SCHOOL INTEGRATION: AN ALMOST LOST CAUSE

...Necessarily they must combine their efforts, as they have done in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but such an organization immediately becomes an obvious target for harassing investigations and legislation, and is forced to divert much of its energy and its resources into battling for its right to exist...

...A few moments before the Senate voted on the deletion of Title III, Senator Jacob Javits, of New York, said, with deep insight: "Today's vote is supremely important...

...No Negro child has yet attended those schools...

...Texas, for example, has a patently invalid law which purports to make it a matter of local option for school districts to decide whether they will or will not comply with the Constitution of the United States...

...I think it is being lost...

...equal—school systems has been a crushing financial burden, accepted by the taxpayers only out of habit...

...Let one segregation statute be held unconstitutional by a federal court and the legislature in that state will hasten to enact a new package of laws which must be attacked and invalidated one by one before an end to segregation can be ordered...

...In the states and cities where these conditions exist, the Supreme Court decision must have been secretly welcomed, no matter how the politicians waved the Confederate flag, because it provides a graceful excuse for ending this expensive obeisance to a virtually-forgotten ancestral memory...

...Senator Russell must have scented victory when the President told his press conference the next day that his objective in the bill was merely to protect voting rights, and that he had read the bill that morning and found phrases in it he didn't understand...

...This complacence is fed by the well-publicized success of integration in places like Louisville and San Antonio, and by the figures released from time to time showing hundreds of Southern schools now open to children of all races...

...Four years have been more than enough to show how naively unrealistic that hope was...

...So long as lay people will not follow their spiritual advisers even as to race relations within the church, it is idle to hope that they will let religious teaching dictate their action in public affairs...

...The House of Representatives passed the bill in this form, and it was no secret that the bill gave the Attorney General this power...

...Senator Richard Russell, of Georgia, blasted Title III as "the most cunningly devised and contrived piece of legislation I have ever seen," and suggested that it had been sneaked into the bill without the knowledge of the President...

...The inauguration of a test ban now could start the wheels of international reconciliation turning and initiate a movement that will eventually bring genuine peace to the troubled peoples of the world...

...But the Dallas school board has announced that there will be no integration there next year because, so it says with breathtaking hypocrisy, it does not know which is controlling, the federal court order or a Texas law, enacted since the litigation began, requiring continued segregation...

...Usually when a government has a law forbidding certain conduct, the full resources of that government, including its police and its prosecutors, are devoted to preventing and punishing such conduct...

...No Negro child has yet been admitted to a white school in Virginia or Louisiana, though in those states litigation intended to cause some desegregation is well advanced, and the future is unpredictable...

...Decisive federal action in support of integration is the only thing which will persuade the South that the end of segregation is inevitable, and that nothing is to be gained by throwing stones outside a Central High School or spitballs within...

...Title III of the bill which ultimately became the Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized the Attorney .General to bring actions to enforce school integration, and the other rights given by the Fourteenth Amendment...

...Even were the NAACP free to pursue its course unmolested, it is a rather puny David forced to do battle simultaneously with a number of alert Goliaths...

...Perhaps judge Lemley's order will be reversed on appeal—though I wouldn't bet on it...

...If the voters of Pleasanton had rejected integration, they would have been faced with the alternatives of paying heavily for an adequate Negro school, or of losing accreditation and state aid for all the schools of their district...

...Almost the only white voices which have been heard to speak favorably of desegregation have been voices trained for use in the pulpit...

...Since the Court spoke, Hawkins' case has been back and forth through the Florida courts again, has gone once more to the Supreme Court, and now is in a lower federal court...

...For the federal government to remain idle in the face of open violation of its supreme law, except in the rare case where private persons have secured a court order calling for compliance with the law, is, in effect, to concede the ultimate victory to those states which are determined not to obey the law...

...Under Judge Lemley's order, they will not be allowed to return to Central this fall...

...Mansfield, Texas, was ordered to end segregation in its schools by the federal court in August, 1956...

