Seventy-Third Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUSLMCATIONS "Where Op'pliosAre reeSTUDENT PUBLICATIONS BLDG., ANN ARBOR, MICH., PHONE No 2-3241 Truth Will Prea" Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of stafff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Miller Quits Post On 'Let's Pretend' SGC DAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1963 NIGHT EDITOR: GAIL EVANS Direct Action: Not- Black' or White 1 S ANN ARBOR Direct Action Committee chairman Charles Thomas explains it, DAC a militant civil rights group dedicated to ying "tit for tat." What just happened in mingham is tit.."When we reply to it in kind Ann Arbor, that's tat," he said. 'or most the situation can never be that ple. It is hard to believe that Thomas can so orce his view from reality that he genuinely Leves that people are either "for or against" i rights. There are a thousand variables lead- to differing shades of intensity of commit- nt. Ironically, things are not black or white. 'homas' group consists of between 30 and 35 nbers. According to Thomas the committee st be designed and led by Negroes but whites y readily join if they indicate a willingness comply with the group's stated purposes.,The losophy behind the DAC hierarchy is simply t the black man can be led effectively only the black man. )AC members laughed when they were asked ether or not a white man could ever be con- ered capable of leadership. The reply was t clearly a white man would always remain nently unqualified to be a leader of colored n. Without carrying this to an extreme, it is e that black leadership will be more effec- 'ECIFICALLY, DAC' seeks to destroy the aste system and topple the white "super Tainted H PHILOSOPHY that speaking at a state- supported institution is a privilege. coupled ith the practice of state's rights results in a orth Carolina law which denies the principles f.the United States Constitution. A recent incident in which British biologist ohn B.. Haldane was barred from the campuses f the Consolidated University of North Caro- .na put the spotlight on a state law which bars ommunists or persons who have pleaded the ifth Amendment in loyalty cases from speak- g at state-supported institutions. VIOUSLY, anybody who merely protects himself in a loyalty case anywhere in the 'nited States by appealing to the Constitution nds himself immediately tainted in the eyes f the North Carolina legislature, showing the ck of respect it holds for the amendment. Finding it impossible to remove from the onstitution some of the rights guaranteed by he Fifth Amendment, the North Carolina leg- da.ture clearly sought to deny those rights ithin the legal domain of the state, using ates' rights to justify the boundaries of that amain. And finding it within that domain to bar peakers from its campuses, the legislature does lt let any state-supported institution extend ie privilege of speaking to people of whom it des not approve. T IS POSSIBLE that the North Carolina law Is constitutional, but constitutionality alone not sufficient' justification. Hopefully, the .tizens of North Carolina will recognize the Glue of the Fifth Amendment as it stands and Ipeal or at least modify the law. --M. SATTINGER THE LIAI Philip Sutin, National Conce 'HERE HAS BEEN a small, but significant change in the way the American press views ommunist China and this change bodes well ir future United States relations with the Ommunist regime. Red China no longer is the outsider of the orld. It is no longer the barbarian "they" ho shoot up American GI's in Korea or who b shells into Quemoy and Matsu, setting of f Aernational crises. Since the noisy flare up of Le Communist ideological dispute, the press as devoted more attention to Chinese prob- ms and ambitions. Concurrently, Nationalist hina has been reduced to comparative insig- ficance. N RECENT MONTHS, the Associated Press, this country's chief source of foreign news, as carried many long ibterpretive articles on ommunist China, often more than one lengthy ticle for the same weekend editions. Not only ve these dealt with China's external rela- ons, they have also included personality etches of Mao Tse-tung and potential suc- ,ssors and analyses of Chinese internal condi- cons. The AP tacitly recognized Communist China st winter when it began calling its capital king, as the Communists name it, instead Peiping, the former Nationalist designation r the city. 1EANWHILE, Nationalist China rarely gets a mention, except an occasional feature out forlorn reaction to Red China's latest Mon. Even the trip of Chiang Kai-shek's son structure." Just how it will go about this is not easy to determine. Thomas and his followers seem unable to.articulate very precisely on this matter. Yet they are convinced they will find a way. Whether the way involves bloodshed or not is no longer a question of importance to DAC. Not conceived by its members as antagonistic toward other civil rights groups, DAC tries to support those things which it considers worth its while. Its members have a horror of the "liberal" white and the Uncle Toms of this world., Thomas referred to the Washington March as a "nice little picnic." "Boss Kennedy is just as much of a myth as the American," he said bitterly. THE GROUP was organized to protest police brutality in the city. DAC is campaigning