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NORTH CAROLINA
SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS—MAY I960—PAGE II
Negro Students Agree on Southwide Group
CHARLOTTE, N. C.
N egro student leaders from 11
southern states and the Dis
trict of Columbia agreed at a
mid-April meeting in Raleigh to
form a southwide committee to
coordinate their segregation pro
tests. (See “Community Action.”)
Wake Forest College students
voted against the admission of
Negroes to the all-white school.
(See “In the Colleges.”)
A Negro dentist filed suit
against the North Carolina Den
tal Society in what the National
Assn, for the Advancement of
Colored People suggested is a
new area: professional discrimi
nation. (See “Legal Action.”)
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling
that a sidewalk, even on private
property, is open to the public has
figured in the dismissal of tres
passing charges against 43 Negro
students arrested in Raleigh lunch
counter protests. (See “Legal
Action.”)
Negro student leaders from 11
southern states and the District of
Columbia have formed a southwide
committee to coordinate protests against
racial segregation at public lunch
counters and elsewhere.
The decision was made at a meeting
in Raleigh April 15, 16 and 17 attended
by nearly 150 representatives of most
of the major Negro educational insti
tutions and some of the white educa
tional institutions in the South.
The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference called the meeting. Prin
cipal speaker was Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. of Atlanta.
The students agreed to resolutions
and findings that called for the forma
tion of a temporary, non-violent stu
dent coordinating committee, with
headquarters in Atlanta.
King urged the Negro students to
continue their sit-down demonstra
tions. He called the demonstrations “an
assault on the whole system of segrega
tion.”
STRATEGY SESSION
The strategy session he addressed
was held in Raleigh’s Memorial Audi
torium, a municipal building. Other
sessions were held at Shaw University,
a Negro college.
The steering committee recommended
creation of a special committee that
will meet in Atlanta in May. It will be
composed of one representative from
each of 14 southern states plus repre
sentatives of the National Student
Assn., the National Student Christian
Federation and representatives of any
regional student organizations that
participate in the student demonstra
tions.
Miss Ella J. Baker, executive secre
tary of the SCLC, took special pains to
state that: “There is no fight between
the National Assn, for the Advancement
of Colored People and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.”
different emphasis
She added: “There is naturally a dif
ference in emphasis.”
Her remarks apparently resulted
from publication of remarks critical
of the NAACP by the Rev. J. M. Law-
son Jr. of Nashville, Term., who de
livered the keynote address on opening
night.
The Rev. Mr. Lawson criticized the
NAACP as being too conservative and
described its magazine, Crisis, as, “the
magazine of the black bourgeoisie.”
Dr. King and the Rev. Mr. Lawson
were named as advisers to the students’
coordinating committee.
PROTESTS CONTINUE
Lunch counter protests continued
sporadically over the state from Eliza
beth City to High Point to Concord to
Charlotte during the month.
In Raleigh, a white student, Andres
Maguire of Glen Rock, N. J., who join
ed protestors from Shaw University,
was struck on Fayetteville Street.
Police charged Billy Pleasants, 29, of
Raleigh, with assault.
The violence took place on the first
day (April 16) of the effective date of a
new ordinance enacted by the Raleigh
City Council to control pickets. The
ordinance limits pickets to 10 to a block
and says they must walk single file, at
least 15 feet apart. No student has been
charged with violating the ordinance
since it was enacted.
RELATED ACTIVITY
In other lunch counter-related ac
tivity:
Dr. C. H. Patrick, sociology professor
at Wake Forest College in Winston-
Salem, submitted the results of a
special survey to the mayor’s Goodwill
Committee, which is negotiating for a
settlement to lunch counter problems
in Winston-Salem. Most lunch counters
were remaining closed while the com
mittee sought a solution.
Patrick’s report showed that of 790
persons interviewed in five Winston-
Salem stores in March, 47 per cent said
they would accept a plan to open lunch
counters to all without regard to race,
48 per cent said they would not, and
five per cent were undecided.
Of the 790, 89 per cent said they
would still trade at the stores if the
counters were desegregated. Nine per
cent said they would not, and two per
cent were undecided.
Patrick also conducted 52 depth in
terviews in which subjects were given
more time to consider detailed answers.
Of these, 73 per cent said they would
accept a plan to serve everyone without
regard to race, and 94 per cent said
they would still trade at stores with
desegregated lunch counters.
CHARLOTTE SURVEY
In Charlotte, Belmont Abbey College
students surveyed 1,300 white Char
lotte store customers. The survey show
ed that 58 per cent of the white cus
tomers would not patronize an inte
grated lunch counter, but that 65.5 per
cent would patronize the store’s other
departments, even if it had desegre
gated lunch counters.
