ustxtxb_obs_1970_10_02_50_00014-00000_000.pdf

CLASSIFIED BOOKPLATES. Free catalog. Many beautiful designs. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, P.O. Box 28-I, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387. ANNE’S TYPING SERVICE \(Marjorie Anne Binding, Mailing, Public Notary. Twenty years experience. Call 442-7008 or 442-0170, Austin. WE SELL THE BEST SOUND. Yamaha pianos, guitars; M oec k Kung his recorders; harmonicas, kalimbas and other exotic instruments. Amster Music, 1624 Lavaca, Austin. 478-7331. DOVE OF PEACE ITEMS: Dove flags, decals, pins. Also peace buttons, jewelry, mugs, etc. Write for price list. Women For Peace, 343 S. Dearborn, Room 1416, Chicago, Ill. 60604. MEETINGS THE THURSDAY CLUB of Dallas meets each Thursday noon . Downtown YMCA, 605 No. Ervay St., Dallas. Good discussion. You’re welcome. Informal, no dues. CENTRAL TEXAS ACLU luncheon meeting. Spanish Village. 2nd Friday every month. From noon. All welcome. A ustin If, as Dee Wilson points out in the preceding article, Vista volunteers are having the devil’s own time trying to organize the poor, at least they’re having considerable success in their efforts to organize themselves. And the object of their self-organization is to finally achieve effectiveness in organizing the poor. The weekend of Sept. 12-13 brought 90 Vistas from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas to Austin to set up a regional structure of the National Vista Alliance, the new-born Vista union. The NVA held its first national conference in Washington, D.C., in late July. The fledgling union, which is in the process of affiliating with the American Federation of Government Employees 14 The Texas Observer “Non-violence has not been tried and found wanting, but has been found hard and not tried.” Nov. 6-8 TEXAS WORKSHOP IN NON-VIOLENCE Vista union formed higher wages or fringe benefits. The Vista volunteers in the NVA want to use collective bargaining methods to press for more effective training, better program ideas, more backup for Vistas who have started controversial programs, and improved administration of current programs. Jon Michaelson, a Louisiana volunteer leader and one of the organizers of the regional NVA meeting, said that 40% of the Vista administrative posts are currently vacant. The result, he said, is lack of supervision for many volunteers and an en ormous over-burdening of the administrators on the job. The Vistas who showed up at the Austin meeting carried with them approximately 100 proxies, thus representing about one-third of the Vistas in the region. Nationally, the NVA now represents about 1,600 of the 4,200 volunteers in the country. The regional meeting was concerned with two special areas. The first is the case of Frank Stewart, a Vista in Baton Rouge, La. Stewart’s case, in a word, stinks. Stewart, who is 24, black, and a former Peace Corps volunteer, was arrested last March on the charge of conspiring to murder the mayor of Baton Rouge. The mayor is alive and well and no one has tried to kill him. Stewart was held in jail for five months on $100,000 bail. He was indicted solely on the testimony of a police informer. The informer was himself indicted on a murder charge in 1965 and again a few months after Stewart was imprisoned. Stewart was arrested with another Vista volunteer, Wade Hudson, against whom charges were dropped on April I. All motions to reduce Stewart’s “IT’S BETTER to lose & ‘s in than win & be defeated” sd Gertie Stein, which wd you choose? Join the Last Texas Civil Liberties Union 3204 Jan Avenue, lyler, Texas 75701 & support LAW w/ or w/out ORDER. Students $3, fixed-income S6, people S 10, his-&-hers S 15, all others more. Mk checks payable to, but do it now. bail were denied, despite a legion of character witnesses. Michaelson said that at the time of Stewart’s arrest the Baton Rouge district attorney, who paid the police informer and who was responsible for the charges against Stewart, was himself under fire for alleged misconduct in office. The Office of Economic Opportunity did not put up any money for Stewart’s defense despite the 1968 Civil Rights Act which empowers the government to defend the civil rights of any government agent. OED’s only response to the case was to send down a memo inquiring why this guy “Hudson” \(whom they had confused with The NVA conference in Washington raised a mighty row about the Stewart case and Stewart was released on his own recognizance a week later. Michaelson expects the charges against him to be dropped. The second case of regional concern at the Austin conference is the continuation. of the Minority Mobilization Project Kramer, Inc. Kramer is one of several firms which contracts with OEO to train Vista volunteers. But unlike General Electric, et al, Kramer, operating the training programs for MMP in south Texas \(all volunteers are has been hiring older chicano community members to train the young volunteers. The MMP operates in El Paso, Nueces, Hidalgo, Bexar and Webb counties. Its contract with OEO is about to be severed because of a cost overrun which is reportedly quite small. Yet General Electric, which held the training contract for this region through June, bid $450,000 and spent $800,000. OEO has not threatened to sever G.E.’s contract. The MMP volunteers trained by Kramer have encountered repeated difficulties in trying to organize chicano communities in south Texas, especially in Del Rio, Uvalde, and Brownsville. The pattern has been consistent. As local Mexican-Americans are urged to take up grievances, the local power structure has accused MMP volunteers of being outside agitators, of spreading hate and communism, and of being trouble-makers. The volunteers have received no help from OEO. In the Brownsville case, OEO director James Griffith did not check on the charges against Vista volunteers there. He terminated their project one hour after W I N telling them they were doing a good job, according to Paul Vargas, MMP volunteer from Corpus Christi. The regional NVA meeting voted to support the continutation of Kramer’s training contract citing the firm “not only for their notable success in training, but in continued logistical support of the OVVYVVVYVVVVIVW volunteers.” for more information: AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMM. Box 1398 223-3371 San Antonio, Texas 78206