The Delta Democrat-Times from Greenville, Mississippi • Page 4

EDITORIALS OF fldta 'Now, Take it Easy, Jackr Greenville, Friday, September 20, 1903 Good Hews On Hospital The General Hospital Board of Trustees took a wise step this weok in opening another floor to Negro patients. over crowded conditions in the existing Negro ward at times have approached scandalous proportions. Although many of the stones which circulated in the Negro community were exaggerated, there was no way to exaggerate conditions when. General was carrying a peak load. II is just plain bad medical practice to force sick people into the halls.

But the board's action was taken with ar.otlici- evident problem still to be faced as the board knows only too well. Now that the Negro wards have been expanded, the shortage of beds for whites will at some lime in the near future become acute. It will not have been a particularly happy solution if one group of people is forced into tho halls so that another group can be kept in rooms. THJS POINTS to the key fncl facing Washington County. Thanks to General Hospital and Kings Daughters Hospital, a great number of doctors and particularly specialists have been attracted here.

They in turn hava attracted patients from wide area extending far beyond county or slate lines. Washington County has be- come a medical center, but it Is a center which is short In one major commodity hospital beds. Tho General Hospital Board knows this. The Kings Daughters Board knows it. Both are planning for expansion, and both need to bo expanded.

There is more than enough room for a bigger private as well as a bigger public hospital. The Kings Daughters expansion will lake the monetary support of a lot of individuals, which should be forthcoming in view ot its long record of service when It was trm only hospital here and ils continuing tradition of first-class cara, The public at large will also have to support wholo-hcarlcdiy any plans which may be cvolvpd for enlarging General, for Ils function as an equally excellent hospital must of necessity be broader in scope than Kings Daughters'. The General Hospital board has more than Us share of problems in any expanding. Most of them have been developed in Ibis newspaper before. But Ihc board has not given up, and the Kings Daughters Hospital is looking toward growth.

This is news equally as good as General's announcement that hospital facilities for Nagrocs have- been substantially increased. 'Its On Me' The "fast-buck" tempo of our times could be no more sharply delineated than by the roller coaster ups and dowpa of the new Internal Revenue Service regulation on expense account spending. Now is a new Interpretation of it, which docs little to diminish ihe confusion and still less to get down to the root of the matter. It was normal that many firms and employees would protest at the outset, when IRS first announced a crackdown on this type ol income tax dodge. In practice, that's just what it had been, A big company in the higher income brackets felt it was only spending cents, instead of dollars, when kited expense accounts were audited and paid.

The employee or officer of the firm considered thnt a lenient entertainment allowance was implicitly a part of his salary on which he would not have to pay the lax. THE OBJECTION that too much bookkeeping would be volvod in paying taxes on or justifying expense spending was not impressive. Bookkeeping Is necessary in all business transactions; even housewives, these days, must keep books and pay Social Security on domeitlg.help. But the most disturbing thing about the whole episode was the plea by nightclubs and swank eateries that they would lose money or cease to exist If the federal government persisted in try- inp to close the gaping tax loophole. This was nothing less than a warning that if spending beyond legitimate bounds were policed, dire economic results to a large segment of our night-life attuned industry would be Ihrealcned.

It was a pica on behalf of cheating, Ihc likes of which seldom bad been seen, and which exposed a rollcn vein through Ihe core nf Western Civilixnlion. A general public that could stand by and accepl such a postulate which was about the way It was presented an odd picture. Because every dollar thai did not go Into the Federal Treasury as it logllimalely should have, had to be prised oul of the general public's pocket. And while John Doe was paying out his money, there was built up in this country a whole new society the expense account liners and the expense account caterers. Just what are Ihc depths of public morality? NOW THE IKS, hnving thought and re-thought the "rc-thlnk" Is common phrase these days In government has come up with this: It is out only after tho expense account fellow "who is really on a frolic." Still to be argued, of course, is the definition of "frolic" and when It "really" Is one, or just one, Meantime, the tens of thousands of businesses, officials and employees who abide by the rules, keep expense spending to an effective minimum and pny all honorably due taxes and they surely are in Ihn majority will continue to be penalized for their virtue.