for the dismissal of deputy sheriff Roy Couch, the assignment of Negro police to beats in the "Negro ghetto" and an "investigation of the mental health, social attitudes and personal experience in racial matters'of Ann Arbor po- licemen." Last Saturday, following an Ann Arbor Fair Housing Association-CORE picket in support of the fair housing ordinance, DAC picketed in protest of police brutality. The number of picketers ranged from 20-30. The participants were partly from Ann Arbor and partly imported from another militant civil rights group in Detroit called Uhuru. Car- rying signs proclaiming "the . white man's heaven is the black man's hell," and chanting phrases from "Cuba si; Yankee no" to "support of the Mau Mau," the group marched slowly in front of City Hall. IT IS VAGUELY incongruous that a "white liberal" is to make a pronouncement on a. militant civil rights organization yet people do- have to judge each other. It is permissable and it is necessary. The word judgment is pom- pous. It reeks of self-righteousness. But judging is not as much of, a decision on the individual's behavior in question as it is a commentary on the judger's ability to think clearly and with some degree of sensitivity about a given situa- tion. PAC's picket did not do any good for the Negro in the Ann Arbor community. It may have increased the solidarity of the members of DAC and sharpened their sense of belonging to a world outside of the normal one. If this was their purpose, and it may partially have been staged to do just that, then DAC suc- ceeded. But if it was a genuine attempt to reach the members of the community and communicate to them a vital need for changes, then it failed. People were upset by the militancy and the apparent irresponsibility of the group. Those dim-witted bigots who may have been on the verge of seeing the Negro as possibly bearable may no longer do so. The problem is, of course, that it is wonder- ful that they were and that people were made aware that a few carefully planned pickets do not nearly represent the wealth of latent pas- sion lying under the surface of the Negro com- munity. They have to be made to realize that orderly picket lines are slow and take too long for many people. -JEAN TENANDER FISCAL REFORM PLAN: Assessing the Assessors (EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a series of articles investi- gating Gov. George Romney's pro- posed fiscal reform program.) By STEVEN IALLER THE FIRST specific legislation included in Gov. George Rom- ney's 12-part plan is concerned with the procedures utilized in collecting property taxes. Although this entails neither the levy nor the repeal of a particular tax, it has already become a mat- ter of some controversy. This is especially true in township areas. Many experts doubt that this part of the fiscal program has any chance of passage this year. Before trying to realize why this is so, it would be wise to review briefly the legislation Romney has in mind. The proposal is a broad one, covering six goals in the area of "improving the procedures for assessment and collection of real and personal property taxes." * * * ROMNEY CALLS FOR required training and certification of all elected and appointed assessing officers and asks that all coun- ties where the state equalized pro- perty evaluation surpasses $25 million establish departments of equalization. In addition, the governor pro- poses that a set of standards be prescribed for. an additional as- sessing system to be set up by any county that so desires. The plan also calls for a pre- scribed set of standards and prac- tices to determine a cash value for assessment purposes and re- quires that these standards be ad- hered to by all local assessing of- ficers. Under the plan proposed by Romney, an express statement of the state equalized valuation would be required on every property tax bill, and improved appeal pro- cedures are also part of the plan. Says Romney, "We must do everything we can to assure in- dividual and business taxpayers of fair and equal treatment re- gardless of where in the state they may be located. Improved assess- ing practices and procedures will . . . help to install basic justice and equity in our property tax system. This is tax justice." * * * THE TROUBLE IS that a large number of people prefer things the way they are and are opposed to the idea of renovating the sys- tem as it now stands. Or perhaps one should say, "the systems," for a local realtor points out that about 1800 different systems of assessing property are now in use in the state of Michigan. In some areas, valuations are based upon the full market value of a given piece of property; in other re- gions, some fraction or another of this value is the criterion. Since the assessment is a means of determining how much an in- dividual, or business must pay in property taxes, the situation can obviously get rather sticky. What is considered a fair tax assessment in one township may be far above the average elsewhere. When a high assessment value is allotted to a piece of property, it is often coupled with a low tax rate; while for a house with a low assessment. value, a correspondingly higher rate is applied. The need for tax rev- enue being what it is, it is under- standable that the latter plan, or a variant thereof, is more often used. * * * ACCORDING