The survey showed that 28 per cent
of the white customers would sit at in
tegrated lunch counters. Twenty-two
per cent said they would not patronize
any department of a store with deseg
regated lunch counters.
ADVISORY COMMITTEE
In Greensboro, the Mayor’s Advisory
Committee on Community Relations
said it had been unable to persuade
managers of F. W. Woolworth & Co.
and S. H. Kress & Co. to serve cus
tomers without regard to race. The
committee chairman, E. R. Zane, re
ported to the City Council that of 2,063
communications the committee had re
ceived, 1,501 had favored equality of
service on some basis, regardless of
race.
The committee had privately recom
mended that stores operate a section
“for service to all races on an inte
grated basis” and reserve the remain
der of the counter for service exclu
sively to white customers.
That recommendation, the committee
said, was regarded by Negro students
at North Carolina A&T College, where
the first protests started on Feb. 1, as
“a workable compromise.”
But, said Zane, managers of the two
stores declined to accept the proposal
because they are “extremely sensitive
to public reaction and merchants en
gaged in general merchandising busi
ness who also have food departments
are fearful that if they serve all races
on an integrated basis in their food de
partments, they will lose a sufficient
percentage of their present patronage to
the non-integrated eating establish
ments in our city to cause presently
profitable food departments to operate
at a loss.”
In Concord, six students were ar
rested for trespassing as students from
Barber-Scotia College continued dem
onstrations.
IN THE COLLEGES
Wake Forest College students have
voted 742 to 604 against admission of
Negroes to the all-white Baptist insti
tution at Winston-Salem.
Voting among 1,346 students showed:
742 against any integration, 282 in fa
vor of immediate integration and 322
in favor of integration in the near fu
ture.
The student legislature on the cam
pus has previously gone on record in
favor of desegregation. Sixty members
of the Wake Forest faculty just last
month asked Winston-Salem stores to
open lunch counters to Negroes.
LEGAL ACTION
Dr. R. A. Hawkins, Charlotte dentist
and an active member of the NAACP,
filed suit in Western Federal District
Court in Charlotte against the North
Carolina Dental Society and the Second
District Dental Society.
Hawkins seeks a permanent injunc
tion which would restrain the societies
from refusing him full membership.
Hawkins said he had been trying for
membership in the state and district
societies since 1955. The suit noted that
the district society does not exclude
Negroes from membership specifically
on the basis of race, but requires an
applicant to have the endorsement of
two members. Hawkins said that at one
time he had several white dentists
who were willing to sponsor his mem
bership, “but when the word got
around, the pressure was applied, and
they told me they couldn’t afford to
recommend me.”
FREES 43
In Raleigh, a U.S. Supreme Court
ruling figured in the freeing of 43 Ne
gro students convicted earlier in Ra
leigh Municipal Court of trespassing.
The charges were dismissed after a
trial in Wake County Superior Court.
In the same court, two other students
had lower court convictions upheld in
jury trials.
Judge Jack W. Hooks told the 43 stu
dents: “If you had gotten in the store
and carried on the same type of con
duct as on the sidewalks, you would
be just as guilty as these two.”
The 43 were arrested in February on
a sidewalk in the privately owned
Cameron Village Shopping Center. Two
of them testified they attempted to stage
a lunch counter protest in a Woolworth
Store, but were foiled when the man
ager closed the store.
Attorneys for the students cited a
1946 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which
had reversed a trespass conviction
against Grace Marsh for distributing
Jehovah’s Witnesses religious literature
on the streets of a company-owned
town, Chickasaw, Ala. # # #
State’s Limited Desegregation Policy
Becomes Issue In Election Campaign
Rv T. IVT WDirilT in ^
By L. M. WRIGHT, JR.
CHARLOTTE, N. C.
N orth Carolina’s policy of lim
ited school desegregation has
become an issue in the state’s
May 28 Democratic primary.
The four candidates for the
Democratic nomination for gov
ernor are:
John D. Larkins of Trenton, a law
yer and veteran legislator.
Terry Sanford of Fayetteville, a law
yer and a former president of the
Young Democrat Clubs, a man who
has been quietly campaigning for more
than two years.
Malcolm B. Seawell, former district
solicitor who was active in cases
against the Ku Klux Klan in the early
1950s in his home county of Robeson
(Lumberton), former superior court
judge, and former attorney general
who has defended the state’s school
laws in court.
