The Wrong Battleground:

...But if you ask him to admit that he and his kin and his sacred ancestors are moral lepers, you have made dialogue impossible and war inevitable, as we discovered in 1861...

...Disengagement—without an explicit treaty, which would freeze the situation—would then be in order, to be followed by a necessarily slow reconstruction of broken communication lines...

...Let the Northerner remember that when the Southern white is pressured he often turns his hostility on the Negro...

...Yet it is precisely this assault on identity that is so congenial to the reforming temper...

...Here we offer two differing evaluations of the Court's ruling and its effects during the last seven years...

...Both the Administration and Congress believed that "the judges have made their decision...

...now let them enforce it...

...The white Southerner must be induced to behave himself and to absorb the values and attitudes of 20th century Occidental culture without it being made explicit that this involves ceasing to be a Southerner and becoming an American...

...School integration, on the other hand, is a judicial novelty based on a dubious sociology which runs counter to longestablished community habits...

...To the white Southerner, a black man in the voting booth has come to mean a black child in the white schoolhouse...

...In the North, opposition based on negrophobia, group-exclusiveness and status-anxiety is supplemented by concern over Negro violence and rowdyism, the contagion of slum habits and attitudes and lowered academic standards...

...The longer the struggle the poorer the chances of reaching a modus vivendi, since both sides will be unwilling to jettison the efforts invested without complete victory...

...Negro voting is unrestricted in the North and substantial in many places in the South...

...A prolonged struggle based on moral principle would produce the worst possible results...

...Board of Education...

...It is virtually a separate nationality, and almost all its distinctive features are handicaps...

...A far wiser choice of battleground would have been the voting booth...

...Henry J. Abraham is associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania...

...It is the task of statesmanship and sociology to find ways of altering that status, as a step toward the acculturation of the Negro and his incorporation into the mainstream of American civilization...

...And let him remember too that an appeal to principle is effective only when the principle is shared...

...School Integration TWO VIEWS The Wrong Battleground By Victor Fox Seven years after the Supreme Court decision on school integration it is clear that the judicial triumph was a major calamity for the Negro people...

...Victor Fox, a free-lance writer, lives in New York...

...Only a tiny percentage of Negro students have been integrated into white schools, chiefly in border states, The upshot of the fierce struggle now raging in the deep South will at best be mere token integration: admission of two or three well-scrubbed Negro children to each white school...

...Enlargement of the Negro electorate in a Southern state would have involved little interracial contact, interfered with the habits of no one but the election commissioners and enlisted the support of many educated Southerners...

...This slight advance has been made at the cost of embittering group relations, ending Negro progress in virtually every other field and causing many formerly sympathetic or tolerant whites to turn hostile...

...No such national leadership was available, however, either inside or outside the Government...

...Neither should the battle be converted into an Armageddon...

...From this standpoint, no worse battle ground could have been chosen than school integration, except possibly the demand for intermarriage...

...to do so would leave the enemy in almost full possession of the field...

...There the matter will apparently rest for another generation...

...It has been argued that the organization of a movement of national scope to keep the various groups in communication, mollify the die-hards and eliminate the stigma of purely regional enforcement would have produced far happier consequences...

...Of course I want to see the Negro advance, but not at the expense of my kids...

...Many Northern "liberals," highly sympathetic to the Negro cause, move to exclusive suburbs as soon as Negroes turn up in neighborhood schools...

...In controversies involving basic values a reflective man will reach his position by the application of moral principle, but a sensible man will not argue it on that basis...

...As it is, the effort to enforce integration first has choked off much of the white Southern support for Negro political claims and extension of the franchise has become problematical...

...Unfortunate as the present segregation battle may be, it cannot be called off now...

...A stubborn man may listen if told that his policy is self-defeating, his facts erroneous and, times having changed, he must bow to the inevitable...

...When principles differ a tactical appeal is necessary...

...On May 17, 1934, the Supreme Court issued its historic judgment on school segregation in the case of Brown vs...

...Rather it ought to be pressed to the point where it is clear that chicanery and violence do not pay, and that the price of submission is not too onerous...

...The special status of the Negro is the most cherished item in the Southern way of life...

...School integration is strongly opposed not only by the great mass of Southern whites, hut also by the great mass of Northern whites...

...The South is not simply a laggard section of the U.S., any more than Sicily is of Italy...

...it is protected by an explicit constitutional clause almost a century old and reaffirmed by numerous court decisions...

...For Negro suffrage would have been a powerful lever to force improvement in Negro schools and respect for Negro rights generally, as a necessary prelude to school integration...

...The obvious strategy for a weak minority seeking equality is to urge its claims only along those frontiers that lack sharp definition, where emotional and ideological entrenchments are weakest, and to join battle only where large segments of the majority group are allied or indifferent...

...The past tense is significant...