“What a ‘Fizzle’!”
New York Herald Tribune.
[excerpt]
By Terry Ferrer and Joseph Michalak of the Herald Tribune staff.
It was by everyone’s count the largest civil rights demonstration in the nation’s history.
And yesterday’s school boycott with almost half the city’s pupils out of classes could be only the beginning of a string of such maneuvers designed to force the city to integrate its schools more quickly and more fully. Civil rights…
[end excerpt]
Read the above lines carefully.
We didn’t write them. They were written in the editorial department of the New York Herald Tribune.
The Herald Tribune opposed the school boycott and campaigned against it. The Amsterdam news supported the boycott and urged its readers to back it up.
We reproduced this front page story from the Herald Tribune to let people know what the opposition to the boycott had to say about it.
If we had said the same thing, someone might’ve accused us of being biased because we favored the boycott.
But the Tribune, even though it opposed the boycott, had the journalistic guts to tell the truth about it—and we’d like to talk a little about that truth right now.
It was the largest civil rights demonstration in the history of the United States.
And it should be forever put to rest all stupid suggestions that the Negro and Puerto Rican people of this city are not deeply dissatisfied and highly concerned with the conditions in our segregated schools.
And it points up what we have said all along—that New York’s minorities are willing to take to the streets in defense of their rights to integrate schools.
The facts are now laid bare for all to see.
Mr. Donovan of the Board of Education went right down to the day of the boycott saying that he did not believe that such a boycott could or would take place.
Well, now he knows.
Mr. Donovan, even as his own Board of Education revealed that 464,000 had participated in the boycott stubbornly called the demonstration “a fizzle.”
To that we would like to add a warning:
If Monday’s demonstration of 464,000 was a fizzle, then the city of New York couldn’t possibly stand the real thing.
For despite the orderliness of the demonstration Monday, there was always the possibility of violence, and if there is another boycott it is almost certain to be twice as large and therefore twice as dangerous as the first one.
Yet Mr. Donovan, stubborn hostility in the face of the full facts before him is simply inviting another boycott.
It’s high time. Mayor Wagner summoned Mr. Donovan to Gracie mansion to talk a little common sense.