Out There in America

...Under the guidance of these men a local riverfront beautification program was parlayed overnight into a world's fair, and it is understandable that their concern is less with public opinion and public interest than with the return on the dollar...

...By mid-March, Washington Governor Daniel J. Evans had signed the $7.5 million bill (this amount was subsequently boosted to approximately $12 million) and a scant two weeks later—without consulting the citizens of Spokane—Cole announced that the next step would be to secure approval from the U.S...

...They plan to argue against North Carolina's capital punishment law, the harshest in the nation, which has sent thirty-three convicts to death row, by far the highest number of death row inmates in the country...

...for residual benefits"—a quest which ignores the fact that not all residue is beneficial and that the greater part of the residue of 41,000 tourists and 9,000 cars per day will be pollution and other ecological problems of the very type which the exposition is supposed to help solve...

...The three negative votes were cast by the three black members of the House, Richard L. Mays and M. L. Townsend of Little Rock, and Henry Wilkins of Pine Bluff...

...Since the promotion of Expo began, refuse and sewage rates have more than doubled, as have parking fines...

...In the months since the trial was held, the case has aroused the anger of the black community of Tarboro, which accounts for about half the population of this town of 9,425...

...Secretary of Commerce as proof of local support, and Expo was off and running...

...The recently enacted business and occupation tax is being passed on to the taxpayers, both directly in the form of a city tax on such items as telephone and electric bills and indirectly in higher prices...

...One wonders how much longer Arkansas politicians will be able to get credit from left-of-center voters simply by not being Orval Faubus and by eliminating the word "nigger" from their public vocabularies...

...A student referendum on the subject voted strongly in favor of his retention...

...The woman testified that she was out on a date, had an argument with her boyfriend, got out of his car, and started walking...

...SHIRLEY HEPTON (Shirley Hepton is a Spokane-based free lance writer who Has followed Expo '74 carefully since its inception in early 1971...

...According to the three convicted men, who testified in their own behalf, the white woman, a medical records clerk at Edgecombe General Hospital, was walking along a road and they offered her a ride...

...The three men—Vernon Leroy Brown, twenty-two, of Tarboro...

...Government or the State of Arkansas," or any group defined as subversive by the state legislature...

...No sooner had the younger Cooper's radical beliefs become known than a horde of tub-thumping would-be patriots seized upon the issue as a means of publicizing themselves...

...Nor is Cole's claim upheld by his co-official, David Peterson, who publicly states that Expo and river clean-up are wholly unrelated and should not be confused...

...Cooper strikes many people as an enigmatic sort, an outwardly gentle, soft-spoken kind of radical who freely discussed at the trial his belief in the ultimate inevitability of revolution, but who seems temperamentally disinclined toward action himself...

...Twenty-two of the men in Central Prison's death row are black, another is an American Indian...

...The jury found the men guilty of rape, a crime that in North Carolina carries a mandatory death sentence...

...The early groundwork was carried on in secret, and when the people of Spokane were finally introduced to Expo '74 it was not as an idea or proposition, but as an established fact—along with the equally established fact that the Washington state legislature stood squarely behind the plan, ready to pledge $7.5 million for its promotion...

...The North Carolina legislature enacted a harsh new capital punishment law after the U.S...

...Expo board chairman Roderick A. Lindsay...

...The men all had "good records" and came from "good families...

...In the car, according to the men, she made advances toward them...

...Mays's law firm, Walker, Kaplan, and Mays, one of the most effective civil rights-oriented firms in this part of the South, is handling Cooper's defense for the ACLU...

...A decision is pending at this writing, but most observers give Cooper little chance of winning in any Arkansas court...

...In the face of a storm of criticism, from within and without the state, that followed the death sentences given the Tarboro blacks, the legislature recently revised the law to eliminate arson and first degree burglary as capital crimes, but clung to racism by continuing to make rape punishable by death...

...When asked how soon he thought the revolution would begin, he responded: "If you're asking whether I clean my gun at night, I don't own a gun...

...Ironically, Cooper is the son of a prominent physician who was president of the Little Rock school board during the integration crisis of 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus started a regional trend by calling out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Central High School...

