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Show Demonstrations Where s The Logic? The World's Fair opens today in Flushing Meadows Mead-ows and the civil rights demonstrators from Brooklyn Brook-lyn CORE chapter at last word were going ahead with their plan to syphon gas tanks and cause a fantastic fan-tastic stall-in to tie up traffic to the fair. There is a rumor that art the same time there will be sympathy snarl-ins in 50 other major cities. NEW YORK CITY last week passed an emergency emerg-ency law making it illegal to run out of gas on the city's throughfares. The NAACP has condemned the chapter. National CORE has disowned it. Brooklyn CORE obviously could not care less who disagrees with its stand. It is hard to understand the chapter's logic behind the move. The Fair's officials have not been accused of discrimination. While such a traffic tie-up will discourage fair visitors and will certainly publicize the Negro's position, it will also tie up emergency vehicles and commuter traffic and will probably do little to gain the demonstrators any white sympathy. As the Colorado Daily pointed out in their Friday editorial, "Does Brooklyn CORE believe that the white or Negro father who watches his injured daughter die because an ambulance cannot reach a hospital is going to decide to write his congressman in favor of the civil rights bill?" It would seem that the militant Black Muslims, some chapters of CORE and in a few cases the NAACP have gone a bit far. There is such a thing as protesting for a cause, but when protest reaches the point of stalling in a World's Fair it would seem that civil rights leaders have run out of real issues to protest and are simply screaming for the sake of hearing hear-ing their own voices. THE GREAT MAJORITY of American Negroes are of course responsible citizens, but while they probably prob-ably do feel oppressed by their present status as second-class citizens, they go on quietly living on their own lives. It is the rable-rousing, hate mongering Negro that America is hearing daily, and they are giving their white counterparts in the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council visible and audible support for their stand that the Negro is not ready for first class status. It is not impossible that the surprisingly heavy vote for Governor Wallace in Wisconsin may be a reflection of the reaction to Negro demands. de-mands. Certainly the Negro is entitled to the citizenship so long denied to him, and we are forced to agree, with those who say that the Negro has waited 100 years for the whites to accord it to them voluntarily, that they have moved slowly for long enough. But are the senseles actions of the past two weeks the only ways to speed up the process? What good was the senseless death of the young white minister under the treds of that bulldozer? What cause will the tie up of New York traffic and the deaths which may occur from it further? There was white sympathy for the sit-ins, the pray-ins pray-ins and the freedom riders, but sympathy is slowly changing to fear and not a little disgust. |