...Both supporters and opponents of a temporary nuclear test suspension should realize that it would be only a beginning...

...Bulganin and Khrushchev have also asserted that the "discontinuance of the manufacture" of atomic and hydrogen weapons should be among the aims of disarmament...

...But even if, after long court struggles, Negroes are admitted to a particular school, new and more subtle statutes will surely have been enacted to remove them from that school, and thousands of other schools will remain segregated...

...It has been far too easy to be complacent about the future of desegregation, to assume that because the Supreme Court has spoken, the South must ultimately go along...

...The whole ball game can indeed be lost...

...This did not quite end the matter...

...Most Southern states are already armed with another answer, statutes which provide that any school occupied by federal troops is to be closed, while the white children are educated in private homes, churches, or any other place that can be found...

...By pressing inexorably onward to bring into operation a nuclear weapons test suspension and the rest of our disarmament blueprint, we shall bring closer the day when we can rid the world of its burdens of fear, hate, and want...

...A threatening mob, unrestrained by local and state authorities, was enough to intimidate would-be Negro applicants, and to keep the school for white students only...

...Army...

...No Negro child has yet been admitted to a white school in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, or in East Texas, and there is no sign that any will be admitted in any reasonable period of time...

...One week later it was formally interred...

...Violence may be the principal weapon for keeping schools segregated, despite orders of the federal courts, but it has a powerful ally in the delaying legalism...

...This is why an inspection breakthrough into the Soviet Union outweighs the military value of the development of new varieties of nuclear weapons...

...It will remain lost unless and until some future Congress corrects its mistake of last summer by adopting a statute similar to Title III...

...It has been only a year—though it now seems ancient history—since Congress came close to putting the responsibility for ending segregation on the federal government, where it properly belongs and where it must rest if segregation is to be ended...

...There are special reasons why private law enforcement will not suffice to end segregation...

...It starts the process by which the whole ball game can be lost...

...Finally, the South has the advantage of the seeming neutrality of the federal government...

...And, not irrelevantly, the federal government has express constitutional authority, conferred by section five of the Fourteenth Amendment, to see to it that every person in the land enjoys the rights that Amendment guarantees...

...Since both governments have individually proclaimed this as a goal of nuclear disarmament, I propose that this and perhaps other specific disarmament goals be jointly affirmed in principle by both governments...

...The President has often insisted that a cutoff in the production of nuclear material for weapons purposes is the "heart of the nuclear weapons problem...

...In the only election which has been held under this absurd statute, the people of Pleasanton, Texas, voted quite decisively in favor of integration...

...The federal government alone has the money and the legal manpower and the patience and the power to force recalcitrant states to obey the law...

...Such orders there surely will be...

...It is true that the federal government did intervene, effectively and powerfully, at Little Rock, but its intervention came at the wrong time and for the wrong reason...

...Integration has come, on the whole, only in those places where it is easy, where white supremacy is not a vital article of faith, where the cost of two separate—though almost never CHARLES ALAN WRIGHT teaches constitutional law at the University of Texas, where he is a professor of law...

...The South has the tremendous advantage of being able to revise at will the rules of the game...

...A state which discriminates according to race in admissions to its schools is breaking the law...

...Before the bill came to the Senate, Telford Taylor, in an article in, the New York Times Magazine, referred correctly to Title III as "the most important provision of the bill...

...When Title III was discarded, so too was any reasonable hope that school segregation will be ended in the foreseeable future...

...It is hard to imagine a clearer or simpler blueprint for thwarting desegregation...

...It is plain that segregation will not be ended in the Deep South merely because it is contrary to the Constitution of the United States...

...Segregation in the public schools is fully as unlawful in Biloxi, Mississippi, where no court action has even been begun, as it is in Little Rock, Arkansas, where a court has decreed its end...

...The South will not end segregation because the Supreme Court says it must, nor because the churches denounce segregation as immoral, nor because the NAACP, laboring manfully with inadequate resources, brings a pitifully few lawsuits looking toward this end...

