Newspapers / Jones County Journal (Trenton, … / April 1, 1965, edition 1 / Page 2
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i*; MT EDITORIALS i Never Forget That These Editorials Are The Opinion Of One Man - ' - - And He May Be Wrong Fair Trial and Hanging The nation’s chief executive has whin ed in his best bed-side manner for a quick, “fair” trial and immediate hang ing of four Alabama men accused of murdering a Michigan agitator. This kind of action on the part of the president is utterly unprecedented and it almost precludes the possibility of justice eventually being done. The jury that will ultimately decide the guilt or innocence of these men cannot pos sibly avoid being swayed one way or the other because of Johnson’s insat iable appetite to make politics out of every imaginable situation. But this is the whole climate of Wash ington today. Last month the entire supreme court applauded wildly when this same politician, Johnson, outlined his latest force bill in the realm of voter registration. These are the nine men who ultimately will be called on to decide the legality of such a patent political fraud, but by their gleeful applause they indicate well in advance what their political decision will be. The constitution has been torn to shreds by the egomaniacs who sit upon the supreme court bench. Such senile mountain climbing goats as Doug las, such repeated opportunists as aptly named Black, such morons as Warren, who abased the nation and the office he holds in the eulogy he spat at President Kennedy’s coffin, when he put the blame for Kennedy’s murder on exact ly the wrong people. And then after his utterly wrong pre judgment this same man who has no judicial ability, nor judicial tempera ment was named to head the commis sion investigating the Kennedy murder; which was rather like hiring a fox to guard a henhouse. Warren, with his long record of sup port for everything from the left, went far out of his way to white-wash the the political conspiracy that installed Johnson in the nation’s highest office. His first act was to hire a known com munist sympathizer. This is the kind of justice one finds in Washington and it is being spread all across the nation. \ A Hundred Years Since Lee surrendered to Grant a very hurried, hectic hundred years lias passed and today we find ourselves fighting the same battle and screaming the same battle cries. Each of us in*lhe35oufli, perhaps more than in the rest of the nation ought to try to understand this continuing war. In 1965 as in 1865 the colored man is the catspaw who is being used and abused by venal white people who care no more for the negro as an individual today than they did a hundred years ago. The South is the home of two great minorities; white and colored, and the ef fort to turn white against colored and colored against white is intended de liberately to stultify the great economic advantages the Sotith has over the rest of the nation. t The South has fertile qoil, plentiful water, tremendous natural resources, cheap electric power, better workers and the better climate which make working and living better than in any other part of the nation. With all these things going FOR the South it is only a slight impediment to have the ancient red herring of racism dragged out in the frightened effort of those in the north to halt the indus trialization and colonization of the South that has accelerated so since the end of World War Two. It behooves us Southerners — white and colored — to ignore the cunning and hypocritical efforts of outsiders who only want to set this progress back. On the one side they tell the fright enable whites what a terrible thing ra cial integration would be and from the other side of this propaganda fence, the colored people are told how badly they have been exploited by their white neighbors. All with eyes to see, ears to hear and minds to understand know the lies for what they are. The plan is to divide and conquer, or divide and delay the ultimate economic superiority which the South will soon have. £' * tiriiL’ i i il ' 'SHtwBKnlSit'h'*' ~' 1 On Leopard's Spots "Nothing i* now moro precious in tho South, so long supposed to bo clinging to legends of the post, then the myths about tomorrow. Across the century since surrender the region hes always needed the romanticized recollections of, great 'days gone to sustain its dignity in pov erty. Now it desperately- requires what may be a new mythology of unequaled economic advance." Now, who do you suppose judges the South so harshly, and wrongly: Walter Reuther? Hubert Humphrey? Roy Wil kins? No, try once more and think of the single Southerner who has most frequently fouled the nest where he has grown up in dignified poverty. Now you’re warm, and his name is Joe Nathan Daniels, senior cynic and chief presstitute of the Raleigh News and Observer. His snideries come fit tingly at the end of this month’s special supplement in Harper’s Magkzine on “The South Today . . . 