National Reports

...The old traditions and prejudices of the South die hard even in the so-called democracy of sports, as certain recent incidents show...

...An "unofficial" collection of party officials and local representatives indicated their preprimary support of two men for Governor and U.S...

...Under his aegis, the church has become a center for all extreme rightists in the city short--but just short--of Gerald L. K. Smith's Christian Nationalists...

...The success of the Texas League in using Negro athletes has done much to break down Southern Association resistance, but the real clincher, everyone knows, will be the necessity of doing something about falling attendance...

...A good example of the liberal younger man in the field is "Hap" Glaudi of the New Orleans Item...

...However, the question has never been put to the test, because the Democrats have, over the years, contributed their share to the polarization of politics in the state...

...Fifield, who lectures the city regularly by radio and television, does not bother to conceal his extremist views...

...The First Congregational is the most influential and powerful Protestant church in the city...

...Senator, one of whom had left the Democrats when Warren was elected and had rejoined them when Knight succeeded Warren as Governor, and the other of whom had headed the State Un-American Activities Committee in 1940...

...Senator, will be able, through his record in the State Legislature prior to going to Congress in 1950, to keep the campaign debate on issues other than Communism and thus avoid a frequent Democratic booby-trap, because Democrats in California do not fare well on this question in the kind of political debate which demands total defense as an answer to total offense...

...Congressman Samuel W. Yorty, the party designee for U.S...

...The ensuing riot was splendid publicity for the candidate-orator, who, as a Democratic candidate in 1948, publicly supported Wallace and has not deviated significantly from the party line since...

...His church is the normal rostrum for such types as Vivian Kellems or Corinne Griffith, who denounce the progressive income tax as Communism, as well as for representatives of the sort of thinking typified by Clarence Manion...

...It has been proved that the use of Negroes does add many new fans...

...To date, he has been given carte blanche, and his column is a refreshing contrast to the run-of-the-mill stuff too often found on sports pages...

...With the departure of Earl Warren from the local scene, control of the GOP, in fact if not in name, has passed to men whose political views are so reactionary as to be caricatures...

...the loss of a few die-hard whites will be far outweighed by a marked increase in Negro attendance...

...While the Negro's status in major league ball is now unquestioned (fourteen teams are now taking Negroes to spring training) and his place in most minor leagues is equally secure, the place of the Negro in leagues operating in the South is still in the balance and poses problems which reflect in many ways the racial patterns, changing and unchanging, of the region...

...The Tugerson brothers, Negroes, had been signed to play with the Hot Springs, Arkansas club of the Cotton States League, but the Mississippi teams in the league threatened to withdraw should the Negroes be played...

...James W. Fifield Jr., is an active rightist propagandist not above occasional veiled anti-Semitism...

...Passage of such a bill, similar to that recently amended in Birmingham, would have made it impossible for major league teams to play exhibition games in New Orleans, Shreveport and other state centers...

...The most significant clue to the Association's future was the recent decision to amend an old Birmingham city ordinance which prohibited Negro and white athletes from competing together...

...True, it is still too early to tell how effective the Communists' new re-infiltration line will be...

...The Gubernatorial candidate, Richard Graves, gave up both his Republican registration and a comfortable job as director of the League of California Cities to make the race against Knight, whom he has described as "the worst Governor in California history...

...Glaudi has made his position quite clear to the Item's owners...

...Fortunately, liberal organizations in Louisiana exerted sufficient pressure to kill the bill in committee...

...The audience swallowed the explanation hook, line and sinker with the exception of one man who arose and declared that the athletes came to New Orleans to play football and not to dance...

...California Democrats Find New Hope By Frank Mankiewicz SAN FRANCISCO IN THE COURSE of his Lincoln Day tour, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a "major address" in the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles...

...Southern whites will grumble and will look backward with regret to the magnolia-scented past, but the inexorable change will not be stopped...

...Hot Springs capitulated, and the players were sent elsewhere...

...But the past history of California Democrats makes them peculiarly vulnerable at a time when the Communist issue seems the only non-fizzling ammunition in the Republicans' locker...

...Members of McCarthy's audience, on their way home, stopped to throw rocks at the truck...

...This removes the final legal barrier to the Association's use of Negro players, since Birmingham was the only league city which had such a discriminatory statute on its books...

...In such a situation, a mature and responsible Democratic party should gain the favor of the state's voters...

...Perhaps the sociologists are wrong and the club owners right...

...A candidate for the Democratic nomination in one of the few Congressional districts within the Democrats' capacity to win appeared outside the church with a sound truck...

...What is amazing to this bystander is that the Association has delayed so long...

...To anyone familiar with the Congregationalists and their generally enlightened social outlook, this would seem strange...

...Eager rookies are making their first bids to stay up in the big time, while fading veterans strive to prove to skeptical managers that there is still "one good year left...

...its members include the Norman Chandlers, publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and other city leaders...

...Through the late Thirties and early Forties--actually the whole effective life of Democracy in California--the party has been plagued with Communists...

...All but Memphis now seem ripe for integration...

...In the whole field of racial segregation, the Deep South is at present in what might be best described as a period of watchful waiting...

...The eight teams in this league are New Orleans, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Birmingham, Mobile and Atlanta...

