Newspaper Page Text
Page Two
Friday, January 24, 1964
THE 80UTHEKN ISRAELITE
Off The Record
By NATHAN ZIPRIN
Sir Negev . . .
All horses are created equal.
Much more so it would appear
than people.
At any rate, one may distin
guish for example between a
Frenchman, a German and an
American, but the French, Ger
man and American *horses look
entirely alike. Yet one of our
friends is always coming to us
with news of Jewish horses in
the races. A Jewish horse to him
is one which carries a name
with a Jewish identification. If
a horse is called “Ferd” or
“Shlemiel” he just can’t resist
risking a bet.
Of late, there have been quite
a number of race horses with
Israeli-sounding names. And
when a race horse has that con
notation, our friend goes wild
with indiscretion and bets even
though he knows in his own
heart that the nag will finish
last. This last week our friend—
who really isn’t much on bet
ting on horse races except when
he is fascinated by their nomen
clature—came to us with the
news of a special find. One of
the horses that had been en-
Ponce de Leon at Highland
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tered at a New York track be
fore the closing of the season
bore the name Sir Negev, he
told us in obvious but mistaken
belief that this writer was a
lily-white innocent in these mat
ters. He was quite excited about
the discovery and 1 let him talk
on. One felt that he looked upon
it as the beginning of a new era.
Not quite as revolutionary per
haps as the discovery of the
wheel, the canoe or even Co
lumbus’ coming upon America,
but still highly significant. The
Negev was the first part of the
Promised Land which belonged
to our ancestors, the land of
Father Abraham himself, but it
is the last to be developed. We
have heard how in the past
year, with the aid of Israel
bonds, pipes laid underground
were bringing fresh water from
the Jordan River to "stir the
dead bones of the Negev to new'
life. And what better proof can
we have of the revival of the
Negev than to have a horse
named after it?
And it is a noble steed indeed.
This horse is no ordinary mor
tal It is Sir Negev.
There is no record of the Jew’s
of old having gone in for horse
racing. To be sure, there w r as a
kind of a horse race when the
Egyptians in chariots pursued
the fleeing Israelites in the
Mosaic *exodus, but in that in
stance, according to the Bible,
•‘the horse with the rider” were
drowned in the sea.
The Jews on foot, it seems,
did better than the Egyptian
horses. Still, we are proud of
Sir Negev.
If you have been w'ondering,
dear reader, why this writer
has suddenly embarked upon the
theme of horse racing, it is
simply because his good wife
and I are gambling on a trip to
Florida in the hope that the
weather will be merciful and
the ferdlach rewarding. How
ever, 1 have a confession to
make—I would rather play pin-
nochle than speculate on chance.
Greatest of Them All . . .
The w’ay young Bobby Fischer
has swept the current chess
tournament for the U.S. cham
pionship, the wonder was not
that he won 11 straight games,
an unmatched record, but that
his opponents showed up at all.
His winning of the first ten
games against master chess
players, including among his
victims the one-time “boy won
der” Samuel Reshevsky, has
set a record that has the chess
world in turboil This young
Jewish “phenom” could well
emerge as the greatest chess
player the w’Orld has ever
known. Masters of the game ad
mire his skill, his tactics, his
power of concentration, his dar
ing. his brilliance, his imagina
tion and, above all, his almost
mystical capacity to probe and
detect his opponents moves.
Rehevsky, who had a few scuf
fles with the young master, was
said to have told friends that
Bobby Fischer may well revolu
tionize the game of chess as it
is being played today. Others
who encountered him feel that
he will go on to unbelievable
heights in the game if he con
tinues at the pace he has been
going virtually since childhood.
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by HARRY FLEISCHM AN
National Labor Service
Institute of Human Relations
a n
klllL’S YEAR
Nineteen sixty-three may long
be remembered as the year that
A. Philip Randolph’s March on
Washington finally took place.
The nation’s" outstanding Negro
labor leader first threatened a
Negro March on Washington back
in 1941 to win a Federal Fair
Employment Practices Commis
sion. President Roosevelt tried
to charm Randolph into calling
off the march, but, finally con
vinced that Randolph was im
mune to pressure from friend or
foe, the President issued his now-
tamous executive order establish
ing a wartime FEPC, which
brought millions of Negroes into
America's defense industries.
The 1941 march was cancelled.
But 22 years later, like a phoenix
arisen Irom the ashes, the de
monstration finally came off. On
August 28, 1963, my children, wife
and I joined over 210,000 black
and white demonstrators in the
gentlest, most determined army
ever to occupy the capitol.