...The cost of these lawsuits is prohibitive...

...Court orders must be obeyed, in a law-abiding country, and it is right that the government should see to it that they are, but a court order has no stronger claims to obedience than does the Constitution itself, from which the courts derive their authority...

...Last winter a federal court in Dallas finally issued a decree, after the case had been appealed three separate times, calling for an end of segregation in that city...

...All that has happened since that day—the wearing and unnecessary battle over the jury trial amendment, passage of the Civil Rights Act itself, the dispatch of troops to Little Rock, Judge Lemley's decision—has been a diverting but fundamentally meaningless sideshow...

...The states resisting integration have the edge with regard to legal talent...

...Hawkins has helped make a good deal of law, but he has not yet been admitted to law school...

...These lawsuits are extremely expensive, and the funds which the NAACP is able to raise by private contribution are a pittance compared to what Southern legislatures are willing to appropriate from otherwise-impoverished state treasuries for the cause of preserving segregation...

...Individual Negroes, denied their constitutional right to attend an integrated school, cannot possibly be expected to carry the brunt of litigation...

...Perhaps the federal government will have the determination to insist on reopening of the school, and to protect Negro children who go there...

...As a test ban comes closer to realization, we must stress our purpose of progressing to other phases of arms control...

...The best time to do this would be at the time a test ban agreement is concluded, for it would then refute any impression that the test ban was the only disarmament we wanted...

...Segregation remains almost invariably the pattern within the church itself, and at church-run schools...

...These gratifying developments have caused those who do not follow the situation closely to overlook the insolence of Dallas, the intransigence of Georgia—to ignore, in a word, the reality of what has been happening and will happen in the South...

...Pleasanton is in South Texas, where the Negro population is small and prejudice traditionally has been directed against Mexicans rather than Negroes...

...That they will end segregation is far less clear...

...If the South will not end segregation because it is contrary to law, if the South will not end segregation because it is immoral, there remains the possibility that segregation will be ended by orders of the federal courts...

...Others have comforted themselves with the hope that a God-fearing South would end segregation because segregation is morally wrong...

...This hope, too, has been forlorn...

...Two Episcopal bishops, one in Virginia and one in Texas, met defeat at the hands of the pious and respectable church leaders who make up a diocesan convention when they proposed this spring that summer camps operated by the church should not be racially segregated—and this despite the influence and prestige which bishops historically enjoy in the Episcopal Church...

...Otherwise responsible newspapers, with few exceptions, fan the fires of lawlessness with distorted and inaccurate criticisms of the Supreme Court, and proud boasts, like that of the Dallas Morning News, that the policy in their area is "all deliberate delay...

...But the Senate voted, 52-38, to delete from the bill all except an unimportant remnant of Title III, and thus to deny to the federal government the power to compel obedience to the Constitution of the United States...

...Supreme Court ruled, after years of litigation, that Virgil D. Hawkins cannot be denied admission to the University of Florida Law School because of his race...

...Segregation will be ended in the South only if the government of the United States recognizes that it is its function and its responsibility to require compliance with the Constitution...

...Prospects that this situation will change are bleak indeed...

...Southern legislatures vie with each other in passing resolutions of defiance of the Court and laws intended to circumvent enforcement of its decrees...

...It is virtually unprecedented to leave enforcement of the law of the land exclusively to private lawsuits, brought and financed by private persons, as we now are doing with that provision of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibiting school segregation...

...It is the Constitution of the United States which the NAACP is seeking to enforce, but the government of the United States acts as if it is a matter of complete indifference to it whether segregation continues, in defiance of the Constitution, or whether it is ended...

...Southern political leaders —even those regarded as "liberal" on other issues—bid for voter support by denunciations of integration and promises that it will never take place during their administration...

...A handful of Negro children do go to previously white schools in North Carolina, but their admission is openly described as a mere token, designed to obscure the fact that the overwhelming majority of Negro children in that state are being denied equal protection of the laws...

