The Tennessean from Nashville, Tennessee • Page 19

SUNDAY August 10, 1980 SECTION EDITORIALS OPINIONS POLITICS Carter Corrung To Claim I si i 'i 4 I "'4' State Delegates Ignore the Polls By SAUNDRA IVEY Tennessean Staff Writer NEW YORK Tennessee delegates to the Democratic National Convention begin arriving here today, most unf azed by nationalpollsters who predict that Jimmy Carter will go down ignominious defeat to Ronald Reagan. While an ABC News-Louis Harris survey showed the president's national approval rating at only 22, an overwhelming majority of state delegates responding to a Tennessean poll gave Carter's performance in of ice nigh marks and said he can win in November. THE election was today, we couldn't win," said Don Farmer, a Carter delegate from Milan. "But when we start fighting Republicans instead of Democrats, we'll be great." "When Reagan has to face up to the issues, Carter will win, said Elizabeth Whorley, a Carter delegate from Murfrees-boro. HER COMMENT reflects the assumption made by virtually all of the two-thirds of Tennessee delegates involved in the Tennessean's poll last week that the president will be renominated despite efforts to "open" the convention for selection of Sen.

Edward M. Kennedy or a compromise candidate. 1L The poll's results indicate that Tennesseans watching the convention on television can expect to see delegates from their ststc vote In favor of Carter's position on a proposed rule that would bind delegates to vote on the first ballot for the candidates they were elected to support. In favor of Carter's position on platform debates expected to center on economic, energy and foreign policy issues. For Carter's nomination as the Democratic Party ticket leader against Reagan.

(Turn to Page 3-B) By JOHN SEIGENTHALER Tennessean Publisher -NEW YORK If it were a sports event the marquee at Madison Square Garden would read: Jimmy (Peanuts) Carter vs. Teddy (Kid) Kennedy for the championship of the Democratic Party Because the sports arena in Manhattan has been the scene of so many title fights, there is a tendency for frustrated sports writers covering politics to write about Carter leaving his training camp in the White House Rose Garden and coming this -to the Garden that once stood at Madison Square to defend-the presidential title he won four years ago. "I'LL WHIP his you know what," Carter said many months back of Kennedy, the challenger. He didn't say it just that way, but frustrated sports writers are careful about explicit anatomi- C3l descriptions. For nearly a year the president has had Kennedy shadow-box.

ing all over the country. And now, having fought himself out, the Massachusetts seantor comes to the final round where he will, indeed, get it whipped. Anybody who can count to 1,666 the number of delegates needed to win knows that Carter will leave this place still champion of his party. After all, he has 1,982 pledged delegates to Kennedy 1,235. Even oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek, who has misguessedmore times on major contests than some newspaper publishers who are his friends, can't be wrong on this AS HOWARD Cosell would say, "the outcome is foreordained and the result is predestined." Hopefully, Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor will be more expansively redundant as they describe the week-long Democratic brawl.

But they won't be. more over-accurate than Cosell. The thing is over before it starts. The reason is reasonably simple: Those 1,982 Carter delegates aretiot just for him they are against Kennedy. They lined up behind the president in bitter primary and caucus struggles in all of the states.

They come to New York not merely to contribute to iiM.imiwitiMifitMiliMitrti-.tMiiirt.riMiliiMtwti ii-linii lA ir tfel President Jimmy Carter His re-nomination appears assured (Turn to Page 3-B) Leadersh New Pretender to KKK ip By BOB DUNNAVANT Tennessean Staff Writer ATHENS, Ala. Don Black, the latest pretender to national leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, grew up here, in a community that still remembers him as a walking contradiction. Stephen Don Black, now 27, was Party, dunng "that intelligent boy" who spouted U. I r.Uy.f.J 'Ul High school thr riTV srhnol hoard Dassed Hi i i i "Hitler and the Jews was a big thing. Hitler was his man and he was going to take over the world by not making Hitler's same mistakes." Black's principal a combat infantryman in Europe during World War II, still wonders "how such a fine, smart boy could be such a little Hitler." IT WAS Hitler, Black said, who opened his eves.

He said he read Mein Kampt when he was 15. "I had read so much on the other side. Then I read Hitler and saw how blatantly I'd been lied to. I tried to talk to my teachers but they wouldn't discuss it much with me," said Black. "History books say Hitler invented the big lie.

But the Jews invented the big lie and took Hitler's words out of context." Black left Athens in 1970 over the objections of his parents to join white racist J. B. Stoner's campaign for governor in Georgia. When one of Stoner's bodyguards shot Black through the chest, the Eeople of Athens thought they had eard the last of the strange boy they could never understand. But they were wrong.