to state officials, the "percentage of true cash val- ue" at which township property is assessed can vary over a wide range-from less than 10 per cent to more than 100 per cent in some counties. The major reason for such a large continuum of assessed value is the fact that comparative- ly few supervisors of property tax assessing have any business being in that position to begin with. They are far better suited for farming than for the skilled trade of property evaluation. These days it can be a very skilled trade indeed, a far cry from the days when the task could simply be added on to the burden of the already-overworked justice of the peace. Those who followed the attempt to abolish the office of sheriff in Wayne County will have some idea of how difficult it could be to make assessing prac- tices in many rural townships cori- form to a set of "roles and rules." * * * IT GOES without saying that, there will be strong opposition from these rural areas, just as there always is when it seems as though young blood might be in- jected into the veins of a tired' old system. This opposition will surely make itself heard in Lansing, just as it always does when legislators from such areas attempt to avoid being ejected from their offices. The fact that. approximately 20 counties now have equalization bureaus is of little or no interest to those which do not and which do not want to have to set up bureaus of their own by Lansing mandate. If an equitable property tax for each and every Michigan citizen and business is to become pos- sible, Romney's proposals should be put into effect. There is no rea- son why any person should be made to assume an unfair per- centage of the total tax burden simply because he happens to live in a particular area of the state. In short, Romney is right in call- ing for such a system of standards for property assessment in Michi- gan, and he is right in calling it "tax justice." Captives CHARGE that the politicians who have inherited the tradi- tion of :liberalism in this country today are not liberals at all, but merely ambitious men who have become the captives of the big-city machines. These ambitious men know that the tradition of liberal- ism in this country demands that they carry on an appearance of righteous crusades but as captives of the big-city machines of the North they can nov carry on only those few token crusades that actually tend to strengthen the big-city machines. --Sen. Barry Goldwater in Human Events To the Editor: THERE WILL BE one more one- half semester seat available on Student Government Council in addition to those vacancies pre- viously announced. At tomorrow night's SGC meeting I will submit my resignation to be effective up- on the seating of the candidates chosen in the forthcoming elec- tions. My reasons for resigning, like those of so many others who have left Student Government Council, are primarily academic in nature. But the strain of the bipartite role of student and politician has been great from the beginning and had I retained my original en- thusiasm for student politics no- thing would prevent me from either taking easier courses or rec- onciling myself to learning less in the courses which I am taking. I am no longer willing to do either one or the other. WHILE I CONTINUE to believe that the ideas which I have been working for as a member of SGC and of Voice Political Party are extremely worthwhile, I have lost my elan somewhere along the line. My resignation will allow my seat to be filled by a person equally committed but perhaps less torn by the sacrifice that he is called upon to make. I will continue to speak to administrators n the hope that they may agree that students must be treated as adults before they act as adults. I will also continue to speak with SGC members in hopes of convincing them that the best favor they can do the affiliate system to to help it rid itself of discriminatory membership prac- tices and outside influence on membership selection. * * * WHEN I RAN for SGC for the first time, one and a half years ago, The Daily warned that I would become disillusioned, and they were correct. It is quite true that SGC has its absurd sides. Parliamentary procedure, the pass- ing of notes at meetings and the committee system (did you know SGC has a "Committee on Com- mittees?") are symptoms of a Kafka-esque structure that I still believe SGC can rise above. The almost 30,000 students on campus have failed miserably to use their economic power and suffer consequently in rental serv- ice, bus service, entertainment service and book service. * * ' * THOUGH IT might be represen- tative of the University students, SGC has consistently failed to rally any manifestations of stu- dent opinion and shudders at the very idea of asking students to demonstrate. I still believe that SGC. can be more than a "let's pretend" student government, but I no longer can pretend to myself that I am simultaneously being a good student and a good SGC menber. -Ken Miller, '64 Bon Voyage? . . . To the Editor: MICHAEL BROWN'S comments on his trip to Cuba, as report- ed in The Daily of Sept. 10, are puzzling. He seems ready to ac- cept on face value whatever ap- pears favorable to the Castro re- gime, and to rationalize or deny that which is not. Principles (?) which he holds when he is on the campus at Ann Arbor