We expect they would be well advised lo order those on company- paid trips and dinners to appear not to be enjoying It too much. Anyhow, their enjoyment can bo lessened by the thought that when some hearty free-spender says "It's on me" his choice of pronouns Is woefully erroneous. Speak Out Now Jackson newspaperman Bill Minor did the state a distinct service several evenings ego when ha on television and pointed to the formation of a Ku Klux Klan unit In Yazoo County. Minor claimed one oJ the Kluxers had read what purported to be a letter of endorsement from Gov. Ross Barnett.

The Jackson representative of the New Orleans Times- Picayune called on the governor to repudiate the Klan if their statements were false. Gov. Barnett did yesterday, adding a blast at Minor along with his disavowal of the hale organization. But Minor's hide is tough enough to fake the governor's cuts. The state Is In his debt for having brought the question out into the open.

What should be carefully not. ed by all decent Mississippians is that the Klan is re-forming in Mississippi In several counties. It has reached the point in Yazoo County that the Yazoo Citizens Council has come forth with a public statement calling for the people to steer clear of the Kluxers. This would be humorous (along the line of the pot and the kettle), except that as events in Birmingham have shown there is little cause for Dlitrlbuled by King Syndicate Backing Urged For School Board In Dispute Over Trigg School humor where racist madmen are concerned. Washington Covmty had to go through a pitched political battle 40 years ago to break the power of the Klan.

Today the chief Ihreat is not political but criminal. The Klan seeks to capitalize on the obvious frustration of many Deep Southerners as integration proceeds on all fronts. But the Klan's only possible recourse is to violence, jusl as ullimately Ihe only posible way to fight court orders is with violence, IT IS not loo early for many other leaders to join Gov. Barrett in disassociating themselves from the Ku Klux Klan and what It represents, We would all do well not to content ourselves with the comforting thought that it can't happen here. It can, enough people keep their mouths shut when they should be talking.

Mississippi already has enough problems without the added one of still another organization dedicated to sinister aims and advocating evil means. Bill Minor has spoken, and provoked Gov. Bar- nctt into taking a stand. Let the rest of us not wait for the organization of a KJan Unit right here before we do the same. Do budding lypisls still sharpen i wlls ami limber their fingers willi "Noiv Is Hie lime tor all good men lo come to the eld of the Anyhow, II looks like now is the time for all of us la como to the aid of the School Board in the current controversy concerning i Trigg Elementary School on North Pojilnr Street at Nelson.

Let us hoar in mind thnt mem- Iwrshlp on school boards is ft thankless job at best. Your school trustco is unpaid. Ho ha: no nx to grind. He has no real estate, choice or unchoico, to sell lo the city of Greenville for school-building silos. THE aim Is oUi- calion, first and Insl, and liow best to provide it for the children of Greenville, Iwlh i and colored.

The greatest good for ihe greatest number also comes into tho picture. The old order indeed clumgclh, (U the feller says, and so do trends, shllls nnd complexions in population. The Into Miss Susia Pclham Trigg, or "Poosic" ns many of us know her, wns nn ardent Slslcs Righler who would rcfight the Civil Wnr with yon most any day in the week, nut "Poosie" was even more nrdent ns nn educator. Ami if she were here loday, Miss Trtgg would sny "Amen" to the school board's plan because it Is so practical. So lei's stand behind the Greenville School Board, In Its move to convert Ihe present Trlgg School from white to colored, and rebuild "Poosic's" namesake elsewhere.

TO THOSE who oppose the Board's decision on sentimental grounds, wo might sny that Old Stuff can go nostalgic about Trlgg (only It was "Court School" in our with Ihc best of you. We practised football and baseball out there, when Ihc Ixiilding wns a four-room deal and sat way back from Nelson Street. And for the benefit of those who now fret about transportation problems, let us remind them that we walked, all the way from the five hundred block on South Broadway (and back) in order lo participate. There's another personal memory, of our friend Thomas Crouch (late brother of Lillian Strange and Mrs. II, Crowder) standing a few feet from the Court Sehoolhousc wall, and knocking flyballs for us lo catch on the trolley-car (racks at Ihe comer of Poplar nnd Nelson.

