Newspapers / Winston-Salem Chronicle (Winston-Salem, N.C.) / Nov. 12, 1981, edition 1 / Page 4
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Page 4-The Chronicle, Thursday, November 12, 1981 Winston-Salem Clinoriicle Founded 1974 Member North Carolina Black Pubhaher's Aaaoclatlon Ndubisi Egemonye Co-Founder Ernest H. Pitt Editor/Publisher Allen Johnson Mananing Editor Robert Eller Sports Editor Audit luriiu of CireaiatiaBi Elaine L. Pitt Office Manager .,ncpa; N.C. Press Association A Tale-Of Two Cities In Winston-Salem, it could be the best of timeS’ In Greensboro, it may well be the worst. Following last week’s aldermanic elec tions, the black community of Winston has the peculiar but welcome prospect of equal representation on the Board of Aldermen. Larry Womble will join incumbents Larry Little, Vivian Burke and Virginia Newell on the board. Following Greensboro’s city council vice, ihc !. community in that town faces four years of a city council with no black representation. That’s no as in zero. Black candidates Prince Graves, Katie Dorsett and Alexander Parker fell prey to a powerful conservative political machine and failed to make it to the council’s six- member cut. But before Winston’s black residents start to pity the bad fortune of their brethren in Greensboro, they had best make sure that they take full advantage of their own fortune - or wind up in the same boat. Warm bodies in board chairs don’t always guarantee results. And numbers do not always guarantee power. Certainly, the potential is here for a productive Board of Aldermen, but both the black community and the black aldermen must make sure that it is realiz ed. Our aldermen must be responsive to their constituents and avoid the petty fighting that has characterized too many of our leaders far too long. As soon as the election was over, the Winston-Salem Sentinel apparently tried to fuel conflict among black aldermen by labeling Burke and Little as “disruptive” and Newell as the most effective and level headed black aldermen. Black aldermen and the black com munity must avoid such blatant and un professional attempts by the white media to divide them into camps and play them against one another. That was one of the factors which caus ed the downfall of the black candidates in Greensboro. Our aldermen also must deal honestly and forthrightly with the issues and they must continue to keep in touch with the people. Larry Little expressed both joy and fear at the close of last week’s elections; joy that Larry Womble’s victory had increas ed the ranks of black aldermen, fear that this golden opportunity might be wasted. Little all but begged the Chrgnicle to challenge him and his associates to do what they are expected and supposed to do. We fully intend to take Little up on that challenge, and we challenge you to do the same. Otherwise, if we sit back and wallow in our victory, we might some day find ourselves in the same conservative mess that our Greensboro neighbors face. Hamburgers And Tanks You can buy a 7-ounc^ steak in Washington, D. C. for only $2.80. You can get a hamburger deluxe (the government’s answer to the Quarter- Pounder with Cheese or Whopper) for 90 cents. You can also get a pretty fair-priced chef’s salad or pastrami on rye. If, of course, you are among high-rank ing government or military officials allowed to nourish themselves in Penta gon dining halls which cost taxpayers $1 million a year. While the Reagan people like to blame social programs for much of the country’s financial mess. Pentagon brass enjoy hefty meals at the dinner table and don’t do too badly when slices of the federal budget are passed around, either. The quibbling over food stamps and social security seems a bit overblown when one considers that a conservative estimate of military waste is at least $15 billion a year. The price of the military’s 47 main weapons systems increased by $47 billion during the last three weeks of June 1980. The total estimated cost for weapons programs has soared $66 billion over last year’s bills. A September Newhouse News Service study cited four major causes of runaway defense expenditures: -Defense contractors submit low bids feeling confident that Congress will approve cost increases later. -Lack of competition among defense contractors forces high prices; 70 percent of last year’s defense purchases came from the same company without competi tive bidding. -The military likes to “gold plate” or make unnecessary improvements on hardware for exorbitant amounts of money. Just as our government finally learned that you can’t simply throw money at problems and solve them, let us hope that it will learn the same with military spending. If a less expensive tank does as well as a Costlier one, we should buy the former-unless we expect to scare our enemies in battle