Arizona Sun

Negro Organizations Representatives May Not Get Hearing On Universal Training

WASHINGTON, D.C. (NNPA)

Whether representatives of any colored organizations will be heard by the Senate and House Armed Services Committee appeared doubtful as the Senate committee opened hearings last Tuesday on a bill to require universal military training.

At the opening of the hearings, Senator Millard E. Tydings, Democrat, of Maryland, committee chairman, who, with Senator G. W. Malone, Republican, of Nevada is sponsoring the bill, said the present hearings are a continuation of the hearings held in 1948. Persons who testified in 1948 need not testify during the current hearings, Senator Tydings said. The 1,100 pages of testimony taken during the 80th Congress, he added "is before us now."

Senator Tydings urged speedy action on the bill. He wants the measure reported promptly and passed during the present session of Congress, which will probably recess or adjourn around September 2.

Colored persons who appeared before the committee in 1948 urged that a safeguard be written into the proposal to prohibit racial segregation of any young men required to undergo military training.

There, however, was a wide difference between the testimony of A. Philip Randolph and Grant Reynolds, co-chairmen of the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training, and Truman K. Gibson, Jr., a member of President Truman's Advisory Commission on Universal Training.

Mr. Randolph took the position that passage of a universal military training law without a prohibition against race segregation and discrimination will result in a civil disobedience program. Mr. Reynolds concurred in Mr. Randolph's advocacy of civil disobedience to any compulsory military training program unless segregation and discrimination were outlawed.

Whether Mr. Randolph and Mr. Reynolds have changed their views in the light of the fighting in Korea or the advances made by the armed services toward wiping out racial segregation and discrimination could not be learned.