100 Years After Appomattox.” And Joe Nathan concludes his written to-order eulogy with: "Sixty years ago my own beloved fa ther, Josephus Daniels, a man who in many ways was regarded as a radical by conservatives in the South and the nation, helped set loose the outcry against a professor who had said that Booker T. Washington was the greatest Southerner since, Robert E. Lee. Per haps I run the risk the professor took. But I think my father will forgive me if I admit the eminence of the Rev. Mar tin Luther King Jr. We shall not soon dismiss him. He and others like him have dramatized the antique inequalities negroes have suffered in the Southern and American life. Yet none but the blind can believe that in the South the unfortunate and the dispossessed are only of one color. Despite the wide ly advertised gains of the few, the truly New South waits upon the release of the many from squalor and neglect. And on this waits the long postponed ideal which also has so often seemed pre tension — the fulfillment of the Ameri can dream." This “ideal” is still pure pretension — political pretension, cultivated by so cialist opportunists and rummy hacks such as Daniels. The Eternal Problem Ever since taxation was invented the big problem has been to tax everyone equitably and up until now no one has been smart enough to accomplish this chore. Listening recently to persons appear ing before the Lenoir County Board of Commissioners the problem was most forcefully brought to mind. One landowner objected to an $8,000 valuation on property that he would not part with for $75,000. He didn’t take the time to inform himself that the average residence is on the tax books for about 40 per cent of its actual cash value. Another homeowner objected to having his home taxed at commer cial rates because he had lived in the home for 60 years and planned to live in it the rest of his life. Of course, what all of these property owners overlook is the fact that “Ad valorem” means “at value” and proper ty should be taxed at its value no mat ter what is being used for. Unfortunate ly this has not been the practice, es pecially for farm land. While commercial, industrial and res idential property is valued at about 40 per cent of its fair market value farm land still remains on the tax books at about 20 per cent or less, of its fan market value. Farmers argue that their tobacco acreage has been cut So the value of their farm should be reduced; which may be true, but if farm values are to be based on tobacco acreage no one . can deny that an acre of tobacco allot ment today is worth far more than it was 15 ^ears ago when the present values were placed on Lenoir County land. l County commissioners know it’s the decisions and not the the work that makes their job a hard one, and, of course, .they know this when they run for office, but the rest of us at least Among the more beautiful cotapany magazines that cross my desk is “Petrol eum Today" from the American Petrol eum Institute and this month there is an article on “Winds of Change Across Libya” and among the pictures illustrat ing this article is one which the cut line says “Some of the world’s most per fectly preserved Roman ruins are along the Mediterranean in Libya. This maid en stands at Sabratha.” And the soft roll of the blue sea out lines the crumbled walls of one small part of the “grandeur that was Rome” and in these scattered stones stands a headless statue. This picture seemed to leap from the page to say many things to me. , That the same gentle pulsing of the sea laps the shores of the world today that was known during the “glory of Greece, and the grandeur of Rome." That time is, indeed, the healer of all wounds, the ultimate referee of all wrongs. That the higher and mightier an em pire or a man becomes the greater the responsibility is to those below, and that when basic truths and simple prin ciples are ignored empires as well as men are sowing the seeds of their own destruction. And perhaps more than anything else this picture reminds me that we Amer icans are living at that time in our his tory which parallels that immediately before “The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire.” We give the mobs the circus of illusory and cynical politi cal promise; we put principal ahead of principle; we ennoble the state and abase the individual; we reward the slothful and penalize the energetic. Caesar is made into a demi-god whose consensus is a holy mandate. We debase family and enshrine state; we sneer at patriotism but glorify statism. We swagger around the world under nuclear writ, trying to impose our form of “Roman Law” on all men, whether they want it or understand it. Our lan guage, our religion, our diet, our dress, our music, our morality, or amorality; all of these things and many more we try to impose upon a reluctant world which accepts our charity and rejects our principles. And so our world will crumble into ruin and on some distant day another editor may look at a picture of scatter ed stones beside the sea at Cape Can averal and the same gentle pulsing of the sea will lap the shore, and people will write pieces such as this, trying to understand why we, of the 20th cen tury, did what we did and left undone things far more important. Why we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to shoot a man to the moon but would not lift a hand to help the man across the street or on the other side of the river. Why Americans spent hundreds of billions of dollars around the world when the real American dil emma was at home. Rome was not destroyed from outside. It rotted first on the inside and then crumbled into the hands of the first who assaulted it. Where in America to day would one look, and hope to find the same courage and moral certainties that led us to victory in 1918 and 1945? Our corruption is internal, not external. We have deserted the bedrock princi ples that brought our nation to emin ence, and without those principles and all they inspired our civilization is doomed — not by the atomic bomb but by our own apathetic ignorance. / ought to sympathize with, them a bit as they tussle with tips annual problem " JONES JOURNAL "" Published every Thursday by The County - news Company, Vernon AvE., Kinston, N. SHTSaSTaTt^ KST« north qfcitttElW*. YEAR.' Lenoir 403 west
Jones County Journal (Trenton, N.C.)
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April 1, 1965, edition 1
2
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