It may not be so distant now, but it seemed like a far-piece In Ihosc days, with Thomas hitting that baseball what looked lo be a country mile. OUR DEEPEST sympathy to Edward Merrill Gray, his son Ed tOSSBKf. and other loved ones of the late Marie Meggett Gray. The Meggctt children grew up on South Shelby Street, a few numbers north of the City Hall and, as kids, were friends of this writer's father, whose cotton-office was just around the corner on Main. Their father, Mr.

Will McD. Meggett, gave Dovo and Old Stulf lire first wedding-present received. This was our marriage- license, for Mr. Meggett was county circuit-clerk at the time. (Who remembers when the colored folks called it a "pair- Tha Meggctts were sweet children, sweet to one another and, when Billy Jr.

(the only son) cams nlong, he rcnlly had It made. We can see those "big sisters" now, rolling little Billy's buggy up and down the street. Goodbye, Marie Gray. BC John McPhnil tells of morning when a Washington business a dropped In at a Chicago newspaper olfkc endeavoring In collect a $150 debt owed to him for many long day by one of the featured columnists on the paper. He failed in his mission, hut for his pains he did get this attention In tho columnist's next outpouring: Mr.

So-and-So, the well-known Washington banker, is in Chicago for a few days looking ntler some of his permanent investments." A persuasive sales clerk has sold a great many bottles of a new nnd unadvcrtised perfume by telling a customers, "This new fragrance is so po- Cl And Stop Me tent it's to be packaged with a booklet on judo." Walla ce Should Lead Drive To Rebuild Birmingham Church WASHINGTON Three contracting pictures sre before me as 1 write this column. One is the recollection of a handsome young man with an almost boyish face, smoking a long black cigar, sitting in my living room and telling me of his plans as governor of Alabama. The second is the mental picture of little girls in white dresses, neatly Ironed, pigtails tied in rib. bons, going to Sunday School in Birmingham. The third is the final picturt of those same little girls, dresses bodies bloody, one with her head blown off, being carried away on stretchers.

It was the Lord's day in Birmingham, supposed lo be a day of peace. And it was children's day at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Tho theme was forgiveness tho story of how Joseph forgave his brothers when they were jealous of him and sold him into bondage. The people of that church have a lot to forgive now, especially the fathers and mothers of those little girls in crumpled white dresses. Rev.

John Cross, their pastor, took the lead in urging forgiveness when he seized a megaphone minutes after Ihe bombing and shouted an anguished appeal: "Please go home! The Lord is our shepherd. Wa shall not want." YES THEY have a lot to forgive at the 16th Street Baptist Church the broken bodies of their children, the broken church, the broken stained glass windows they had saved so long to buy. How many collections those windows had required! And how many times the mothers of those little girls had washed them and dressed them and sent them off to Sunday School to learn patience and forgiveness! EESSSS Now their crumpled bodies lay mute on bloodstained shoe Is; the dusty plaster, the splintered pews, the ripped up flooring, tho tattered prayerbooks, the pieces of glass shallered glass everywhere all bore silent testimony that Ibero was much on the other side to forgive. One stained glass window remained Christ leading a group of children. His face was blown out symbolic of the fact that the spirit ot Christ has been blown out of many parts of Birmingham today.

Gov. George Wallace, tho man who leads the state of Alabama, sat in my living room last winter, handsome, serene, confident, puffing his cigar. He'd been gov- errr.ir of Alabama about three months and expected no problems. He had been the friend of the he said, had served on the board of directors nt Tuskegee, attended meetings with the Rockefellers in New York, smoked their one dollar cigars, but refused to follow their ideas on the race problem. That problem, as far as Ilia schools were concerned, was to permit no integration.

