A month ago, three college educated Negroes received promotions in the Dallas, (Tex.), Post Office. What pushed them ahead — ability or the color of their skins? The promotion of the three set off a tempest in Dallas and in Washington. Some critics cried discrimination against whites. This Dallas controversy may be a harbinger of things to come, for tempests like it may brew again and again in the Negro struggle for better jobs and better conditions. Representative Alger, Republican of Texas, who represents Dallas, says the promotions there show that, “in a direct appeal to racial prejudice and in an effort to submit to threats of violence, the administration has ordered that Civil Service procedures be ignored and promotions made strictly on the basis of race." Clarence Mitchell, Washington representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, dismisses this argument. “The Dallas promotions.” he says, “were just one of those things where the Government is trying to correct an inequity.”

JOHN CRAMER of the Washington Daily News recently reported the mounting cries of complaint from Post Office workers under pressure to buy U.S. Mail, a book by the Department’s leading literary critic, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. “Not enough of our employees have bought it,” Cramer quoted some supervisors as telling postal workers. “It’s been suggested we really ought to make a better showing. . . . We think you ought to give us an assist on this.” Summerfield, his voice muted in this book through an “as told to” collaborator, surveys postal history, describes and defends present programs of the Department, and prophesies a bit about mail transport in the post-Summerfield, space age. The book would rank among the dullest ever written but for the fact that it appears at about the same time that another writer has decided to cover the same material from a very different point of view. Placed side by side, the views tend to tangle. Mailman U.S.A. comes from William C. Doherty, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. Doherty is a jovial Irishman with a keen wit and, at least where Postmasters General are concerned, a bitter pen...

IN THE Federalist days, the young, fretful American Republic tried to stop pamphlets about the French Revolution from reaching the mailboxes of its citizens. Since then, in sporadic moments of crisis, the federal government has continued to screen mail and weed out what it considers foreign or dangerous propaganda. Such moments have come in the pre-Civil War days, during the two World Wars, and, now, in the Cold War. But the present little-known program, a joint effort by the Post Office Department and the Customs Bureau, is facing the heaviest attack in its existence. For the first time, law suits have been filed against it. Under the program, the Customs Bureau checks foreign non-first class mail as it enters the United States. If translators and inspectors decide the mail contains foreign - usually Communist - political propaganda, the Post Office generally holds it up and sends a notice to the addressee...

An innocent-looking envelope, addressed to the teen-ager in your family, slips into the morning mail. The envelope is opened. A letter and two photos fall out. Half-nude girls beckon from the photos. For a few dollars, the letter promises, you can get more and better photos perhaps showing less clothing and more action. Shock and anger grip you. "Can't something be done to keep such mail away from the American home?" you demand. "Must our teen-agers be exposed to this?" You investigate and find that the Post Office department, led personally and loudly by Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, has embarked on a campaign to rid the mails of pornography. But there is a hitch. You also discover that in some quarters the post office attempt to clear up the mails has provoked bitterness and anger. Critics like the American Civil Liberties union and book publishers say the post office tramples on freedom of speech and of the press, and, in its zeal, too often mistakes a classic for a French post card. Through the years, they say, the post office, while attacking pornography, has tried to ban a host of literary classics...

IT IS fashionable in literary circles to snicker at Arthur E. Summerfield, the former Chevrolet dealer who may have produced one of the most publicized cases of poor judgment in the history of criticism. But the Postmaster General merely carried the logic of traditional Post Office procedures to their proper conclusion. Through the years, these procedures have led to the seizure of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Caldwell’s Tobacco Road as obscene literature, and Sholom Aleichem’s Bewitched Tailor, abolitionist pamphlets, discussions of the French Revolution, the Economist (London), and a Russian chess book as political propaganda. Vested with these traditional powers of censorship, Summerfield, a man who admits to reading little fiction, decided that D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover “taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work”; literary critics and at least one federal judge decided otherwise. Snickering at this difference in judgment seems like misplaced energy. Rather than examine the critical faculties of Summerfield, it would make more sense to examine the censorship powers of the Post Office...