ustxtxb_obs_1965_07_23_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

spread non-compliance in rural East Texas counties with civil rights statutes relating to schools, public accommodations, and in some instancesvoting rights has apparently given an added sense of urgency to civil rights activists in Texas. The views of William Oliver of Beaumont are representative of this tendency. “There are a growing number of us who feel it is time to hold a mirror up to this state to separate truth from fiction in the whole area of civil rights,” he said. Oliver, a young white minister of a Negro church in BeauMont, has been active in the coalition’s mass blockworker and voter registration programs of the past two years. The most-discussed single topic at the Austin meeting was the Yarborough-forGovernor resolution, which was introduced by Bill Kilgarlin, Democratic county chair goo Dope stories based on conversations with people who have been talking politics with Gov. Connally say he wants to quit. One explanation: he’s disenchanted, having lost his limited labor backing over 14-B and bankers’ backing over the interest rate law veto. . . . The Dallas News said it “has a bulletin distributed from Austin by the Texas Bankers Assn., one not generally available to the public. ‘Gov. Connally Stuns Bankers with Veto of SB 59,’ captioned the bulletin.” V The Houston Post’s William Gardner reports that Cong. Jim Wright, Fort Worth, told him, “If it looks like I have a real good fighting chance, without creating serious divisions within the Democratic Party, I will probably run” for the. U.S. Senate; that Sen. Ralph Yarborough says he has got a lot of mail about running against Connally, \(who Yarborough said was “frightened” by speeches the senator made against the bankers’ bill, and so time to think about making such a race; that Cong. Jack Brooks, Beaumont, was “shocked” when he was put into a district with Cong. Clark Thompson, Galveston; and that Thompson denies he wants or has ever been offered an ambassadorship. Gardner, working in Washington, also discovered that Cong.-at-large Joe Pool of Texas has drummed himself up a $25-aplate campaign money dinner in Washington. V Prospective state Senate candidates recently mentioned: Rep. Henry Grover, Houston \(under fire lately from Mrs. Charles White of the school board for taking a high-paying school administrattonio, if Sen. Franklin Spears runs for attorney general; Ex-Rep. Stanford Smith, San Antonio; Rep. David Ivy, Dallas. V National liberal spokesman proposed not seriously to oppose the nomination of Ex-Gov. Coleman of Mississippi to the Fifth Court of Appeals if the President 4 The Texas Observer man of Harris County. “Governor John Connally has betrayed the Democrats of Texas,” Kilgarlin said, “by consistently opposing President Johnson’s most important programs, including the war on poverty, minimum wages, equal opportunities, and free collective bargaining.” The resolution passed by a three-to-one margin, although among the dissenters were such well-known Texas liberals as Margaret Carter of Fort Worth, Jean Lee of Austin, and J. W. Airhart of Lubbock. A brochure is being prepared which Dixie said would be mailed “by the thousands” to the Coalition and old Democrats the proposed draft constitution and inviting people to the Houston meeting, but the meeting is to be open to anyone who wishes to attend. LI would bracket Coleman with L.N.D. Wells of Dallas, but Johnson named Homer Thornberry, instead. Now Thornberry and Sen. Ralph Yarborough figure in speculation about the new U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. . . . Gov. Connally accepted Johnson’s appointment of him as a vice-chairman at large at the White House Conference on Education, then failed to attend it. . . In his new book, My Appointed Round, Ex-Postmaster General J. Edward Day says that then-Vice-President Johnson “did not like” Yarborough. . . . Yarborough’s administrative aide, Alex Dickie of Denton, has resigned to work as congressional liaison for the State Dept. in the development of economic programs in underdeveloped nations, especially in the Far East. Kennedys Help Ralph Yarborough’s resounding victory for his G.I. Bill of Rightsits passage by despite the Administration’s open opposition to itwas accomplished with the significant help of the two Kennedy brothers. Robert Kennedy asked incredulously how the three executive agencies that opposed it possibly could possibly do soaiming the shaft of his astonishment directly at the President. \(Speculation has finally broken out in Washington that the Kennedys may have, not 1972, but 1968, in blockade as before in the person of Cong. Olin Teague of College Station, chairman of the House veterans affairs committee. Yarborough beat back three attempts to amend his bill, one of these by Sen. John Tower, Texas, to limit the bill’s educational benefits to veterans serving in areas of hostility as declared by the President. Tower voted for the final bill, however. V Tower voted against, and Yarborough for, medicare and the federal housing bills recently passed in the Senate. Tower opposed, Yarborough favored, the rent subsidy provisions of the latter measure.. . . Yarborough won his fight to keep the Public Health Service hospital in Galveston open. . . . The House voting rights bill would abolish state poll taxes, despite an appeal by Cong. Jack Pickle, Austin, to the contrary. The final law on this point depends on a conference committee. . . . Texaco, lobbied for on this point by Tom Sealy of Midland, wants an exception in the Guadalupe National Park law to let it keep its mineral rights to 25,000 acres of the prospective parkland. V The state insurance commission’s new auto insurance increase of 13%and of 20% on auto liability rateshas been defended by Connally, who says 34 states still have higher rates. Three representatives called for a special session; Connally said no. State labor leader Roy Evans said the time has come to “raise hell” about insurance rates, charged that insurance companies are stronger in state government than either oil or banking. Dallas attorney Bert Bader, in a petition filed in an Austin court, raised a pointed question whether the increases are actually based on declining profits. Badersaid they aren’t that the companies have been getting richer, not poorer. V The integration demonstrations in Huntsville appear to be the first major ones in East Texas since the Marshall sitins in 1961 and are probably a precursor of similar events throughout East Texas. . . . The Republicans filed their congressional redistricting suit. The five liberal Democratic litigants in the original legislative suit will file another suit challenging the legislature’s Texas House redistricting bill. Sen. Spears is likely to file an independent petition supporting the GOP suit. Rep. Neil Caldwell, Alvin, has been considering similar action because of the bisection of Brazoria County in the congressional law. . . . The Texas Poll showed this month that 57% favor abolishing capital punishment, 32% oppose it. Eight men await execution on Death Row in Huntsville. V Barry Goldwater’s Free Society Assn. simply has not attracted support amongTexas GOP figures; Sen. Tower and George Bush are notably cool. . . . The new Keeping It Clean . . . A paragraph in a column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, as it appeared in the Austin American, read as follows: “[John] Connally has been the President’s conduit to what is called the ‘lobby’ here in Austin for many years. The lobby is made up of oil, insurance, bank, and other vested interests. It exerts great, often decisive influence over the Teicas legislature. . . .” What one may assume must have been, originally, this paragraph appeared in the Evans-Novak column in the San Antonio Evening News as follows: “Connally has been the President’s conduit to conservative Democrats here for many years. This group exerts great, often decisive influence over the state legislature. . . .” Political Intelligence