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Show u I The Prince Column fly John Prince Later Eldridge Cleaver was to say of the event that somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery had shifted. But on that December day in 1955 nothing seemed quite so dramatic. There was a lady. Her name was Rosa Parks. She was forty-tw- o years old. And she was black. The city was Montgomery, Ala. and Rosa Parks was taking the bus home that evening. She was tired, found a seat, and sat down. It seems the custom of the times in Alabama was for Negroes to give up their seat w'hen whites couldn't find one. It was also against the law to not obey any order from a bus driver. So when the bus filled up, the driver told her to stand so that a white man could sit down. Mrs. Parks thought about it and then said she wasn't moving. She was arrested at the next stop, later found guilty of a misdemeanor, and fined S10. The word spread among Mrs. Parks neighbors. Within two days there wrere pamphlets all over calling for a boycott of the city buses. There were about 25,000 blacks living in Montgomery at the time. They accounted for about 75 percent of the ridership of the bus systems. The boycott was successful. The bus company was told they had seen their last black patron until they agreed everyone was seated on a first come, first serve basis. The next year saw hundreds of arrests and heated exchanges. Basic values were being stretched to the breaking point. A young 26 year old clergyman by the name of Martin Luther King was a national figure when, 381 days after Rosa Parks started it all, he rode the integrated buses of Montgomery himself. Theyll find that all theyve won in their year of praying and boycotting, a white citizen is supposed to have said., is the same lousy service Ive been getting every day. 1955 . . . Not so very long ago. Twenty two years to be exact. But think of the changes. Come we now to 1977 and the question of Allan Bakke. Five years ago he was 32 years old. He applied to the University of California medical school. His application was not a casual decision. After he wras married he moved to San y Francisco and began a career as a engineer. Then He was so doctor. a was he decided what he really wanted to be d courses during his off obsessed by the thought he took hours and also wrorked as a hospital volunteer. For two years Allan Bakke was denied admission to medical school. He later learned his college grades and aptitude test scores were higher than many of the students who got in. The only explanation Allan Bakke could find was the color of his skin. He was white. And like being black in Montgomery before 1955, being white in 1972 had some disadvantages. Alan Bakke filed a lawsuit against the University of California. He claimed he was discriminated against. There seems to be little doubt that he was. So be glad tonight that you are not on the Supreme Court. After you exhaust the simple sayings such as Two wrongs dont make a right, you have to come to terms with some tough space-agenc- pre-me- questions. There have been so many events since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus: s Little Rock in 1975; black in Greensboro in 1960; James Meredith at Ole Miss in 1962; George Wallace in the schoolhouse in 1963; Black power in 1966; ghetto violence in 1967; and Angela Davis in 1970. Some of it made more sense than did others. But the basic message was correct: the color of a person's skin shouldn't matter. Yet in 1977, we know that discrimination still exists. The sit-in- that Rosa Parks knew. And a new kind that Allan Bakke can tell us about. As I write this, I have no answers, only a deep respect for old ugly kind the problem. THE NATIONAL Wl&WVHE It gets quiet in Washington when Congress goes on one of its blessedly frequent vacations. But with the honorable members back home impressing the electorate, the chatter about their drinking habits and their propensity for piously snagging the lobbyist dollar gets repetitive. That leads newsmen, and I like to think of myself as one, to reminisce about their past exploits. This makes for good talk since the journalistic tribe, between dry periods, lead interesting lives. They also lead frustrating lives. remember that in my first year as a columnist I journeyed to New York to cover the appearance of Nikita Khrushchev, then emperor of all the Russias, before the United Nations, a Soviet freighter, under heavy guard, had tied up at one of the Hudson River piers, and this piqued my curiosity. By what was called digging then, but has now been dignified to the level of investigative reporting, I was able to of space learn that the freighter carried a number of mock-up- s time be which to unloaded at the appropriate and were vehicles of States. United the to the exhibited people The question for me was, Why? The Soviets had their Sputnik. What did they plan to stick us with nowr? With this question in mind, I continued to dig focusing my efforts on those U.N. diplomats who had some insight into what the Kremlin was up to. And it was a great story. Khrushchev, I was told, would make the grand announcement that the Soviet Union had sent its first man into space. of the space vehicles w ere to be produced as the The mock-up- s props for Comrade Khrushchevs speech. But by the time he made his pronouncement, the Soviet freighter had quietly cast off and there was no announcement of the great event. That raised new questions. Was my information about the I OFFICE Cf EXfUNTOONSASP HELIP, one of those rumors that circulates at all important diplomatic gatherings? Had the Kremlin decided to keep mum and spring the big news at another time.? The answer came from two very reliable sources. (All sources are reliable when they are your own.) The Soviets had. in fact, sent a man into space, but something had gone wrong and he was lost forever in the wild blue youder. I had my story, and I wrote it, expecting a pat on the head from the syndicate which then handled my column. Instead I was told, Oh, come on. Ralph, that story must have come out of your thumb. When I protested I was given the brush with, "OK. then, what have you been smoking?" The column went into the round file. How can you prove youre right when you haven't got a document filched from the Defense DcpartmeM of the National Security Council to back you up? Thats part of the business. It had happened to me before, though hope it never happens again. In my chagrin. 1 tore up my blacksheets and promised myself that I would never stick my neck out again unless I had an affidavit from the president ot the United States. You win some and you lose some. You swallow your disappointment with a couple of jiggers of Scotch and make an anecdote of it to top the anecdote a fellow reporter has just passed off on you. But there was a sequel. Some six months later I picked up one of New York's newspapers there were more than three in those days and my eye fell on a n head. The story which followed reported fact for fact though in somewhat greater detail the facts in the column which had been spiked. My first reaction was to go to the editor who had killed my column and punch him in the nose. But. I thought, he s probably a karate expert. I grumbled politely, and let it go at that. Come the summer doldrums, its one I can tell at the National Press Club bar but m sure no one believes me. mock-up- s 1 four-colum- 1 |