The Farmville Herald

THE FARMVILLE (Va.) HERALD, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1957

John Temple Graves

Peace Be With Those Who Seek Peace

Going back, going back, doing back to Nassau Hall ...

As young men and women return to Northern schools this fortnight after a summer in the animated, question-marked South, may they remember where they come from. The snobbery which looks down on its own is costly indeed when its own happens to be the place of the present and the wave of the future.

In school and college they will learn much from books, professors and fellow students. But the very context of learning to come is being put together back home in the South, and some of it will date these books, professors and fellow students. The South has last words of its own to contribute to America's increasing purpose and way. To scorn them because they are our own is a backwardness no ivy can conceal.

A beauty specialty of South Carolina's Marion McKnight, the retiring Miss America, was charming in sight as she made her nice little retiring speech Saturday night. It is the flat, insinuating upper lip with the faint curl at the corner. Few are blessed with a bonus of beauty like that.

Much was made in the civil rights debate over a point that federal judges in the South would generally be Southerners. Perhaps the President would like to ask Mr. Brownell how, after an 18 months vacancy, a federal judge from uncomprehending North Dakota was 'put in at Little Rock just as the crisis came. The President simply can't live on Brownell alone in a situation like this.

As Alabama's carefully implemented placement law goes into action in Birmingham - it is important to note that it isn't like ones condemned by federal courts as being part of anti-segregation "package" for Alabama has "abolished legal school segregation." Or like Tennessee's so-called preference law which was so obviously doomed. Granting preferences calls for maintenance of schools from which people would be excluded by reason of race. That's just what the court says you can't do.

The men who beat the Rev. Shuttlesworth in Birmingham are under arrest and will be punished. Nothing is more important now than looking to our own state and local laws against federal usurpations, rather than to mob law of any type.

But the agitator himself should have been punished. He was a vicious disturber of the peace. His legal move had been made, the process of adjudging it was going on, he had our courts and eventually the Supreme Court at his disposal against our placement law. To come to Phillips High School in these circumstances, with Negro children he knew would not be admitted, was the act not of a true leader but of a trouble-seeking hate-monger.

The Rev. Shuttlesworth should have been shuttled to jail when he got out of the hospital. He should be shuttled out of whatever leadership has been entrusted to him by his people, too. Colored people can't afford a leader like this.

How can they say the case against those who mutilated a Negro here just for being a Negro is "closed" when only the six who took part have been arrested? The whole membership of the group which sent the six on their cowardly and treasonable errand must be arrested. They were accessories before the ghastly fact.