Dr. I. Beverly Lake, a lawyer and
former professor of law at Wake For
rest College and former assistant at
torney general. He left the attorney
general’s office before Seawell came,
but was there during the 1954-55
period and did help write many of the
pupil placement and other school laws.
VIGOROUS CAMPAIGN
These four candidates—from among
whom North Carolinians will, if they
follow tradition, pick their next gov
ernor—have been staging vigorous,
active campaigns up and down the
state for more than a month. And they
have another month of it before the
first primary on May 28.
Seawell has been the most out
spoken supporter of existing laws and
the existing desegregation, though he
still is critical of the 1954 Supreme
Court decision.
Sanford and Larkins, though saying
little on the issue until recently, have
taken much the same position as Sea
well. They think the laws are all right
as they are and believe North Carolina
is setting an example for other south
ern states to follow.
Lake, on the other hand, is dissatis
fied with things as they are.
Though he has endorsed the state’s
pupil placement laws (“They ought to
be all right, I wrote them.”) he does
not endorse any degree of racial de
segregation in public schools.
In a recent campaign speech, Lake
said North Carolina should seek to
“persuade” Negro children to leave
voluntarily desegregated public schools
and return to all-Negro schools.
The state, he said, should adopt seg
regation as an official policy in the
operation of its schools and seek to
terminate any desegregation “forced”
upon it.
SHOULD USE ALL MEANS
If a school is integrated “by force,
beyond the power of the state prac
tically and peacefully to overcome,”
said Lake, the state should recognize
such action as contrary to its policy
and use every lawful means to limit
and terminate that condition.
“I am not suggesting at this time
any change in the pupil assignment
law. I think that any intermixture of
white and Negro children in our
schools is undesirable and all lawful,
practicable and peaceful means to ter
minate that condition should be used.
TERRY SANFORD
DR. I. BEVERLY LAKE
MALCOLM B. SEAWELL
JOHN D. LARKINS
That would include the use of per
suasion to induce the Negro children
now attending white schools to re
turn to the schools which the state
operates for the Negro children in
their communities.”
Lake continued: “If the North Caro
lina of tomorrow is to be a land of
promise instead of a land of paralysis,
there must be today a clear statement
of its policy” with regard to segrega
tion.
Lake said the people of the state
have a right to the privilege of educa
tion. The full power of the state should
be used, he said, “to guard and main
tain that right by educating her white
and Negro children in equal, separate
public schools.”
CITES WASHINGTON
Lake said the right of the people
cannot be guarded and maintained
effectively in schools “in which large
numbers of white and Negro children
are intermingled.” This, he said, has
been “conclusively demonstrated in the
public schools in Washington.”
“To conserve and develop our
schools and our industrial growth, we
must move against the NAACP and
its allies,” Dr. Lake said. The only
difference between the NAACP’s goals
and the “quicksands of moderation,”
Dr. Lake said, is that the NAACP
would get to its goal faster. He added:
“The NAACP has made it clear that it
will not be content with token inte
gration.”
Lake has also said he would not
suggest that the state use force or vio
lence to resist the decision and would
not suggest that schools be closed to
prevent token integration.
FAVORS PRESENT POLICY
Larkins would have the state con
tinue its present policy of pupil as
signment as practiced now by local
school boards. (This leaves racial as
signment decisions to local boards of
education.) Larkins added:
“Let us not allow ourselves to be
provoked to anger or to indiscretion.”
Larkins said he knows the pupil
placement law “is despised by the
NAACP, for it likes to either run the
show or suffer persecution. It hopes to
provoke us to anger.”
Sanford endorsed the Larkins view,
then endorsed what Lake had said
about the Supreme Court decision it
self.
“Few of us think of it as sound law
. . .,” said Sanford. “It was a most im
proper decision, but we are faced with
it.”
Sanford said he had hoped the school
desegregation question would not be
built up for fear “we would lose sight
of what we could do to make this a
better state.”
FACING NEW DAY’
Sanford said the more the racial
problem is stirred up, the more trou
ble there will be and the “more mem
berships will be sold by the NAACP.
The best thing is to handle the prob
lem with our brains and not our
mouths . . . North Carolina is facing a
new day of opportunity ... if we do
not inadvertently let our ambitions be
consumed in the fires of racial bitter
ness.”
Seawell said: “The new day is to
day, when the two other candidates
for governor finally agree to support
the stand which for so long I have
fought.”
Seawell said that as attorney gen
eral, “I had a little to do in the fed
eral courts with keeping our schools
open—and that at a time when the
others did not stand up and be count
ed and did not speak out.” # # #