Churches, unions and Negro civil
'ights groups pressed forcefully
for jobs and freedom.
But that wasn’t the whole
■ lory. The year also included a
rousing reception for Randolph at
the AFL-CIO convention. A scant
four years earlier at a similar
convention. AFL-CIO George
Meany had roared at Vice Presi
dent Randolph: "Who the hell ap
pointed you the guardian of all
Negroes in America?” But in 1963,
Meany chose Randolph to open
the discussion on the civil rights
: esolution.
Randolph had prophetic words
for his fellow labor leaders: “As
the Negro has taken to the
-treets, so will the unemployed
of alj races take to the streets.
To discuss the civil rights rev
olution is therefore to write the
agenda of labor’s unfinished rev
olution . . . History shows that
as unemployment rises, the gap
between Negro and white unem
ployment rates widens. As this
gap widens, the Negro’s demand
for preferential treatment to close
the gap becomes moie vociferous.
But, my friends, there is no need
to demand preferential treatment
in a full-employment economy.
To achieve a full-employment
economy in fact, labor must be in
favor of preferential treatment—
not just for the Negro, but for
all the unemployed, the poor, the
aged, and the deprived youth of
this nation. These groups would
benefit from a domestic Marshall
Plan organized on the basis of
need . . Let us so implement
this resolution that white unem
ployed miners in West Virginia
and Tennessee will march arm-in
arm with their black brothers to
transform their bleak hills into
flourishing countrysides.”
A standing ovation, led by
George Meany, greeted Rand
olph’s remarks. But this, like all
the kudos that came earlier, was
not merely a personal triumph for
Randolph. Rather, they symboliz
ed that blazing idea whose time
had come—equality.
BELOW THE
.MASON-DIXON LINE
To me, one of the most inspiring
events of the AFL-CIO conven
tion was a speech by Hank Brown,
president of the Texas AFL-CIO
and former business agent of a
plumbers’ local. Backing Phil
Randolph’s call for labor-Negro
unity, Brown pointed to the
plight of the garment workers,
who formerly had 4,000 members
in 11 San Antonio plants but
where today, “under right-to-
w ork laws and the prejudice of
one person" against another, not
a single member is left, not a
single union contract.” He men
tioned El Paso, where maids in
the biggest hotel in a national
chain are working 60 hours for
$11 a week.
Tall, lanky Hank, the only
white speaker from south of the
Mason-Dixon line, stressed that
"there ace a half-million Negroes
and nearly a million unorganized
Latin Americans in our state
working for less than fifty cents
an hour. When we put our TV
show on every Texas station, we
didn't talk about color We show
ed the actual family of Juan
Hernandos with his nine kids
trying to live on 31 cents an
lour.”
Electrifying the convention,
Brown concluded with: "We will
take our stand with the Negro and
the Latin American or ten yeais
hence we will not stand at all in
our state.”
oops:
With apologies to the Building
Trades, we pass on this story from
RACINE LABOR. Two men were
hard at work on a construction
project when a passer-by ques
tioned them about what they
were making. “I’m making $25 a
day,” proudly answered the first
worker. The second answered,
the first worker. The second ans-
ered, “I am building a cathedral.”
Two hours later, the second
worker was fired. He was sup
posed to be building a delicates
sen.
* * *
ANTI-SLAVERY
AND A NEW NATION
Almost a century before Lin
coln’s 1863 Emancipation Procla
mation, the British beat him to
the punc^. When the American
colonies fought for freedom
against Britain in 1776, the Brit
ish made that very freedom a
political weapon against the col
onists. They offered to free
any Negro slaves who • would
desert their revolutionary mas-
sters and fight for King George.
Thousands did so, and even
though ^ritajn lost the war, it
kept its pledge and brought some
four to five thousand Negro form
er slaves to Nova Scotia.
The Negro f reedrnen, mostly
from the South, found the wintry
Canadian climate too chilling to
their bones and emigrated as a
group to London. Kalfa Caulker,
Sierra leone’s Ambassador to the
United Nations, told me the other
day that after a short time there,
the freed slaves found the social
climate as cold as Nova Scotia’s
icy winds and moved again -
this time t> West Africa where
they founded Britain’s Sierra
Leone colony in 1788. Since that
dinner British colony achieved
independence in 1961, are we jus
tified in saying that our Amer
ican Revolution is the ancestor—
in a lqft-handed way -of a free
Sierra Leone?
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