fly to the wind once he gets to Havana. "'I saw no Russian troops, and everyone I talked to said there were none.'" There are several thousand U.S. Marines at Guan- tanamo Base; yet since they were not walking the streetsin Cuba, I could by the same reasoning tentatively conclude that there were none. * * * WHO DID he talk to while ask- ing about Russian troops? With Fidel's efficient propaganda sys- tem, of which Mr. Brown is just a part, I am sure that the average muzhik hears only of the im- perialists to the North, and prob- ably does not even know of the" Soviet forces in his homeland. Cuba is all behind its govern- ment, and therefore, Mr. Brown says, organized channels of dissent are not needed. *« « « SHUTTING opposition voices in a country by its government is an old ploy, and it is almost in- evitably rationalized by the same reasons Mr. Brown gives. Nazi Germany was all behind Hitler, who expressed the "national will," so who needed a free press and elections and such trappings of a bourgeois democratic society? Stal- in "personified" the revolution, and in a proletarian society, there were by definition no conflicting interests, so what good were poli- tical parties? MR. BROWN grants the right of the Castro regime to deny the right to publish to certain dis- senting groups. Would he grant the same right to the U.S. govern- ment, which feels just as endan- gered by certain forms of internal dissent as does Castro? Liberties of speech and press can be denied by the Castro government to any- one; would Mr. Brown condone giving this same right to the U.S. government? --Steven Hendel CAMPUS-: Sellers In 'Heaven' WE'VE HAD HIM as a labor leader, a grand duchess, a Welsh librarian, an American author, a clothing designer, a criminal king and now a priest. Who? "Heavens Above," It's Peter Sellers now showing at the Cam- pus Theatre. Peter Sellers is a crusading preacher transferred by error from his prison parish to a very middle class community. After ap- pointing a Negro (Brock Peters) as his warden, he proceeds to practice Christianity. Of course, the townspeople are outraged, shocked and so forth. * * * THE ACTING is excellent, as seems to be the rule in English comedies, with the emphasis on small eccentric characters scat- tered throughout. Eric Sykes as Smith, the professional pensioner, and his wife (played by Irene Handl) are especially- brilliant. Brock Peters is too stereotyped as the "good-hearted Negro" to be given a chance to show his talent. Sellers is as marvelous as ever: he smiles a line and it gains new impetus; he snaps and the line is a bolt of lightning. * * * "HEAVENS ABOVE" provides many moments of typical English humor bound to tickle and delight but as a comedy it fails. It also has some extremely biting mo- ments but as a satire it fails. Fin- ally, as an entertainment it never really approaches the heights it set out for. The satire fails because it at- tacks too much too obviously. Un- able to contain itself with reveal- ing the insiduous deterioration of the church into a social conven- tion, "Heavens Above" also man- ages to take on socialized govern- ment, racial and religious preju- dice, big business and almost everything else. * * * THE MOVIE fails to be really funny because it is too obviously presenting a message and this constantly gets in the way. However, Peter Sellers is a fan- tastically talented comedian. But he is primarily a wit and a pun- ster, tooled in the fine arts of characterization and imitation, not a stylistic social commentar- ian. When given rein to romp and cavort he can provide wild gustos of humor or he can be as subtly deadly as he was in "Only Two Can Play." Yet when he is strap- ped into a vehicle which is as burdened and controlled as "Hea- vens Above," he can only succeed Sin occasional moments. But with Sellers, even those are worth it. a--Hugh Holland I 4 A , soT rus Editor I V 1 I ,4k -jr tempting to break out of the shell imposed upon it. The expanded and more understanding cov- erage is a small step toward the day the United States can maintain open and rational rela- tions with Communist China. Ignorance is a major promoter of fear and hatred. Anti-Com- munist fanatics can play upon public ignorance of Communist China to prevent necessary dip- lomatic relations with that country. The United States needs first hand informa- tion about China to deal effectively with it as well as a formal relations to help make Com- munists more accountable to world opinion. Wider public understanding could lead to rela- tions with Red China and more effective West- ern attempts to contain the ambitious Chinese. T HE NEXT STEP is to allow Anerican re- porters inside Communist China. Currently, the State Department forbids their entry par- tially as part of a mistaken policy of isolating China and partially because it has no way of guaranteeing reporters' safety. While the Chinese severely limit reporters' activities, being in Peking is better than writing about it from Hong Kong or Tokyo. Less news will depend on rumor and speculation. With greater public understanding, the Unit- ed States could move to bring Communist China into world politics where it can be better dis- ciplined. The next step is ending opposition to China's admission to the United Nations. 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