View Of Killing As ‘Right Thing’

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32302, 21 May 1970, Page 11

View Of Killing As ‘Right Thing’

(N.Z. Press Assn —Copyright) WASHINGTON, May 20. A civil rights leader suggested yesterday that police involved in the killing of two students at Jackson State College, Mississippi, might have thought they were “doing the right and patriotic thing” on the basis of anti-protest statements by President Nixon and Vice-Presi-dent Spiro Agnew. Mr Whitney Young, director of the National Urban League, said at a Senate hearing that he would be surprised if they did not expect to receive the Medal of Freedom. Mr Young said the police

shooting of students at Jackson State College should not come as a surprise “when the President calls them (student protesters) bums and the Vice-President calls them rotten apples.” “It is as wrong for top officials in our Government and white leaders to call people bums and rotten apples as it is for revolutionaries to call people pigs and honkies," Mr Young told a special Senate committee on equal education opportunities. Senator Walter Mondale (Democrat, Minnesota), asked whether Mr Young noticed less public reaction to the slaying of two Negro students at Jaekson than to the deaths of four white students at Kent State University in Ohio. “Yes, and it’s tragic.” Mr Young replied, but added that Negro leaders considered it useless to complain to Administration officials.