...But the big test is yet to come: The Southern Association, which enjoys the highest classification in the region (Class AA), has not yet broken down the barriers...

...Several of the more astute sports writers feel that the Negro players actually will be seen in Southern uniforms this summer...

...The result was that the only Democrats who remained untouched were, with a few exceptions, so conservative as to be unavailable as leaders...

...But the "new look" of the Democratic party is a good one, and could prove the rallying point for a "vital center" so conspicuously lacking in the past...

...Much of the confusion of professional baseball also prevails in college football, basketball and track...

...Without Warren, the Republican party in California is a not-very-entertaining spectacle of opportunists and plain hacks, with a sprinkling among the younger men of McCarthy-like demagoguery...

...In their heyday during the war, certain Democratic party clubs resembled nothing so much as CP cells, and wide sections of the party apparatus had all the earmarks of Communist fronts...

...Long after it had ceased to be fashionable for even nominally pro-Ike Republicans to do so, Senator Thomas Kuchel was stumping the state for the Bricker Amendment...

...Governor Goodwin Knight, a total politician, has been attacking "creeping socialism," "bleeding-heart liberals" and Government "boondoggling" for so long that he finds it difficult to stop now that the GOP is in power in Washington...

...Now the state Democratic leadership is clearly anti-Communist...

...But in Los Angeles valid national images are reversed...

...Negroes may play in the Orange Bowl in Miami and the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, but not in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans...

...Advances are coming so rapidly that, like it or not, Southerners have really lost control of the situation...

...The explanation was pathetic: "We have a big dance after the game, and you wouldn't want your sister dancing with Negroes, would you...

...Glaudi, New Orleans born and bred, says he is "no crusader," but the fact remains that ever since he took over the sports editorship of the paper he has waged a constant battle for recognition of the Negro's place in Southern sports...

...National Reports The Negro in Southern Sports By Stephen P. Ryan While residents of the North and Midwest are still shivering in the blasts of winter, spring has already come to the American South, and with spring comes baseball...

...This looks like a good year to find out...

...In this incident, the basic California political problem was posed: There has been (with a few exceptions which I will discuss later) no responsible politics of either Right or Left...

...If this is so, why have Negro players performed successfully in towns like Vidalia, Georgia and Lake Charles, Louisiana while club owners in larger cities have hesitated...

...The amendment now permits interracial participation in baseball and football...

...Negroes have played (and will play this season) on many professional teams throughout the South--for example, in the South Atlantic League, the Georgia-Florida League, and the Florida-International League...

...The opposition to McCarthy took a predictable form, too...

...In short, recent developments in the Democratic party suggest that California's political polarization may be coming to an end...

...With this background, it was not surprising that McCarthy was booked into Fifield's church or that most Los Angeles civic leaders were to be found in the ranks of McCarthy's supporters...

...Few people in Louisiana were aware, for example, of the bill introduced in the Legislature in 1952 to prohibit whites and Negroes from competing together in athletic events where admission was charged...

...We have all been told that racial attitudes were far better in the larger cities of the South than in the smaller towns and rural districts...

...Its minister, Dr...

...there is some evidence that they are coming back into liberal organizations in disturbing numbers...

...All this is a familiar part of the American scene, but, in recent years, something new has been added--the presence of Negroes on professional teams in leagues of every classification...

...They print all that he writes or look for another editor...

...Sports writers in the Deep South are pretty evenly divided on this question of integration in athletics...

...Then there was the Tugerson case last summer...

...Are racial tensions more volatile in New Orleans than in Lake Charles, in Atlanta than in Vidalia...

...He runs regularly in his column a section called the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave Department" in which he points up recent examples of discrimination, e.g., teams from the North and Midwest which leave their Negro players home when the outfit tours the South...

...A responsible liberal campaign might draw out of Republican ranks those Warren supporters now on the outside in GOP councils...

...This situation has been largely remedied since the ill-starred Wallace adventure in 1948...

...A member of the Sugar Bowl Committee rather plaintively tried to explain his group's stand recently...

...Yorty headed up an investigation of Communists in the State Relief Administration in 1940, for which many Democrats have never wholly forgiven him, but this will place him and the party in an enviable position with the voters, who will be able to assess his liberal record in Congress on its merits...

...Despite widespread defections of Democrats, including the 1946 Gubernatorial candidate, to the Progressive banner, and virtual Communist control of the State CIO, Wallace got less than 200,000 votes in California, which went for Truman by 19,000...

...But a pre-primary convention of Democrats in Fresno last month contained some of the most encouraging signs of a liberal renascence in California in some time...

...Decisions have been made and will be made to change the traditional way of life...

...That the assembled Democrats endorsed Graves, considering his ten-year record as a Republican until last December, was an act of rare political maturity, and will serve to point up the disparity between Earl Warren's liberal, popular Republicanism and the narrow orthodoxy of Governor Knight...

...Not only was the intellectual heart cut out of the party during its time of flirtation with the Communists, but many of its best available candidates were drawn into fronts...

...Another straw in the wind is the fact that several major league teams have assigned the contracts of Negro players to their farm clubs in the Southern Association...

...With the usual lack of logic, Softball must still be played on a segregated basis...