ADVOCATE REGISTER (Designed to Read) Publi~hed by Oliver Smith News Agency (Established 1943 OLIVER E. SMITH, EDITOR Office 1453 N. Williams Ave.-EM. 7266 ATwater 2551, 3411 S. W. First Avenue, Portland 1, Oregon Free from Services of Any Special Interests The News As We See It. The Editorials Are Our Opinions IN. MY OPINION By Rene Bozarth With the end of 1950 and the first half of the twentieth century, almost everyone with access to a typewriter or a ball point pen has attempted the verbal' gymnastic of both summing up the past and neatly classifying the future. Of course, there have been a few carping voices from the sidelines nagginga way that the half century really ende,sl. with the beginning of 1950, and surprisingly enough emotions can become quite intense in these discussions of time. Like the sweet old party who firmly set her Big Ben on what ~he insisted was "God's Time" all last year and refused to concede the right of City Council or State Governor or "That Man in the White House" himself to change it back an hour. There have been two amazing and violent political issues of this first half century (regardless of when it ended, the poor thing did end) and both of them keep cropping up in the most unexpected places and recurring from one year to the next. One is Daylight Saving Time (as though the sun could be mad'e to stand still) and the other is, under a guise of various names, the Civil Rights Issue (battled as though the Constitution means nothing, and often voted down as though no one has the right to expect fulfillment of guaranteed liberties). No study is more interesting that the efforts of humanity to divide and measure and harnass time. Our experiments with calendars and other such devices have been both amusing and frightening, especially when we take the current products as our absolute and ruthless masters. Our measuring of time is such a poor thing. Our present, rather new, calendar is still defective utterly. It, in theory, dates from the birth of Christ-and even in that it misses the mark by. at least four years. But the problem of Daylight Saving time, believe it or not, hinges with the little old lady at the end of the runway (apologies to Mr. Lampman; the airplane has edged out the carline) and her quaint sub-conscious belief that God must have wound up the first clock and split each day in twelve parts and each month-somewhat erraticallyinto 30 or 31 or 28 and occasionally 29 days. He didn't, of course; but one dares not politically go so far as to say that Standard Time is not necessarily God's Time, anymore than Hank Luce's Time is. Civil Rights issues sort of spring from the same basis. Some greybearded son of Abraham who fancied himself the first anthropologist wrote down in the Book of Genesis ( another artificial name) that Noah's sons peopled the earth on a racial basis-with the progeny of Ham, Shem and J apheth causing the different colors of skin, instead of natural evolution and environment. And so for thousands of years the little old lady and most of the rest of us have believed that God really divided the world's people into colors and creeds, false divisions of humanity. We have ignored the lessons of time, by any measure, that racial and religious discrimination is never anything but economic and emotional. We have reached a time and a country where there are no races anymore-but we have refused to move the clock and calendar ahead. So, in recorded history, every ethnic group has sometime and somewhere been subjected to discrimination or persecution. The Israelites persecuted the Caananites and discriminated against the poor cross-bred Samaritans ( the good Samaritan would in modern times be a good Negro, or Oriental or, in one of history's ironies, a good Jew) . And from then on ( or back the other way, for all of that) first one people and then another is considered inferior. And every area of discrimination vanishes wh!'!n the economic causes behind it vanish. Which is why we dare-not confine our thinking or our work to any one area-such as the Negro "problem"-but must labor on a two fold front that covers the whole experience of discrimination. l. We must work constantly to root out every symbol and lie that divides mankind on the artificial basis of color or dogma (as we have tried to divide our days into hours). 2. We must labor without rest to improve the economic status of the whole community, so that there can be no areaof Englishment or Negroes-in economic problems that m turn produce the emotional problem of discrimination. I We must have courage and vision and understanding (so much finer a word than "tolerance") and above all, love. And we shall accomplish our task. The children °in our Colored homes in the South are nearly two grades ahead of their parents. In the recent survey of 17 southern counties entitled THESE MY BRETHREN, information was secured as to the grade in school completed by 4390 parents. The same information was secured regarding their children who had stopped school or were through school. The average grade completed by the 4390 parents was 7.0. The average grade completed by their children was 8.8. The children are nearly 2 grades ahead of their parents. If each generation exceeds the preceding one by two grades in school we can see progress ahead. This survey is being distributed by the Rural Department, Drew Seminary, Madison, New Jersey for 40 cents a copy. It contains 104 pages. - The wives in these families were a little more than one grade ahead of their husbands. The average grade completed in school by the husbands was 6.4, by the wives it was 7.5.
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