by posting price tags on our artillery. We should also convince some of our hard-headed administrators to apply pressure to the military that has unfairly been directed at effective social pro grams. Or the many humans who supposedly are to operate those tanks and planes and submarines might decide that they don’t feel like it. •CANDID SHOTS Black Folk And Stereos By Allen H. Johnson, III Black people have a curious obsession, it seems, with radios. We strap the big Japanese contraptions over our shoulders and lug them to shopping centers, on buses, to street corners and everywhere else that our Eveready batteries will take The phenomenon is so big that Ebony magazine, in another stroke of journalis tic relevance, ran a feature on portable stereos last spring, showing mostly California black folk lug ging their music boxes to beaches and parking lots and so forth. Now, 1 have nothing against music, and 1 own a portable stereo myself. But I wonder why we seem to have this uncontrollable urge to share our music with the public-whether it wants to hear or not. 1 began to ponder this philosophical point serious ly one morning when I awoke early to hear the S.O.S. Band walking down the street. Well, let me be honest. The S.O.S. Band wasn’t quite walking down the street. A grown man with his multi-knobbed, deluxe speaker, AC-DC cassette thingamigig was, and he had the volume turned full blast so that I could hear the exquisite tonal quality of his Memorex tape. Here it was, 7 a.m. and the S.O.S. Band was asking me to “Do it Tonight”. Weeks later, at Durham’s South Square Mall, 1 had the pleasure of seeing my first “Battle of the Port ables”. Two high school- age gentlemen were sitting opposite each other on benches blasting identical tape players, with un-iden- tical music, at each other. I later saw the same two fellows at the mall’s entr ance, blasting away at each other still. An elderly wo man sat near the pair, and seemed resigned to frown and bear the music until her ride arrived. A junior high shopper bopped on her way to the parking lot to one of the songs. I might have bopped myself, but I couldn’t tell which beat was which. At least 1 halfway like what I hear on those port able caos-creators. What about the passenger on the city bus, whose taste in music includes Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and See page 5 “B.'ick in Haiti. I wa.s (old .she held a laiiij).” THE I. A TIMES SYNDICATE 'The Dean's* Legacy Lives On By Tony Brown A Negro who signs his columns as Gerald C. Horne, “Esq.” - the “Esq.” is used to advertise his having attended a law school - in one of his many live personal attacks on blacks with whom he politically disagrees - derid ed my television salute, “The Dean” to W.O. Walker. William Otis Walker was like the rest of the black Reagan supporters, Hornes asserted, traitors to the cause of black people -simply because they voted Republican. I was inac- Black Press gave in fighting for the civil rights of blacks in Cleveland and across the nation. How sad this cruel. curately charged with being myopic assault on a truly Although Walker left behind no children, the scores of employees at the Call and Post, where he spent nearly 50 years of his life, were his true love. aji^“cl9set” Reaganite great man - a legend in his (whatever that is) because I own time - by someone who honored the 85 years of ser- is known only for his surly vice that the Dean of the criticism, but unknown for any contribution to anyone. It was fitting that The Charlotte Post, a leading black weekly, referred to one of his attacks as “sour grapes.” Walker, on the other hand, was a giant tree of strength in a forest of human frailties. Moreover, the likes of the Hornes of this world are unsuited to touch the hem of his gar ment. I said “was” because on Thursday, October 29,' 1981, William Otis Walker, the influential editor and publisher of the Call and Post, collapsed in a cc ridor of his office buildii around 1p.m. and was pr nounced dead at 2:45 p.i at the Lakeside Hospital Cleveland. Although Walker le behind no children, t scores of employees at t Call and Post, where spent nearly 50 years of 1 life, were his true lev When John Lenear, t paper’s city editor, eulogi ':ed;Walker at his funeral,; recalled how, in an : mosphere of love, he ai See Page 18 Yawn,,, Another War On Crime By Vernon Jordan If crime didn’t exist, politicians would have to invent it, for there is noth ing more rewarding politi cally than a fresh an nouncement of a “War on crime . A new war on crime seems about to get off the ground, with a get-tough speeches by Chief Justice Warren Burger and President Reagan, and a Justice Department report that re commends, among other things, weakening of con stitutional protections and building more prisons. The Justice Department’s