ustxtxb_obs_1965_11_12_50_00010-00000_000.pdf

In Texas in the game room beer’s the one… for good taste good fun You name your game, ping-pong or check ers, cards or chess. Play it hard, and it takes a lot out of you. That’s when you like most to settle down in a soft chair and enjoy your friends’ talk and your beer’s taste. Beer was made to relax with. Made to refresh you, cool you, cheer your taste. So next time you’re playing some sociable at-home game, take time out for the companionable taste of beer. UNITED STATES BREWERS ASSOCIATION, INC. 905 International Life Bldg., Austin 1, Texas The Editor’s Observations Texas Liberal Democrats Organize Houston I spoke on foreign policy before and participated in the statewide meeting of liberals last Saturday in Houston that resulted in the formation of the Texas Liberal Democrats, so this account of the meeting is from a person who was involved. More than 700 people signed registration cards, making this the largest meeting of Texas liberals since the late fifties. Politicians were not invited; in fact, some of them were forewarned that .foreign policy and civil rights would be boldly confronted, as they were, but only in speeches. Sen. Ralph Yarborough spoke the night before in the city but didn’t show at the Rice Hotel, where the liberals were meeting. 10 The Texas Observer Paul Haring, the representative from Goliad who has announced against Railroad Cmsr. Byron Tunnell, appeared and spoke briefly. The audience at different times included other politicians, including Don Yarborough. One origin of the meeting, a feeling that independence of organized labor was needed if independent criticism of President Johnson was to be possible, was manifest in the absence of labor officials from the head table, but Hank Brown and Roy Evans, the state’s top labor officials, both attended as liberals, neither speaking. There were more Negroes present proportionally than in recent times at a state liberal meeting; there were many young people who had never been seen at such meetings before. People had come from all over the state, and a delegation of a half-dozen Arkansans were present; they are founding “Democrats for Arkansas” independent of Gov. Orval Faubus. The night before the one-day meeting there were three open discussion groups on the organization’s constitution, foreign policy, and civil rights spirited, excited meetings. The only formal committee designated by temporary chairman Chris Dixie, however, was a constitutional committee of five Otto Mullinax, Dallas, chairman, and Mrs. Jean Lee, Austin; Mrs. Margaret Carter, Fort Worth; Mrs. Latane Lambert, Dallas ; and Mrs. Ruth Barton, Denton. After hearing suggestions until 1:30 in the morning, these five worked another two hours and perfected their draft constitution. The civil rights group heard Mrs. Charles White, Houston school board member, discuss continuing discrimination in Houston schools, and they shared indignation over the sentencing of ten Huntsville Negro teen-agers to reform school for civil rights activity that had caused them to be charged with unlawful assembly and other such civil violations. These children were still in reform school in Crockett and Gatesville as we went to press. In the foreign policy meeting \(which I opened, who *stayed late enough voted out a draft resolution on Vietnam by a vote of 18 to 11. Mainly the work of members of Students for a Democratic Society in attendance, this draft resolution called for a stop to U.S. “aggressive military action” in Vietnam and endorsed “the liberation movements of national assertion throughout the world.” Evidently the S.D.S. members had it mimeographed, for they were distributing copies of it, on blue paper, when the liberals convened the next morning. It became known as “the blue sheet.” The minority report of the night meeting, Xeroxed and also passed out, supported the Administration in continuing to try to get a basis for negotiation in Vietnam, said the U.S. must continue to contain totalitarian aggression, and proposed extension of the war on poverty to “the poor of all this world.” It also slapped at any blanket approval of “socalled ‘national liberation movements,’ ” some of which might be seeking totalitarianism. DIXIE STARTED by reading a position paper he had circulated beforehand. He said he hoped discussion would be uninhibited. He said there is no institution in Texas but the Observer through which issues may be analyzed and no statewide organization to carry programs toward law and fact, from the liberal point of view. The first need, he said, was to , create a forum. He passed along the suggestions, as areas for the liberals’ attention, of foreign