ the Senate by Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey’s gavel a few days earlier, despite filibustering efforts. To bring the bill to final passage, Turman openly announced to the House that more votes were needed and then he delayed the count to allow a number of changes even after the electric voting machine had registered the total. Rep. George Hinson, Mineola, had told the House, “I know you’re going to pass this bill. But it will cost the state $16 million for support of the school in its first two years. We’re not going to be able to take care of the 19 institutions of higher education we already have.” Union; Bob Hawkins, United Rubber Workers; and Rex Ballard, Brewery Workers. Fred Schmidt, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and the voice of the industrial unions in top policy matters within the parent group, was keynote speaker at the Austin meeting, and the fact that the group voted to pursue their organizational program was interpreted by some as a vote of confidence in Schmidt. BRAIPOWER IS OUR MOST VITAL RESOURCE! You can’t .dig education e$t the earth. There’s only one Saes where business and industry can get the educated men and woman so vitally needed for future progress. That’s from our eelleges and universities. Today these institutions are doing their best to meet the need. But they face a crisis. The demand for brains is fast, and so is the pressure college applications. More money must be raised each year to expand ficilities bring faculty salaries up to an adequate standard provide a sound education for the young people who need and deserve it. As n practical busines$ measure, help the colleges or =Ivorshies of your choicenow!