Issue Was Other Than Brotherhood

    I lost a job the other day.

    It wasn't a big job, but it did have prestige.  I was invited to be a judge in an essay contest for the high school students of Burbank.
   
    Last week, I got my notice.  My services wouldn't be needed.  The contest — organized and sponsored by the Burbank Human Relations Council — had been called off.

    No official reason was given to me, but it was only a matter of hours before the "unofficial" explanation started coming in from various sources.

    The most repeated one was that the Burbank city school system had decided that the subject matter of the essay contest was too hot to handle.

    This piqued my interest more than slightly because the essays were to be written on brotherhood.  Somehow, brotherhood never quite struck me as a controversial subject.  At least not in this portion of the nation.

    While I was making quiet inquiries into the situation, however, I was "scooped" on my own exclusive.  The story broke that the "issue of brotherhood" caused Burbank Superintendent of Schools Russell Croad to drop the contest like a hot potato.

    
Croad, one report said, was influenced in his decision by half a dozen protesting phone calls — four of them anonymous.  Another implied that the superintendent was against human relations.

    If these had been facts, there certainly would have been a story there.  An educator who labels brotherhood as a subject too controversial for his students is news.

    But those weren't the facts.

    The facts were that a small controversy did arise, but not over the issue of brotherhood.  It was the kind of an issue of no importance to anybody except those directly concerned.  Superintendent Croad called Jasper Teague , an engineer who was serving as contest chairman on the Burbank Human Relations Council, into his office and suggested that the contest be dropped.  He gave his reasons.

    Teague agreed to go along with Croad's suggestion.

    And that was that.

    After talking to both parties, I'm convinced that if the subject of the proposed essay had been "How to Build a Rabbit Hutch," the contest would also have been dropped.

     Croad told me yesterday, "We certainly aren't questioning human relations.  As far as our school program is concerned, we're not at variance with the objectives of the council.

    "What does bother me," he added, "is that so much was made out of it publicly.  The facts were twisted around to make it an issue."

    It bothers me too.

    There exists today, whether we like it or not, a strange hypersensitivity surrounding the once-innocuous words "brotherhood" and "human relations."

    People read strange meaning into them.  The fault, doesn't lie only with the hate-preachers who twist them into,  in their term, "mongrelization."  There are two extremes.  On the other, there are people who are quick to charge that anyone unwilling to participate in a specific human relations or brotherhood program — no matter what the individual's reasons — is automatically a narrow-minded bigot.

    That's a risky premise, too.

    The diametric definitions don't simplify the job of reporting social injustices, either.  I'm certainly in favor of bringing stories of — if you'll pardon the weighty term- social significance — to the attention of people.  Ignorance of what's going on never cured any social ill.

    But, by the same token, when you're reporting that kind of a story, you've got to be careful what your emotions, and other people's emotions, lead you to assume.  You might wake up in the morning to find that you were crying wolf.