Task Force on Violent Crime specifically suggest ed a $2 billion grant pro gram to help the states construct new prisons. And several states plan to float bond issues for prison con struction. Somehow a nation that claims to be unable to afford decent social service benefit levels is supposed to come up with the money to finance prisons. A nation whose inner-city housing stock is deteriorated and is being abandoned, is sup posed to build prisons that cost about $70,000 per bed just for construction, with up to $20,000 per year in maintenance costs per indi vidual. And that princely sum doesn’t allow for infla tion. Talk about misplaced national priorities! Buying more prisons won’t buy more security. If anything, our experience with prisons suggests they do not deter people from committing crimes. Indeed, they serve to warehouse people in brutalizing condi tions, leading to the in creased likelihood that they will return to custody once released. That raises another point neglected by the get-tough- with-crime advocates. You can arrest, convict and imprison people. But ulti mately, they will serve their time and return to the community. Unless they are helped to overcome the lack of skills, anti-social attitudes and limited opportunituies that helped land them in trouble, they are likely to continue to swell the crime rate. Nor do the hard-liners have much to say about keeping young people from the lure of criminal activi ties. Apparently they would rather build prisons at luxury-hotel construction rates than invest in the education and job oppor tunities that give economi cally deprived young people a stake in stable, crime-free communities. A lot of the old bromides are also being hauled out in this year’s version of the war on crime. Preventive detention sounds like a good idea until you realize that there is no way a judge can predict the likelihood of an accused person’s turn- tlii wkei till ing up for trial. Without hard evidena that accurate predictioi can be made - and i studies indicate contrary, especially applied to blacks - shouldn’t weaken governing assumption • our legal system that )i accused person is innocei until proven guilty. The same holds for tti so-called exclusionary riilt which the task force want weakened. That rule p vents illegally obtaine evidence from being use in a criminal trial, and it based on Fourth Anienil ment protections agai® illegal search and seizure' The exclusionary rui keeps law enforceniei See page 5 On Creating The Perfect Negro By E.J. Tokely If 1 had the power to create a Negro, what might 1 do? 1 might program him to be a product of poverty, drop out of high school, join the army, and enter college on the G.l. Bill. He’d win a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, A Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, and become a distinguished teacher. 1 would instruct him to say such clever things as “Forced school busing is in sulting and destructive to blacks as well as whites,” or “Affirmative action and quotas, with their accompa nying threat of an tidiscrimination suits by those who do not win pro motions, lead employers to hire only the safest risks real meaty statements like that. He’d write books that last out against the tradi tional idea that racism is still the major reason for black economic inequality. I’d staff his memory banks with statements like: “When one compares the average standard of living in Africa to the average standard of living of black Americans, the conclusion might be that blacks (should) pay whites com pensation.” My, my! What an ar rogant work of art my Negro would be! Leaving no traditional stone unturn ed, he’d hunt down and ver bally destroy all black ac tivists and white liberals. With his mechanical words of steel (which I, of course, would supply) he would rewrite Afro -American history! Imagine him saying, “With little in centive to work any more than necessary, (or) to escape punishment, slaves developed foot-dragging, work-evading patterns that were to remain as a cultural legacy long after slavery itself disappeared.” Ah, but 1 would also give my Frankenstein a heart. 1 would program his tapes to reminisce: “I’m always amazed, when 1 drive through Harlem, at the kids dashing out to wash wind shields. Decades of abuse haven’t stamped out thei® itiative of the people What a sensation my el®' tronic Negro would be! However, do not thin^ that 1 might sell to the fW bidder, nor the second, n® the third! Oh, no, no, n® My Negro would be desigi' ed with only the Whiil House in mind. After alli I’ve always heard it that they haven’t had * good Negro since Sarnm) Davis kissed Richard Nixa and Ben Vereen made a W of himself. President Reagan wou See page 5
Winston-Salem Chronicle (Winston-Salem, N.C.)
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