...This seems the typical case," NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer Adam Stein of Chapel Hill points out, "that justifies claims that the crime [rape] is designed to punish blacks only" and that the death penalty is mainly directed against blacks...

...One black woman also awaits death there...

...Besides the John Birch Society, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and various American Legion and church groups, twenty-three state legislators, led by Representatives Bobby Glover, Frank Henslee, and Art Givens, filed suit in Chancery Court to have Cooper's salary cut off...

...It was organized by government officials, local businessmen, and imported promoters...

...Congress passed a funding bill for $11 million (supplemented on December 14, 1973 by an additional Federal grant of $2 million), putting Spokane on the road toward becoming a victim of both "progress" and government...

...Expo general manager Peter Spurney of Washington, D.C., and U.S...

...Secretary of Commerce, President Nixon, and the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) in Paris...

...Mayor Rodgers, who prior to the election had taken the position that "the Expo bond issue is essentially a citizen effort," acknowledged on September 1 his regret that "voters defeated Expo '74 at the ballot box," but was "confident Spokane is going to find a way to overcome the difficulty...

...This double-barreled announcement was made early in 1971...

...She admitted she willingly accepted the ride offered by the three black men...

...The North Carolina law may no longer be, as The Charlotte Observer said, "the most barbaric capital punishment law in the nation," but it remains one of the worst...

...River beautification is certainly important, but much more important are the constitutional rights of the people—and these rights are now at stake in Spokane...

...While hailing Expo as an ecological blessing, its promoters have failed to come up with any believable explanation as to how 4.5 million tourists will improve the local environment...

...A black nurse, Alice Smith, and a white doctor, John Whaley, testified that when they examined the woman at Edgecombe General they found no evidence of rape, although she had had sexual intercourse...

...He is the Cooper of Cooper v. Aaron, in which the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Little Rock school board's contention that public hostility prevented their carrying out the law, pointing out that politicians had inflamed the people against school integration from the start...

...The trial was the latest development in a controversy dating from last September, when a campus newspaper reported that Cooper, whose beliefs were well known on campus, was being told by the school's administration to keep them to himself...

...The tax measure was accepted by the U.S...

...the ERA plan makes no such claim...

...The group is headed by Spokane Mayor David H. Rodgers...

...For this "ecological exposition" aimed at dealing with the problems of man and his environment —this story of "progress without pollution," this celebration of "tomorrow's fresh new environment"—is taking place under the pressures of the energy and pollution crises, and without the consent of the taxpayers who will have to pick up the tab...

...The administration was forced, in the wake of an effectively written student rebuttal, to retract two of the original eight reasons given for Cooper's dismissal which dealt with rather fraudulent use of student opinion surveys...

...Expo by Edict Spokane, Washington Spokane's Expo '74, which is being peddled to the general public as the greatest thing ever to hit the Northwest, may well be the greatest tragedy to befall this area...

...The final count was 24,605 in favor, to 18,798 against—a 56.7 per cent favorable vote...

...No one yet knows what the cost will be for the giant birthday party being staged by "Spokane city officials and civic leaders" in celebration of Spokane's 100 years of "progress which," ERA acknowledges, "has come at the expense of nature...

...While the exhibits of the ten foreign countries in the fair that opens May 4 will presumably offer something of interest in exchange for the ecological problems they will present, the industrial exhibitors, such as Ford and General Motors, will simply be selling their wares, and to a town that can barely provide the living space to host a major football game the cost could be almost fatal...

...On September 1 he declared flatly, "As far as I am concerned Expo is not dead" and added that there were "several alternative plans" despite the defeat of the bond issue...

...Lyons is a member of the English department at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock...

...Yet he was unwilling to accept the negative election result...

...The persuasion of lawyers such as Stein and Charles Abernathy of the Southern Poverty Law Center that the North Carolina death penalty law is discriminatory and unconstitutional is bolstered by the circumstances of the Tarboro case and of the trial itself, which even some conservative North Carolina lawyers have questioned...

...Until Arkansans quit making wryly self-deprecatory jokes about what would have been done twenty years ago and concentrate upon what today's elected and appointed officials should be doing, they will continue to suffer inferior public services and to be governed on the state level by a series of genial mediocrities...

