ustxtxb_obs_1965_02_19_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

ple I trade with are Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, but I don’t like the feeling, when I go see a doctor, that I am contributing at one and the same time to propaganda against sufficient medical care for the poor who are sick and to the spreading political :;ickness of the far right wing. Last Things First For many recent years we Texans have had to listen to Allan Shivers and assorted other defenders of local rights berate federal aid to education on grounds that federal control would come with it. Now, at long last, we can see what they really meant. They meant that they knew full well that bigots, put to the test to choose between paying their own way for their local public services and giving in a little on their bigotries, will give in their bigotries. The 1964 civil rights act requires schools to certify they are complying with school integration or give up their federal aid funds. Every school district is free to raise its school taxes and stall even some more against the national consensus on racial equality. But now East Texas school districts are pelting down on Washington their certifications of compliance: “Liberty, Hardin, and Hull-Daisetta Independent School District boards voted to sign assurances of compliance . . . and Devers and Dayton were expected to follow suit. . . .” 1 “Atlanta’s School Board Tuesday night took formal steps to conform. . . .” 2 “The board of education has decided that Haskell schools will be integrated in all 12 grades . . . in compliance with the civil rights law.” 3 “Deweyville School District trustees have authorized Wesley Brockman, board president, to sign a statement of compliance. . . .”4 “The 16 The Texas Observer Alvarado School Board has voted to drop all racial bars. The board . . . noted that the schools here faced the loss of $30,000 in federal funds. . .”5 “School boards in all school districts of Harrison County have voted in unison to file a plan of desegregation with the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.. . .”6 There are whites of good will in East Texas and the South who are using the Feb. 22 deadline under the civil rights act as an inescapable imperative for local school integration. Doubtless also, many schools are certifying integration which they intend to delay and dilute as much as they can. Perhaps most white Southerners know in their hearts segregation is wrong and find their courage only when they can deny they are acting on it. But hereafter we shall have no more of this talk about local rights in school segregation unless the local people are willing to finance their own prejudices. Dries All Wet Forward two, back one. They had a wetdry election in Marshall recently. Declared the membership of the Friendship Baptist Church on Carthage Highway in a newspaper advertisement, “God will remember your actions on Jan. 9, and so will you, throughout eternity. Vote dry!” They did, 2,569 to 2,300. Then it was that Franklin Jones, Sr., our most irascible contributing editor, penned this to the Marshall NewsMessenger, which’he of course addressed as the “Marshall Newsmessenger”: “The true victors at the polls Saturday were fear and hypocrisy. “Many conscientious drys, in belief and practice, undoubtedly voted for legalized control as the best combatant of the abuse of the drinking privilege. To offset this vote, there must have been a heavy hypocritical dry vote, the behind-the-door and sneak drinkers who want to procure their liquor in secrecy from bootleggers or at a distance; who are infected with a holierthan-thou attitude because they talk dry and drink wet. That this vote would be considerable will be substantiated by the ‘travelers or newcomers in Marshall, who give it the doubtful distinction of being one of the wettest towns in the U.S.A. “The greater of the villains was fear. Fear, not of the eternal bonfire predicted for wet voters by some drys understandably carried away by their zeal, but of reprisals inflicted while on this earthly sphere. The kind of terror that left the power complex of the town voiceless on the economic and police advantages of legal control, save for a few, mostly among the young. The fear and pressure that caused some to switch rather than fight. “Fear is not a stranger to Marshall. For a generation genuine progress was blocked by the fear that the T. & P. shops would be moved from Marshall. Ironically, the fawning was of no avail; for the shops were moved when it suited the railroad, so that the net profit of the cringing was to put Marshall a quarter of a century behind the progress of our neighboring cities to the west. “In the oil boom of the thirties Marshall ‘leaders’ feared the influx of what ,they called the riff-raff of the oilfield; a riffraff that settled in .tongview and Tyler and made them prosperous cities. . . . “This communication may be out of place in the aura of righteousness, that has permeated our fair city during the -campaign. One should turn the other cheek, but at times the desire to smite the jawbone of an ass cannot be denied.” Jones has been taking leave of his colleagues in Marshall with the jaunty cry, “See you in hell.” $ Speaking of that possibility, the Austin Memorial & Burial Information Society has been working along a year now to make it easier and cheaper to shuffle off this mortal coil with the least bother for everyprofit group dedicated to dignity and simplicity in funeral and memorial services. A few of its members have information on local funeral and cemetery costs and make it available on request from members. A handbook contains information about creamation, the eye bank, getting one’s body to a medical society, and funeral and memorial services. Membership is $5; that gets you the handbook. 0 I have a piece in the New York Times Magazine of Feb. 14 on an enlightening encounter with two Russian journalists who were scouting through Austin. Although it is rather long. I may reprint it in the Observer if we have room soon, as not manynot enoughTexans read the Times. But we probably won’t have room. R.D. Dialogue To Pens, To Pens Larry King’s “Texans, Our Texani” [Obs. Feb. 5] was a masterpiece of writing: Surely as a result of it, Texas liberals will take to their pens with renewed determination and purpose. Your fine paper is a jewel shining brightly in our Lone Star State–Katherine Cobb, 1403 Floyd Rd., Richardson, Tex. He Realized at Stanford I consider the Observer to be one of the very few institutions in Texas worthy of great praise. It was certainly for meand many others the primary guiding light in the quest for a humane, just, and equalitarian society. I miss that almost religious, conspiratorial feeling one gets while reading the Observer in Texas. The observations you presented in your “A Suggestion Based on An Experience” [Obs. Jan. 8] were embarassingly close to my own experience at the University of Texas. I graduated in political science in 1964, Phi Beta Kappa and a 2.85 grade point average. I had to come to Stanford to realize what kind of education I had really received. Colin Dale Neal, the Stanford Review, P.O. Box 2102, Stanford, Cal.