...Unfortunately these are voices crying in the wilderness, ineffective to persuade even the faithful...

...No Negro has yet attended that university, except for the day or two that Autherine Lucy risked her life to get to the classroom...

...It is a measure of the extent to which Southern conditions and Northern hopes have deteriorated that today it is entirely clear segregation will not be ended by 1963...

...Probably the courts will be able to see through such laws...

...These, however, are not the circumstances which exist throughout the Deep South...

...There is a final possibility...

...Under all the circumstances, it is not surprising that Pleasanton accepted integration...

...The problem of integration is, in ultimate analysis, a simple question of law enforcement...

...Unfortunately, the very next day, again at a press conference, he made a remark which the newspapers and the Senate understood to mean that he was not convinced that it would be wise to permit the Attorney fieneral to bring school integration suits...

...A temporary inspected test termination would constitute a natural step toward a prohibition of nuclear arms production...

...The day the Senate agreed to consider the bill President Eisenhower issued a statement in which he said that one of the four objectives of the bill was "to provide a reasonable program of assistance in efforts to protect the constitutional rights of our citizens"—an obvious reference to Title III—and that, though the Senate might make changes in detail, he hoped all four of these objectives would be retained...

...Quite frequently private persons who have a special concern with the unlawful conduct may also bring their own lawsuit, but this is a supplement to the efforts of the government to enforce the law, rather than a substitute for such effort...

...Even more frightening, it is now entirely conceivable—perhaps even probable—that in major parts of the South the schools will never be desegregated...

...But Title III soon fell victim to Southern adroitness and Administration vacillation...

...It is no disparagement of the dedicated lawyers who have worked tirelessly for the NAACP to say that, good as they are, they are not the outstanding lawyers of the South...

...More is at stake here than the right of Negro children to go to school with white children in the South, important as that right is...

...In this battle the Southern states have every advantage...

...If the Supreme Court's decision that segregation is unconstitutional is allowed, because of federal inaction, to become a dead letter in places where it is unpopular, we can abandon our proud boasts that we live in a strong federal union, rather than a loose confederacy of states, and that we enjoy constitutional government under law...

...It is doubtful that this is what the President actually meant to say, or what he thought he had said, but when no action was taken to correct this interpretation of his remarks, Title III was dead...

...They did this, however, only because the local Negro school was so shockingly inadequate as to offend the sensibilities of usually tolerant state officials...

...Many Southern clergymen have behaved splendidly on this issue...

...More than four years have gone by since the Supreme Court announced that the Constitution of the United States forbids racial segregation in public education, but the Deep South remains committed to its old ways, its defenses not even seriously attacked much less dented...

...The University of Alabama was ordered to admit Negroes in 1955...

...otherwise the momentum we desire as one of the main effects of the ban might be lost...

...For this statement he was roundly denounced, by Negro leaders and by liberal groups, as a "gradualist" and a "go-slower...

...It is only the first phase of our total disarmament blueprint...

...It has been two and a half years since the U.S...

...Despite the lack of clear encouragement from the White House, Senator Knowland was able to hold a majority of Republicans to support of Title III, and they were joined by some— but far from all—liberal Democrats...

...If a handful of juvenile delinquents, goaded on by their elders and their governor, can create enough unpleasant incidents within an integrated school, then, so Judge Lemley ruled, the constitutional rights of Negro children must yield to the desire of the community for peace and order in its schools...

...Nine Negro children did attend Central High School in Little Rock, thanks to their own fantastic courage and the might of the U.S...

...There was a time when many people hoped that the South would end segregation simply because segregation is no longer lawful, and the Southern gentleman—or so the myth runs—is a law-abiding person...

...In the course of his campaign in the primaries leading up to the 1956 Democratic National Convention, Adai Stevenson commented that it would be a fine thing if desegregation of the public schools could be completed by 1963, the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation...

...Those who insist that a cutoff of nuclear weapons production be linked to a nuclear test suspension should be more perceptive of the political realities and view this whole problem of disarmament in more of a time perspective...