ustxtxb_obs_1962_02_09_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

FULL GOP EFFORT FOR STATE PLACES TSU DEAN, NAACP vs. the Communists g o of Senator John Tower was crushingly defeated in his efforts to modify the 1958 Welfare and Pension Plans Disclosure Act, which’gives the labor secretary power to ride close herd on pension plans in order to block abuses such as kickbacks and embezzlement. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, still ill with pneumonia, was unable to lead the floor fight against Tower’s amendments as he wanted to do. kof The Arkansas . Gazette di torialized recently that Edwin Walker by entering the Texas gubernatorial race “immediately forfeits his position, which had advantages, as a purported anticommunist martyr speaking from a place above and beyond the hue and cry of politics.” It went on, “Actually Walker has been up to his epaulets in political activity even while he was in the army, but now it is impossible for him to assume the non-political pose.” Support for Walker and his extreme views will become now a ticklish proposition for Republicans \( especially Sen. John Tower. . . . If somehow he were elected . . . Walker would either have to mature overnight or the state government would practically come apart at the seams under the influence of his erratic personality. “All in all the Walker decision is an encouraging development. As a candidate for political office, he will be less effective as a standard bearer for the Raucous Right. As a defeated politician he would be finished. In all probability Walker is speeding his own demise as a national figure; his plunge into politics is probably a plunge toward oblivion.” g# Capitol newsman Stuart Long wrote in his newsletter this week that with Gen. Walker running for governor and J. Evetts Haley Jr. running for agriculture commissioner, it seems “the Constitution-party types decided to cast their lot with the Democratic primary and thus answered the prayer Gen. Preston Weatherred mailed out to conservatives, pleading with them to stay in the Democratic primary, to prevent the election of liberal legislators. The defeat in the Senate of HB 32, which would have prevented those who vote in the GOP first primary from voting in the Democratic runoff primary, makes the Walker-Haley strategy unnecessary, but may have saved a lot of runoffs in the cities where the Indignation and John Birch movements have gathered their strength.” por Thursday afternoon, at this writing, the Democratic Party headquarters reported six have paid their filing fees for the congressman-at-large race. Nine have filed, but the other three can pay their fees any time Thursday, if they mean to. Filing for congressman-at-large a re Manley Head, Austin, former state senator; Woodrow W. Bean, El Paso; Warren G. Moore, Tyler attorney; Russell T. Van Keuren, Houston attorney; Eldon Mahon, Colorado City judge; Joe R. Pool, Dallas, former state legislator; Robert Hervey, Houston businessman; Charles H. Stevenson Jr., Corpus Christi lawyer; Phil Willis, Kaufman County rancher. Republicans running are Giles Miller, Dallas; Desmond Barry, Houston ; Joe Phillips, Lubbock. J. Ed Connally, Abilene oil man and chairman of the state Democratic executive committee, backed out of the race at the last minute. Another last day retreat from the race was made by Martin Dies Sr. Both men earlier had been considered sure candidates. Dies said he would spend his talen supporting Daniel. por The attorney general cam paign was enlivened by th candidacy of Bob Looney, 38, wh has been prominently in the new recently with his defense appeal for condemned killer Howar Stickney. Looney will be runnin against moderate Tom Reavley Austin, Waggoner Carr, Lubbock conservative, Tom James, Dallas conservative, Les Procter, former Travis county district attorney, and W. T. McDonald, Criminal Appeals Court judge. v Six U. S. congressmen will win re-election without opposition: Olin Teague, W. R. Poage, John Young, Joe Kilgore, Omar Burleson, and Henry Gonzalez. Eight others who will have no opposition in the primary but will run into Republican opposition in the general election are: Lindley Beckworth, Ray Roberts, Albert Thomas, Jim Wright, Graham Purcell, Walter Rogers, George Mahon, 0. C. Fisher. g o or Opposition in both the pri mary and general election faces Homer Thornberry, who has been holding Lyndon Johnson’s old seat in the House. He runs against Paul Stimson in the primary, and will face either Jim Dobbs, lay minister, or Hal Hendrix, insurance salesman, from the GOP side in the fall. kof One of the stronger Republi cans active in Texas politics is William M. Steger, Tyler attorney, who polled 600,000 votes when he opposed Gov. Daniel in 1960. This time Steger will be running for Congress. g o of Texas Senate veteran George Parkhouse will be opposed by Dallas legislator Joe Ratcliff, 30. Parkhouse has been in the legislature since the year Ratcliff was born. vir Liberal state Sen. A. R. will receive often-threatened opposition from Rep. Maco Stewart, a liberalmoderate-conservative, in the Galveston running. Sam Bass of Freeport will also be running. I, Conservative Lee Smith will be opposed by Joe Bailey Humphreys in the race for Dallas County Democratic Executive Committee chairman. vConsiderable attention is be ing drawn to the seventh district congressional race where Benton Musslewhite, Lufkin attorney, has filed to oppose arch-ultraconservative Cong. John Dowdy of Athens. p o of In the Democratic stable for lieutenant governor, the Labor-liberal vote will probably be claimed by House Speaker James Turman of Gober, but Sen. Crawford Martin of Hillsboro, a flexible moderate, will give him strong competition for some of those votes. Otherwise, the field is conservative: Sen. RobertBaker, Houston, Sen. Jarrard Secrest, Temple, and Preston Smith, Lubbock, none of whom have records t hat would offend the GOP candidates, 0. W. Hayes of Temple, and Kellis Dibrell of San Antonio. Dibrell’s campaign rankles LBJ devotees because the GOP attorney constantly refers to his role n investigating the infamous “Box 13″ affair in Johnson’s past. The other candidate is Gene Smith, former legislator from Fort Worth, who has been a loyal Democrat. vf Of liberal candidate for gov ernor Don Yarborough, the Kountze News said this week, I. . . he didn’t support Ike and he d idn’t support Nixon, and to . . . radical conservatives, anybody who voted for FDR, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy right down the line is an extremist.” We excerpt a talk given last month by Kenneth S. Tollett, acting dean of Texas Southern University in Houston and a leading Negro educator, to the Democratic Forum of the Harris County Democrats. He spoke on communism and the NAACP, Ed. HOUSTON There are always going to be social problems and injustice, just as there are always going to be murderers and law violators, but this conservative judgment is no excuse for inaction. A vital effort must always be made to correct social injustice and crime, although it is very doubtful that a perfect society can be brought about on this earth. THE PROBLEMS of man will hardly be solved by self-righteous indignation. T o l e r a n c e, though not submissiveness; patience, though not spinelessness; warmness, though not sentimentality; goodwill, though not messianism; and intellience, though not dogmatism, are the virtues to be exercised in the solution of our problems. He who is alienated and deprived becomes sick and desperate if he sees no way of improving his lot. Revolutions are. borne of desperate efforts to remold intractable and unjust social orders. Communism is most alien to our way of thinking because of the intransigency of its doctrines and the unscrupulousness of its methods. Orderly change is given up as a possibility only when those who thwart and impede your aspirations deny that you have any rights to any aspirations or refuse to regard you as a human being deserving of any recognition. If you resist or impede the realization of my human dignity, I either become an abject sycophant or an incendiary fanatic. This is the reason communism is a genuine threat to Latin American and other countries with large classes of underprivileged people. The haves have too brutally thwarted the desire for land and economic reform of the have nots. This is the reason President Kennedy has realistically set conditions of self-reform on his Alliance for Progress. tions, and particularly the courts that interpret and apply it. It would be surprising, indeed, if an organization which had chosen this most conservative of con servative institutions as its ye-. hicle of progress were substantially influenced by radicals or composed of revolutionaries. THE OVERSTREETS in their book, What We Must Know About Communism, state: “A second permanent target \(of community. It is a basic tenet of Leninism that an underprivileged minority group is ripe for revolution,” One should think the Negro is ripe for communism. The cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity to which the Negro has been subjected would certainly make a group, less committed to democracy and the American way of life than the Negro, an easy target. It is difficult to make this clear in words. One has to be a Negro to really understand how unhappy and dissatisfied he is with his status. Read artists like James Baldwin or the late Richard Wright to get a clear feel of the Negroes’ sense of deprivation and mistreatment. The Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, in which several Negroes were killed and practically all were burned out of their homes, aroused many enlightened white people to action. They set up a conference in 1909 in New York to discuss the sad and disgraceful situation of the Negro in America. The conference was called on Lincoln’s birthday and the NAACP was launched the next year as a result. The purpose of the NAACP was and is to realize for the Negro the enjoyment of rights of all citizens, justice in the courts, and equal opportunity in every economic, social and political endeavor. These are hardly subversive objectives. Lynching was on the rampage during this period. Legislation in the Southern states was disenfranchising the Negro. He was discriminated against, segregated, whipped, intimidated, exploited; his women were ravished. Although these evils do not exist to such an extent today, we know the Negro is still seeking the ballot in many parts of the South, as well as fair employment and educational opportunity. Many of the evils have been corrected or abolished through the fearless and dedicated efforts of the NAACP. Much remains to be done. How eve r, the communists missed the mark. To quote the Overstreets: “The communists claim ‘overwhelming success’ for their work among the Negroes. This claim is itself a maneuver: an effort to instill fear in the minds of white Americans and thus to drive deeper the wedge of anxiety and prejudice between the races. In this secondary effort they have often succeeded far better than they have in their primary effort to win the Negroes. In this primary effort, they have largely failed.” Those who assert Negroes as a group and the NAACP as an organization are significantly infiltrated, influenced, and controlled by communists are in truth helping spread communist propaganda and assisting their methods and objectives. The Overstreets give three reasons for the communist failure to make a dent into Negro groups and organizations: “For one thing, the Party has all too obviously taken its commands from the Soviet Union.