NEGRO FAVORS FOR WHITE FOLKS

The Negro magazine EBONY:

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WHEN Louis Armstrong took young Gary Crosby under his trumpeting wing, some Negroes shook their heads, wondered: “With all the promising Negro youngsters who need a musical break, why did the mighty maestro choose, as his protégé, a towhead born with a silver spoon, heir to a golden throat?” When wealthy Mrs. Pearl C. Anderson gifted the Dallas Community Chest Trust Fund with several blocks of downtown property worth over $200,000, more than one brother gasped: “Why give all that wealth to the white folks?” When Michigan’s Congressman Charles Diggs Jr. named, as his first military academy appointee, white Thomas Jozwiak. there were those who said: “Ain’t that a shame!”

All three of these famous Americans have contributed unstintingly to the welfare of the Negro. In addition, they have succeeded, as few of us have, in rising above the narrow confines of color. When any Negro is big enough to bestow his favors on deserving persons and causes without regard to race, creed or color, he should be commended for his tolerance. Such deeds should be labeled a blessing instead of a shame.

Racial discrimination is as reprehensible when practiced by Negroes as it is when employed by whites. And the Golden Rule works both ways. Like many Negroes, Mrs. Anderson, Louis Armstrong and Congressman Diggs owe much of their success to white people. By virtue of their positions they have a moral obligation to society in general.

Granted, the white majority has done the Negro wrong, is responsible for much of his inferior status in society. But even though restrictions are placed upon the Negro, it profits no one to retaliate in kind. Two wrongs make nobody right. Negroes should be proud that there are members of their race who abide by the Christian principle of doing unto others as they would that others should do unto them.

DEMOCRATS CANNOT HIT IKE ON FOREIGN POLICY

Columnist WALTER LIPPMANN:

MR. Adlai Stevenson is severely critical of the way foreign affairs have been conducted by the Eisenhower Administration. As Mr. Stevenson is the leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, we may ask ourselves not whether there is ground for criticism but whether the Democratic Party can take issue legitimately and effectively with the Republican Administration.

As of now the Democrats cannot do it. That is not because the Eisenhower-Dulles record is above criticism. Far from it. It is because by their support and by their silence the Democrats have forfeited the chance, and with it one might say the right, to take issue with the President.

Things may look very differently a year hence. But as of now the Democrats have no quarrel with what the Administration has managed to do Their quarrel, long after the event, is with how, by backing and filling, by zigging and zagging. by talking tough and by talking soft, the Administration got where it is today. As the Democrats do not criticize the result, as they did not at the time oppose the method they have as the opposition party no issue. ihey have no record of their own to oppose to the Eisenhower record. And as the saying goes in politics, you can’t beat a horse with no horse.

There is no doubt that the President has made a great, a unique and a necessary contribution to reducing the prob ability of a third world war. He has done this by maintaining our military power and our alliances, and, also and no less, by clarifying our fundamental policy m the Far East. If we pay attention not to what the Administration has said but to what it has been doing we can say that it has pulled back from positions of weakness where we were overextended, to positions which the United States and its allies are strong enough and willing enough to hold.

IKE, LIKE BASEBALL, A NATIONAL INSTITUTION

NEW YORK TIMES Washington Bureau Chief JAMES RESTON :THE popularity of President Eisenhower has got beyond the bounds of reasonable calculation and will have to be put down as a national phenomenon like baseball. The thing is no longer just a remarkable political fact but a kind of national love affair, which cannot be analyzed satisfactorily by the political scientists and will probably have to be turned over to the headshrinkers.

Very much against his will, the President is suddenly being presented as the answer and solution to everything: war, juvenile delinquency, the decline in farm prices, parental irresponsibility, the division of Europe and Germany, polio, death on the highways, the school shortage, and all the rest. When the Republican state chairmen met [last] week, they went over all these things and came to the same conclusion about every thing. Ike was the answer. To a man they agreed that if he should refuse to stand for re-election next year, the confusion in the party would be indescribable but even in their private sessions with one another they refused to consider an alternative.

Whatever the President does now is automatically wonderful. If he goes to Geneva and cries peace, even when there is no peace, he is proclaimed throughout the world. If he counters the optimism of Geneva six weeks later with stern warnings to the Communists, nobody asks why he didn’t think of that before, but hails him as a scourge of the appeasers. When the farmers think about the decline in commodity prices, they don’t blame the President but Secretary of Agriculture Benson. When people have complaints about foreign policy, they turn on Secretary of State Dulles.’ When they worry about polio, they blame Mrs. Hobby; about taxes, Secretary Humphrey; and so on.

It is a remarkable psychological situation. Roosevelt at the height of his pop ularity never had it so good. Eisenhower today not only commands the overwhelming support of his party, but the affection as well.

Eisenhower is. indeed, a symbol of the atmosphere of the time: optimistic, prosperous, escapist, pragmatic, friendly, attentive in moments of crisis and comparatively inattentive the rest of the time. What America is, at this moment of her history, so is Eisenhower, and the Democrats don’t know what to make of it.

LIBERALS CREATED DANGER OF BIG GOVERNMENT

An open letter to a liberal, in the Conservative FREEMAN :

As a good modern Liberal, you are always in a sweat about civil liberties. You say that informers, witch hunters, book burners, China Lobbies, character assassins, wire tappers and other agents of the iniquitous government lurk in constant readiness to trample any stray civil liberty as soon as the ADA or the ACLU turns its back, while I maintain that you do exaggerate. I must admit in fairness that what you charge is substantially true. That is the power to crush the civil liberties of American citizens is latent in our government. Several times it has come to the surface, and some helpless citizen has been sucked down by the inexorable undertow of a government that is too powerful for the country’s good.

Without embroidering the subject I shall grant the substantial truth of your incessant uproar about infringement of civil liberties. Then, let me ask you one question: How did we get this way?

Who made the government so powerful that it could trample on the rights of the individual? Who subordinated the individual to society? Who stressed security at the expense of liberty? You did, friend. You did.