...With typical disregard for the taxpayers' rights, Cole went on to say that by June 1971 a copy of Expo's "rules and regulations" would be on file in both Washington, D.C., and Paris, although local knowledge continued to be based on a welter of confusing and contradictory half-promises, while Expo's "master plan," a 131-page, $10,000 "Plan and Feasibility" report by Economic Research Associates (ERA) of Los Angeles, remained a secret in the hands of city government—where it had been since September 1970...

...Wilkins teaches history at the Pine Bluff campus of the University of Arkansas system...

...The Arkansas Gazette, the state's Pulitzer Prize-winning liberal daily, put the story on the front page, and the subsequent follies show why Arkansas and several states like it in the Deep South continue to lag far behind the rest of the nation in almost every measurable index of education and social welfare, despite the perennial false dawns of a "new day" that is slow in coming...

...They claim she willingly submitted to sexual intercourse...

...In spite of heavy campaigning on the part of Expo proponents, the bond issue fell short of the sixty per cent majority required by law for passage...

...Expo chairman Lindsay, prior to the election, had pledged in an open letter to Spokane citizens that "Expo depends absolutely upon passage of the riverfront bond issue . . . without the bond issue Expo is dead," and that "the decision rests with all of us on August 31...

...The Economic Research Associates' "master plan" is more credible...

...He has also praised the UALR administration's handling of the case, and said that neither the AAUP nor anyone else should have cause for complaint...

...And when Cooper decided to appeal the removal action, it developed that it had been so long since anyone had been dismissed for bad teaching or for anything else on the UALR campus that the committees which, according to the faculty handbook, have the responsibility to reconsider such disputes do not even exist...

...The stated purpose of Expo is economic...

...People who have money or influence never get the death penalty here...

...Most discouraging is the small number of Arkansans of progressive sympathies (and there are more than most outsiders generally assume) who expect an effective defense of civil liberties on the part of University officials or liberal-minded politicians...

...Expo president King F. Cole and his assistant, David Peterson (both from California...

...the family has donated more than $250,000 to the school over the years...

...The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund of New York, a long-standing foe of the death penalty, and the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, have both entered the case...

...water rates are heading upwards...

...When the legislature took up a non-binding resolution on Cooper, the vote was seventy-eight to three for his immediate removal...

...Citing racial discrimination, the Tarboro blacks as well as black leaders across North Carolina organized protest rallies in Tarboro and Raleigh, and letter-writing campaigns aimed at persuading Governor Jim Holshouser to stay the execution...

...GENE LYONS (Mr...

...LUISITA LOPEZ (Luisita Lopez is a news editor at The Charlotte Observer and a contributing editor of Race Relations Reporter...

...We must not drop the ball...

...He should know, as should the legislators...

...It does not in any way relate depollution—either by cost or intent—to Expo...

...W. G. Cooper, Jr., is not only on the UALR Board of Visitors...

...Expo president Cole's claim of river depollution as a prime goal of the exposition is seconded only by Expo chairman Lindsay...

...Briefs on the case are due before the North Carolina Supreme Court this month...

...Civil rights and religious leaders, including the Reverend Leon White of the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ and Golden Frinks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, joined in the protests...

...She claimed they raped her but that she did not fight them because she was afraid of being killed...

...Two members of the UALR political science department who are also legislators, Cal Ledbetter and Robert Johnston, both liberal Democrats, were absent when the vote was taken...

...It assigns top priority of this ecological exposition not to ecological betterment, but to the concern of "Spokane city officials and civic leaders...

...The trial explored the character of the woman, described by those familiar with the case as "questionable...

...To those who voted against the bond issue in 1971, Expo represents not progress but disaster for Spokane, with its overtaxed sewage system, polluted river, and thickening air...

...She accepted...

...The UALR chapter of the American Association of University Professors, representing about one-quarter of the faculty, has passed a virtually unanimous resolution of support for Cooper...

...The ruling is expected by July...

...Early in July 1971 the BIE officially endorsed Expo, and the Federal Government, fresh from having its bicentennial overtures in Philadelphia rebuffed, indicated that it would be most cooperative—at the same time stipulating that proof of local support would be a prerequisite to Federal participation...