"What are you going lo do about the University of Alabama?" I asked, knowing that integration wns due shortly. "Are you going to let It become another University of Mississippi?" "WE ARE not going to retract one inch," he said. "I don't care what the other states do. I have announced that I would draw a line in Ihe dust, and I shall stand in the door lo block the entry of federal troops or federal marshals or anyone-else. They will have to arrest me before they integrale the University of Alabama." "But you have been a I said, "and you know the importance of respecting the authority ol the courts.

If you set an ex. ample of opposition, you undermine the courts and give a lo everyone who believes in violence." "I'm against violence," repeated the governor, puffing his cigar, "but I'm also against Integration." 1 remembered the bombings ol the past the twisted lockers, the torn texibooks at the Clinton High School in Tennessee, which so many people bad worked so hard to build; the gaping holes in the floor, the battered classrooms at Osage, West Virginia; the prayerbooks and masses of debrij at the templa in Atlanta. These were the scars of violence sure to follow when men at the top give signals of encouragement to the hate mongers below. "But ycu are the highest executive in Alabama," I said in a last plea to a man I had known long before he was elected. "The pattern you set of opposilion will be a hunting license for violenca to all the rabble-rousers and tho white Citizens Councils and all the Kluxers in Alabama." MY PLEA fell on deaf ears.

The Governor insisted be would stand in the door and draw a line in the dust to Ihe very end. The governor of Alabama must suffer sleepless nights this week --nights haunted by the specter of those four little girls who were sent to study forgiveness on the Lord's day and were carried out of Sunday School on stretchers. THE ALMANAC By United Press International Today is Friday, Sept. 20, tha 263rd day of 1963 with 102 to follow. The moon is approaching first quarter.

The evening stars are Jupiter and Saturn. flugte Parliamentary Delegates Find Their Position Weakened World-Wide msxmafSEcsBmsassxKSBie: I (c) 1963, by Bennett Cerf. Distributed by King Features Syndicate. BELGRADE--The world's parliamentarians a becoming alarmed about Ihe slate of their parliaments. They find parliamentary democracy dangerously weakened in many parts of the world and most of the American delegates say lhat goes for the Congress of the United Slates.

This is onn of the dominant themes of-the 52nd Conference of the Inlerpliamentary Union to which elected lawmakers from 59 nations are gathered here at Belgrade. THE CONSENSUS is that many Western parliaments are losing power nnd prestige, partly because of their own faults, lhat the newly independent countries are i i that independence does not bring democracy, and that Ihe Communist parliaments are simply facades, pliant tools of Ihe government. The speaker who most strongly alerted the conference to Ihe decline In tho vigor and strength of elected parliaments was a member of the British House of Commons, F. Elwyn Jones. The speaker who offered the constructive rr.corares Alabama Tragedy Will Undercut South's Position William White HODDING CARTER Editor and Publisher HOODING CARTER III Associate Editor and Publisher JOHN T.

GIBSON General Manager WASHINGTON. darkness which is falling on Alabama is falling elsewhere, too, and no- whero more somberly than over Ihe deceit Southern cause In the United Stales Senate. This cause is lo resist, not merely in bchnlf of Ihe South but In behalf of ordered freedom everywhere, those extremist as- peels of an Administration civil rights program of Federal force which the President himself long refused lo request but now demands. Not long ago die clear prospect wns that he would at length be granted scme but not ail of that program; for it has unwisdom as well as wisdom In It. The outlook was that while measures wmild be taken to vindicate actual Negro rights, notably the vole, the President would be denied, for illustration, Federal sanctions to end discrimination even on private property as a matter of private choice.

TODAY, NO man can say how far Congress may go, lashed by the emotional storms that blow in from outrages in Alabama. could have been a grave and memorably sensible dialogue on this issue has been so embittered as to leave the moderates, Inside and outside the Soulh, nil but defenseless In the storm. No long a the Southern moderates in tho Senate those who are rcsdy 'o give ground on the racial issue but wish lo do so only carefully, considering lhat centuries of habit must here be over-come had an enorrrous, quiet influence with Northern nnd Western moderates in both parlies. Within all this merged group there lay the power of final decision on the question. But now a great and terrible change i the Senate has come.

