St. Paul Recorder

Carl Rowan Tells Meeting:

U.S. Money Spent In Meredith Case Was Big Diplomatic Bargain

By Eddie L. Madison, Jr.

Chicago (ANP) — Americans who are wondering about the nation's future after three weeks of being at the brink in the Cuban crisis were asked last week to examine their own lives to see what they are doing to correct moral injustices.

Carl T. Rowan, deputy assistant secretary of state for public affairs, said the United States must develop a multiracial society in the interest of its own survival. Unless such a society is built, one in which people are

judged on merits, a war of races, greater than any conflict ever known, will result, he said.

Rowan, who also serves as an alternate delegate to the United Nations, said: "We in the United States have the greatest opportunity of any people in the world to make a multiracial society work," adding that the U.S. must show the world "we know what reform is all about and that we are not afraid to change."

Referring to the Mississippi integration crisis, Rowan said a nation must have diplomatic security along with military security and the estimated $3 million spent by the federal government to keep James H. Meredith in the University of Mississippi is the biggest diplomatic "bargain" this country has ever had.

Rowan, speaking at Chicago's McCormick Place before members of Friendship House, a Roman Catholic layman's race relations organization, said the federal government's forceful action in Mississippi prevented what could have been a diplomatic tragedy.

A former staff writer for the Minneapolis Tribune, a noted author and one of the highest-ranking Negroes in the federal government, Rowan said that while Sen. John Stennis (D., Miss.) complained of the $3 million spent in Mississippi to give the United States diplomatic security, there is no complaint made of billions spent by the nation for the space program to give us military security.

"If a rocket goes up at Cape Canaveral and fizzles, many billions more are spent than the cost of maintaining a James Meredith," Rowan said. "We have to realize that there is more to security than just rockets."

Rowan said that African delegates to the United Nations are watching the Mississippi situation closely. As an example, he said John Karefa-Smart, minister of external affairs and defense from Sierra Leone, while attacking South Africa for apartheid (segregation), praised the United States for its stand in Mississippi.

Rowan described jim crowism in the U.S. as a national tragedy, adding: "The pitiful thing about it is that there is a large number of Americans who don't know what's going on in the world today, and there are a great many who can rationalize away this matter."

Interest of Self Survival

He said that any American who works to alleviate "the cancer of racism" is no more do-gooder but one acting in the interest of self-survival. He said he feared that long after the conflict between communism and capitalism has ended, the world might be thrown into "the darkest abyss mankind has ever known," by a war between races.

"If the United States is going to measure up to the challenge, we must realize that the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling interpreting the Constitution insures justice for the American citizen.

"This is a matter of fundamental human justice," the State Department official said.

He said unless the country acts against racial injustice, "we are a nation in peril, fighting an enemy from without and one from within."

"We are going to have to relinquish some of our most cherished ideas about man and human nature if we are going to explore the inner reaches of the human mind," Rowan said. "We are going to need courage to do this."

Rowan was introduced by Edwin C. (Bill) Berry, executive director, Chicago Urban League. The Friendship House lecture was in honor of St. Martin de Porres black saint of Lima, Peru, who was canonized May 6, of this year.