...The most recent survey listed Arkansas fiftieth among the states in per capita expenditure for education and forty-ninth in teacher salaries...

...Last summer in Minneapolis, Bumpers made a well-publicized speech that was highly critical of the failures of public education...

...This is especially true of the Spokane area where from 200 to 300 days a year have a potential for chemical smog because of the city's bottom-of-the-bowl location and temperature inversions...

...Under present city management, however, Spokane's coliseum, stadium, and transit system are all operating at a loss, and a new project appears more likely to burden than to benefit the city...

...Bobby Hines, twenty-three, of Princeville, and Jesse Lee Walston, twenty-three, of Washington, D.C.—were scheduled to die January 10 but were granted a last-minute stay of execution pending appeal of their case to the North Carolina Supreme Court...

...Commissioner General J. Welles Henderson, President Nixon's officially appointed ambassador of Expo '74...

...While denying that they were threatening the University, they also spoke of calling the legislature into special session to close the school if Cooper were not fired...

...The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare recently sent along its usual rejection of the Bumpers administration's desegregation plan for higher education...

...Governor Evans quite possibly set a gubernatorial precedent by suggesting ways to circumvent the people's vote...

...Consequently, the hurried submission—on August 31, 1971—of a bond issue to a vote of the people cannot be construed as a belated decision to consult the taxpayers so much as a move to satisfy Federal regulations...

...city parks are allowed to turn brown for "lack of funds" to water them...

...OUT THERE IN AMERICA Waiting on Death Row Charlotte, North Carolina Late last fall, in the small town of Tarboro in eastern North Carolina, three young black men were sentenced to die in the gas chamber of Central Prison at Raleigh for the rape of a young white woman on the night of August 4, 1973...

...Expo came into being not as a result of public approval or support, but as a half-grown child of governmental cooperation...

...He was not removed immediately, but was "non-re-appointed effective May 1975," as the jargon goes, allegedly for reasons having to do only with his poor performance as a teacher...

...Governor Dale Bumpers, who can be counted on to avoid this and all other issues in his attempt to unseat Senator J. W. Fulbright in the Democratic primary, sent his "wholehearted" support to legislators Henslee, Glover, and Givens...

...The cost of land acquisition for the Expo site is also passed on, and the fact that to date such purchases have been handled through the issuance of councilmanic bonds does not lessen the load, for government expense— regardless of the label—is public obligation...

...It is quite possible that the 1971 prediction of Spokane councilman Del E. Jones—that Expo '74 could make Spokane "one of the most unique cities in the country"—could come true: as a "unique" ecological and economic disaster...

...and an attempt has been made to enact a swimming pool fee to get the parks "out of the red" —yet all the while money from the city's general fund is being siphoned into Expo...

...The way was now clear and the U.S...

...Its officials claim that a residual convention center would add a yearly $215,000 to the local coffers...

...As it turned out, Mayor Rodgers did indeed "find a way to overcome the difficulty" of defeat at the ballot box: he arranged for a business and occupation tax to be levied by the city council...

...He suggested that "the idea of councilmanic bonds or resubmitting the bond issue to the voters should be considered...

...His father, Dr...

...Supreme Court's 1972 decision held that the existing statutes were unconstitutional...

...Off campus, however, only The Arkansas Gazette and state AFL-CIO President Bill Becker have defended Cooper's First Amendment rights...

...It so happens that in North Carolina everyone who is waiting [on death row] is black, poor, or illiterate and disadvantaged," says the Reverend W. W. Finlator, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh...

...A Case of Thoughtcrime' Little Rock, Arkansas On February 20, 1974, a college professor went on trial in Little Rock, charged with "Thoughtcrime...

...Grant Cooper, a history teacher at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and a member of the Progressive Labor Party, a self-described Communist organization, was tried for allegedly violating six Arkansas criminal statutes which make it a felony to belong to, or even to teach about, any group calling for the "violent overthrow of the U.S...

...The UALR administration's case against Cooper has not been, to put it as politely as possible, a model of cogent and decisive action...

...That is, rape—real or construed or fabricated—by black men against white women will still be a capital crime in North Carolina...