National Reports
LERCHE, CHARLES O. Jr.
NATIONAL REPORTS Georgia Watches Little Rock By Charles O. Lerche Jr. Atlanta As one of the acknowledged centers of "total resistance" to school integration and defense of the "Southern way of...
...Atlanta As one of the acknowledged centers of "total resistance" to school integration and defense of the "Southern way of life," Georgia has been following I'affaire Faubus anxiously...
...he is empowered to call on "every able-bodied male" in the state to serve under his orders in preserving the "peace...
...How Capitol Hill feels about it is unclear...
...How much this disturbs at least some Atlantans was suggested by one citizen who told me, obviously with considerable pain: "The way things are going in Georgia, I wish I was back in Mississippi...
...When the Federal court rules that the applicants should be admitted, all possible appeals will be taken...
...The ruling junta has no choice except to go through with total resistance, no matter what stupidities it gives rise to...
...The state has a complex series of laws on its books designed to head off mixed schools...
...then the Governor will go into action...
...and even here their numbers are discouragingly small...
...Many Southerners are totally irrational about miscegenation...
...What interests all Georgians about Little Rock is what it will mean to them when the integration fight reaches Georgia...
...Griffin has more power than Faubus...
...Some students of local politics are convinced that the entry of Federal troops would lead to large-scale bloodshed, both in race riots and in actual battles between the mob and the troops...
...This may well be the spark that touches off a nasty series of racial incidents...
...Even the Koinonia Farms episode in Americus has calmed down...
...The Governor has no real choice except to use the extraordinary powers given him by the last Legislature to suspend the bus company's operation...
...I have found no one in the state Attorney General's office who thinks he could persuade a Federal court that using tax money to provide tuition to private white schools is in compliance with Brown v. Board of Education...
...This would be, after all the fire-eating talk, total surrender and equivalent to committing political suicide...
...Nobody expects this step to be taken before all other alternatives are exhausted...
...If the private-school plan fails, the slate administration's choices are few and hard...
...On intermarriage very few Southerners can take a moderate stand, and they will go to considerable extremes to preserve what they call the purity of Southern womanhood...
...The ingredients of violence were always present in the Southern subconscious...
...They'll chortle at the thought of city folks having to walk to work, and "Horatius at the Bridge" Griffin will once again be able to claim he turned back the Yankee and Negro hordes...
...Georgia's politicians are proud of their laws, conlrasling them favorably with the "pussy-footing" pupil-assignment approach used in Virginia and North Carolina...
...White parents will receive tuition grants...
...Here the state will fight the case with every resource of pettifoggery...
...Rut no one thinks for a second that a racial crisis is not coming...
...The private-school system will go into operation immediately (I have been told that the prospective lessees of every school in the state have long been selected...
...Other legislation authorizes the leasing of public-school facilities to private groups for use as private schools...
...The Atlanta Negro leadership seems to be avoiding action on any issue until after Mayor Bill Harts-field is safely elected over his segregationist opponent...
...Once the election is out of the way, however, Atlantans expect last year's bus-segregation case to come to trial...
...Under the twin compulsions of bad publicity in the nation's press since 1954 and the conscienceless manipulation of self-seeking political leadership, the Southern psyche (or, at least, the Georgia psyche) has become inflamed...
...School integration, however, will be another story...
...It does no good to inquire how this would happen, since it doesn't throughout most of the North...
...Up to a point, the sequence of events can be predicted...
...There seems no possibility that the state can escape feeling the full weight of Federal coercion before the question has run its course...
...In fact, Roy Harris of Augusta, the state's number 1 segregationist, claims to share credit with Governor Marvin Griffin for "stiffening Faubus's back" and alerting the "decent white people" of Little Rock to what the Yankee "hypocrits" (sic) were planning...
...Ultimately this road will run out...
...He will, as he has promised, close any school in the state ordered by a court to admit Negroes...
...Northerners find it hard to understand why such uncontrollable passion should be released by the admission of a handful of Negro children to a white school...
...Its major defense is a "private-school" amendment to the state constitution that permits the state to make tuition grants to parents in lieu of providing public schools...
...There are a lot of reasons, but in this case the simplest is probably the most widely applicable...
...Bus segregation, everyone agrees, will fail in the courts...
...Finally the state courts will rule contrary to the applicants, and they will go to Federal courts...
...the Montgomery cases seem absolutely controlling...
...The path of the Negro petitioners through the state's "administrative remedies" will be slow and tortuous...
...One result of the sharp cleavage since Little Rock has been the disappearance of the "moderates" anywhere except in the larger cities...
...At present, there are no racial incidents marring the orderly course of affairs here...
...The local NAACP is quietly planning to begin a suit fairly soon—possibly next term...
...A second possibility is the repeal of all legislation on public education (this would require a constitutional amendment) and total abolition of the schools...
...A Federal court order to integrate would bring out a mob in any Georgia street far bigger and much uglier than the Little Rock group...
...This will infuriate Atlanta, but will score a lot of points in the redneck country...
...They might, in the first place, submit and permit the Negroes to enter...
...Negroes are not so sure of receiving any...
...they point to the forced integration of the New York schools and predict darkly that New York will soon be a mulatto city...
...The nation knows, moreover, that Harris and Griffin addressed a mass meeting of Citizens' Councileers in Little Rock the week before school opened...
...The Supreme Court, as Georgia's legal minds have pointed out, cannot force a state to operate a public school...
...What frightens a lot of people— and this is where Little Rock comes into the picture—is that the Governor will try to evade his hard choice by trying open defiance of a Federal court order to integrate...
...Although Roy Harris bravely calls for this course, on the ground that decent Georgians would prefer their children racially pure and ignorant to educated and integrated, serious-minded citizens contemplate this prospect with horror...
...But what happens if a suit is then brought attacking the private-school system as just as much a violation of equal protection under the law as outright segregation...
...Dozens of otherwise sober and intelligent Atlantans have told me that integration inevitably means intermarriage, and that "the schools would teach them how...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 43
