ustxtxb_obs_1962_04_06_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

‘HE ALSO HAS FAILED’ Ideological Substance of Juvenile Crime WASHINGTON, D. C. Many citizens of the nation’s Capital are afraid to walk in the city at night. They have reason to be. There is a menace, vicious and palpable, on these dark and almost deserted streets. Last year more than one thousand street beatings and thefts were reported to the police in the District of Columbia, that is, three every night. The liberal Washington Post reports that although the Negro population of the district is 54 percent, Negroes are implicated in 80 percent of the major crimes. Their slum life and their difficulties getting jobs are blamed. Nevertheless, it is Negro teenage boys who are feared. That is the fact that is creating a new concern among Kennedy Frontiersmen for the image of the United States abroad. Two years ago, a cab driver recalls, he was cruising along about one a.m. at the intersection of New York and New Jersey and saw a well-dressed man gesticulating wildly from an island in the middle of the street where the street-cars stopped to take on riders. The muggings were already so frequent, most cab drivers were knocking off at ten or eleven at night, but this one sensed the man’s distress and picked him up. He had blood on his cheekbone. Three Negro youths had attacked him from behind as he stood waiting for the street-car. The cabbie drove him to the police station, and when he came back out, he said the police had told him he had no business on the streets at that hour ! The cabbie drove him home free ; all his assailants had left him was a streetcar transfer clutched in his hand. T HE CABBIE remembers another recent case. Two young Negroes boarded a bus and attacked the driver. One of them drew a piece of wire tight around the driver’s neck. The driver drew a pistol and shot the boy dead. For this he lost his job. Even though it violates the law, said the cabbie, the bus drivers are carrying pistols again in Washington. Hearsay, you may object. It was not hearsay when three Negro youths boarded another bus and beat up the driver while thirty passengers sat watching and did absolutely nothing to help the driver. That episode tormented the conscience of the Capitol as little else has in recent years. It was not hearsay when a person to whom I am close, a lady of more than 60 years, parked her car in her regular place near her apartment and was set upon in an alleyway by three Negro youths who beat her about the head with six heavy blows and took her purse. It is not hearsay when one walks along the streets of the Capitol and sees policemen accompanied by police dogs on leashes. Are even the police afraid? They have guns on their hips ; what do they need dogs for? To scent and track down attackers fleeing through the streets and alleys. A policeman told me there are now 54 police dogs on duty in the Capitol. When I reached over and patted him, he warned me, “That’s not a good idea.” What has a city come to, when armed men use dogs against boys on the public streets of an American city? Suppose a policeman orders a dog to attack a boy who is on the run. The boys turns on the dog and chokes it ; the dog sinks its teeth into the boy’s throat. Will the policeman shoot the dog or the boy? “Juvenile delinquency” has entered a new phase when you are walking along, a free person on a free street in a free city, and hear across the street a policeman sweet-talking a leashed dog that, seated beside him, is half as tall as he is. HE PRESIDENT’S committee on juvenile delinquency is trying to devise ways to cure the cause of youth crime. They have concluded that this is no narrow problem of crime and punishment, rehabilitation and parole supervision ; that it is a problem that calls for the reshaping of an entire society. It is not only a problem of segregated slums, although this is the sordid context in which bitterness and cynicism clutch the growing mind. It is not only a problem of second-rate schools for Negroes, although such schools add to the burdens Negroes must overcome or be defeated by. It is not only a problem of racist or equivocal employers who will not hire Negroes for jobs they are qualified to fill, although in one survey of 1,000 Negro youths in the district, 400 were qualified for jobs they were not permitted to fill because of their race. It is not only these things, it is all of themand it is more. When you ask a young man to work for status in a society, you ask him to aspire for acceptance according to its values. His resistance to frustrations, disadvantages, and setbacks in the pursuit of that status is weakened by every flaw, every unfairness, every absurdity in the values of the system from which he seeks his reward. Handicap a boy, then ask him to fight past all those handicaps for honor in the very system which has handicapped him, and *you wake up one day and realize that a whole busload of Negroes will not defend a white bus driver who is being set upon by three other Negroes. N OTHER WORDS, there is an ideological content to juvenile delinquency. Crime may be. a boy’s vengeance for a just grievance. Only by reshaping our values and our society to reduce just grievancesonly by giving a boy a fair chance in life can the boy be expected to want to succeed on society’s terms. If a white employer refuses for racial reasons to hire a Negro to do a job for which he is qualified, then if that white man’s wife, or mother, or sister, or child, happens to be set upon late one night, beaten, and robbed by Negro youths, he must realize that not only have the Negro youths failed ; not only have the police failed ; not only have the social reformers failed ; he also has failed. R. D. ALAMO: PRE-UNITED NATIONS `Ride the River for Academic Freedom’ We excerpt the testimony of Maury Maverick Jr. before the House textbook investigating committee, less perhaps for the part about textbooks than for the feelings he expresses for his hometown.Ed. SAN ANTONIO I present testimony before you in behalf of the book Our Widening World by Dr. Ethel Ewing. The publisher is Rand-McNally & Co. What is the book really about? For one thing, it is not about any one nation or its heroes and wasn’t intended to be. To put it in a nutshell, this bookis about the Family of Man, something that we Americans should appreciate most of all with our melting-pot culture. You, see, gentlemen, we have a great nation not for the reason we are all alike, but because we are trying to live together in friendship despite our differences and diversity. JUSTICE WM. 0. DOUG-LAS, a man who loves the soil, put it this way, “There is room in this great and good American family for all the diversities the Creator has produced in man. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights were, indeed, written to accommodate each and every mii nority, regardless of color, nationality, or creed . . . Out of that diversity can come a unity the world has never witnessed.” Our Widening World, then, .tells about the ancestral lands of the United States, about Far Eastern society, about India, and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Moslem society, Slavic, European, Anglo-American, and Latin American society. You will remember that Franklin Roosevelt once told the Daughters of the American Revolution that we Americans are all descendants of revolutionaries and immigrants. San Antonio is an appropriate place to talk about our widening world, and I hope you will let me tell you briefly about my home town, a com munity made up of people from so many different races. From both a historical and contemporary standpoint it isn’t all good. We have always had one of the highest death rates from infant diarrhea and tuberculosis. Our wage scale suffers badly by comparison with Houston or Dallas. But St. Anthony’s town is a dramatic place for the right kind of things, too, a town which can demonstrate the truth of and need for a book like Our Widening World. Here the Franciscans came and built their missions. Here to what was then called the New Philippines came the Canary Islandersand before them the Apaches and Cornmanches watered their horses at San Pedro Springs not far from here. Most anthropologists contend, by the way, that the American Indian is the descendant of Mongoloid groups, his ancestors having crossed the Bering Straits more than 30,000 years ago. To San Antonio the Anglo-Saxon began to migratepushing his way through East Texas not so very long after George Washington left the office of President. Here a young West Point graduate, Lt. A. W. Magee, joined together with Bernardo Gutierres in a joint AngloMexican effort against the Spanish Crown. Gutierres was one of Father Hidalgo’s men and on the streets and plazas of San Antonio men talked about liberty and died for it. H ERE TEDDY Roosevelt, a New Yorker, organized his Rough Riders, and Blackjack Pershing strutted up and down Peacock Alley of the St. Anthony Hotel before going to the trenches of France after first thanking the French people for their contribution to the American Revolution. As a matter of fact, if you look hard enough here in San Antonio you might even see some of Pershing’s old Chinese cooks who soldiered with him in his chase after Pancho Villa in Mexico. From our widening world, San Antonio has in retirement a soldier’s soldier, Walter Krueger, immigrant. Go to our Irish flats while you are here and you will learn about a people who came to Bexar County suffering from economic poverty. Go down to what we call with some humor and much affection Sauerkraut Bend and you will learn something about people with names like Herff, Steves, Oppenheimer and Altgelt, who fled a despotic Germany in search of liberty. And while you are weighing the evidence presented at this hearing, go by the Alamo, Texas’ greatest shrine, and understand that to a substantial degree it was defended by foreigners from our widening world. The Alamo is important because it belongs to the family of man everywhere. In its time, the Alamo was a sort of pre-United Nations effort of its own. Where did the defenders come from? Let me call the roll: 15 men from England-10 from Ireland-4 from Scotland-2 from Wales-1 man from Denmark, his name was Zanco2 from Prussia-8 were native born Texans with names like Guerrero and Fuentes-32 were from Tennessee and the rest from the other American states, although even some of these defenders also emigrated from Europe too. MAVERICK A man named Ramsey Yelvington wrote a play about the Alamo which is produced each summer here. A brave man can see that play and weep. At the end of the play the dead defenders of the Alamo assemble on the stage. Satan walks out and mocks the dead and asks them why they died. This is their reply : “We died there: And from our dust the mammoth thing Freedom Received a forward thrust The Reverberations we continued Are something to which man may respond or not respond at pleasure.” E VERY MAN who ever served in the Texas House of Representatives is an old colleague, and so on that friendly basis now I put the question to you as if I were standing at what you and I call the snorting pole. How do you committee members respond? Will you give freedom a forward thrust ? Do you believe in academic freedom? Don’t you generally agree that the state of Texas already has an adequate screening process for the selection of books? Don’t you agree that we cannot adopt the censorship tactics of a fascist Spain or a communist Russia? Don’t you agree that he who would intelligently cope with any totalitarianism must first love democracy most of all? Gentlemen, let me finally conclude with a Texas saying which my old professor, Poncho Dobie, taught me. It describes a man who won’t run out on you or on an ideal. It goes like this, “He’ll do to ride the river with.” I know you committee members will do to ride the river with. Ride it for liberty, ride it for academic freedom, ride it for good school teachers to keep them from being bullied around, ride the river for the glory of Texas and these United States of America.