First, it was introduced by the posturings of the Governor of Alabama, George a a against court-ordered and token school Integration even over the wishes of local authorities who were sick of violence and only wanted to get on with educating (he young. Now this great and terrible change has been grievously hardened by headline words frcm Birmingham which memory a sick roi- asma: "Four Negro Children killed in Church Bombing." For years this columnist a Southerner who has never apoli- gized for and never will, any more than he will ever apologize for Ihe six n-cmbers of his family who died in action in Ihe armies of Ihe Confederacy has been trying as best he could to send this warning lo his friends below the Mason Dixon line. Extremism is working an evil course against you. The day may come when your greatest and most honorable weapon, the moral influence in the Senate of the best of the Soulh's men, will be stricken from you by the fierce hoodlumism which the many in the South the heirs of Lee and Jackson and Stuart and Jefferson and Washington and Madison -are somehow not suppressing among the white-trash few. AMONG multiple tragedies here Is that in so much of the South the many have, indee.1, in duty and in courage overcome the lynch spirit o' the few.

But Alabama thai stale which once sheltered all the pride and glory of the Capitol cf iht old Confederacy in Lhat serenely white and gracious mansion in Montgomery has now brought the ultimate tragedy of all. This is the fragemcntation, at long last, of the power of those Senators I have just called Ihe South's best men and gladly so call them yet again. For these, the South's best men, live now in horror and in which comes to gallant fighters never yet beaten by their adversaries i the Senate but now undercut by scalawags at home. Their voice Is mu'ed now, not by the skill of their opponents but by the ugly echoes that have, once (oo often, come up from Birmingham. SO THE "great debate" will soon proceed not upon sense and reason but upon emotion stirred beyond control by actions which cannot be condoned.

When reasonable men seek to raise reasonable questkns about this or that of the civil righlj bill there will come the answer so completely unarguable: "What about the dead Negvo children in the church in Birmingham?" which elected parliaments could take to restore their vigor a strength was the chairman of the U. S. delegation, Rep. Katherine St. George (R.) of New York.

Both were warmly applauded. MR. JONES pointed out that parliaments in Burma, Guatemala, Iraq, and Syria have been suppressed, and that in olber parliaments n.emhers had become little more lhan "paper tigers." "Creeping authoritarianism," he said, "is a danger to all parliamentary systems and particularly In parliaments where no opposition." Mr. Jones warned his fellow parliamentarians that the one- party system in inevitably liable to become authoritarian. He spoke directly to the delegates from Ihe newly independent nations.

He contended a while some degroo of authoritarianism might be unavoidable in the early stages of a country's newfound independence, if the full dividends of freedom were not passed on to all citizens, "Ihen itself would become a cynical mockery." Mrs. St. George put forward a series of proposals for strenglhe- ning parliamentary democracy a number of which were as applicable to the Congress of Ihe United States as to other parliaments, She advocated that parliamentary government could be improved: 1--By having the national government assume campaign costs. "The rising cost of running for public office," she explained, exposes politicians to pressures from affluent groups with special interests. Responsibility for financing political campaigns should be shifted to the public at large." 2--BY preventing tha executive from monopolizing the means of a communication, Parliaments, as well as executives, should have fuller use of a.id television.

3--By expanding and making equally available to all members the legislature's professional research staff. 4--By strengthening the power of the national legislature lo supervise and control the activities 1 of the government. "The chief modern task of parliament," Mrs. St. George said, "was Ihe exercise of delegated power." 5--By reducing the extraneous workload on parliament, failure to do which, as in Washington, dangerously retards the legislative process.

MRS. ST. George's plea to tha Communists was that the composition of all parliaments made "truly representative of the people," and she called for "eternal vigilance to prevent military dictators from reizing power anj dissolving parliament or convert- Ing it into a puppet regime." The Communist delegates oh- vnusly hoped that nobody was listening. 'THE KICOIE6ARTER TEACHER OOfJTVUlOtV NO FTO3S, SO WE CAMS.