The "weird kid" was down, but he wasn't out. And today as the new Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Black may be one of the most famous people ever to call Last week he and this reporter sat down for coffee a few blocks from the high school we both attended. Black smiled as he remembered growing up, and talked about his long road into the Ku Klux Klan. "These folks never understood me," Black said. "I'm not filled with hate; I just believe in my race.

"I was confused early on race. I was about to become a liberal at one point, thinking that if we loved everybody, we'd be all right. Then I saw mixing the races brought decline. I had been led to believe that races are equal, but the white race is superior by the standards of Western civilization." HIS RACIAL attitudes, formed by extensive reading and correspondence with white supremacists across the nation, blocked Don Black's chosen path into the military and pushed him in the direction of the Klan. "I wanted to be a career officer, and I probably would be in the Army right now if they hadn't rejected me for being a racist," he recalled.

Black had completed three years of ROTC training at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa when the Army decided to investigate his background and barred his admission into a program that would (Turn to Page 2-B) A ui aim ui racism nidi aiiuL.is.eu uia parents, and even the town where cafes still maintained separate entrances for theraces. HE REGULARLY attended services with the town's largest Church of Christ congregation. "He was a precious little boy." is how the minister remembers him. But a high school classmate who went to the same church recalled that Black "sometime in the seventh grade got up in Sunday school and started spouting this really serious stuff about blacks and Jews and it surprised everybody." "Don told people he was going to take over the world and said he was going to remember those people who were mean to him," said Marc Sandlin, now the district attorney for Limestone County, where Athens is located. In high school he was attacked by some of his classmates when he tried tn nass out swastika rules to check his activities, and the FBI investigated Black when he was a junior in high school.

The investigation followed reports of threats against Jewish students. Black said he never threatened any of the Jewish students. On the contrary, he said, he was "trying to be friends" with them "when their parents got this crazy idea that I threatened to strangle them with piano wire." Black's closest friend in high school, according to Sandlin, was Morris Black, Don's first cousin. Morris Black remembers Don Black "was his own group. He was always quiet and he always told the truth as he saw it I don't think he would lie.

He's so above it that he would tell you the facts in a way that you would believe it was the truth, said Morris Black. "RACE? IT was like he had to have a cause and he settled on that. Everybody has to have something Don Black The white race is superior' emblazortea pamphlets from the and his someining is a Dig cause. Athens home. National Socialist White People's He was searching for something.

Nuclear Commitment Becomes More Co stly TVA Nuclear Plant OfiBinal Cost New Cost Ori0inal Nw Dte Interest Cost For Completion For Completion Brown Ferry, Alo 1970, 1971 1974,1975 WcUsd 19d6 $39? million $909miflioft' 1977 Sequoyah, Chattanooga Awarded 1968 $333 million $1.46 billion 1974 1980-81 $305 million "wwpnppB Tf mT'T'TTT. 'r' 1.4feiffion 75 miHW: Bellefonte, Scoltsboro, Ala. $650 $2.05 billion 1978 1983-84 $272 million Awarded 1970 Phipps Bend Surgoinville, Tn. 1 .6 billion $2.9 billion 1983 1987-89 $625 million Awarded 1974 Yellow Crek, luko, 9 billion $2,975 fcill.on 1985 1985-88' $730 million Awarded 1974 By ED GREGORY Tennessean Staff Writer THE Tennesee Valley Authority, unrestrained in its authority to raise rates to pay for atomic power plant construction, is preparing to take advantage of that fact and of the difficulty other utilities are having with their own construction programs. Privately-owned utilities across the nation are being forced by economic and regulatory uncertainties to cancel or delay planned atomic power plants, yet TVA announced recently it will forge ahead with the nation largest commitment to nuclear power.

The announcement came at a time when TVA also dislosed that the annual growth in the demand for electric power load growth in the vernacular will not be 7 as had been historically assumed, nor even 4 as TVA said last year when it announced delays at four reactors, but only about 2.5. DURING THE FIRST half ot this year, the investor-owned utilities constrained by the need to show a profit and the unwillingness of public service commissions to grant rate increases to fund nuclear power have announced major delays at almost half of the reactors under construction. Eight reactor orders were cancelled during the same period, according to the Atomic Industrial Forum, lobbying arm for the nuclear industry. The Electric Power Research Institute reports that a New York state utility scrapped a nuclear plant after investing $167 million, choosing to write off the loss rather than cope with the uncertainties hanging over nuclear power in the 4, (Turn to Page 2-8) i 1 High Cost of Nuclear Power This chart ihows how the cost of buifJing.nucleor plants for TVA has risen since the first contract was awarded in 1966..