THE LONG DEAD FATHERS

...The very next morning," Shockley continued, "Superintendent Elder informed me that I had been called in by the school board because I had tried to enter my daughter in the Milford High School...

...The heat outside was dry as the heat of Spain that afternoon, and I lemembered the school teachers I knew in Spain who lived on the edge of fear...

...The night before school opened, he telephoned me to say that he could not admit my daughter, but that he would refer my request to the September meeting of the board of education, and that I would hear further about the matter...

...I worked as a night-watchman six nights a week, and I went to school all day...

...When I was in the ninth grade, I was 24 years old and I had two children," he told me, and he laughed as he swung in the porch swing...

...This state which has no civil rights law, no fair employment act, no fair educational act, no accommodations act, and whose restaurants, cafes, amusement places are, with rare exceptions, banned to Negroes...

...My uncle, Samuel L. Conwell, was the first teacher they had at the Delaware State College, even before it had a president...

...Delaware, I found, is at least two states in one...

...And in April 1958, the board of education notified Shockley that he would not be rehired for the coming school year because of "wilful and persistent disobedience of orders...

...We have apparently left until last our conscientious explorations in the field of living harmoniously with our neighbor...

...They'll come up with the right answer in the end...

...Dickerson, giving him my daughter's name, and saying I would like to register her at the school...

...It was dinnertime, and the place was nearly full, but George Wilson was escorted by a waitress to a table right out in the center of the room, and they didn't even put a screen around him to hide him from view...

...The counties of Sussex and Kent, in the southern part of the state, are less developed industrially than New Castle county in the north...

...The writer must speak, too, the name of a Negro who at this moment is fighting his part of the battle for equality in which all thinking, feeling men are now engaged...

...In Sussex county, where a cross was burned recently on a labor organizer's lawn, a right to work bill was drafted for the state...

...this state where the Negro's chances for adequate schooling, adequate medical care, adequate housing, and cultural experiences, are scarcely better than in the Deep South...

...from Michigan State University and an advance certificate in administration and supervision from New York University, talked to me on a hot afternoon downstate in the parched Delaware countryside...

...activities, and even the public library is integrated now...

...That was in 1891...

...Merely by being American, I was rightful heir to the trees of this state, to its dust, and to the white pillared porticos of its houses as well as to the conflict in the minds of its citizens...

...Women and children are not allowed into the courtyard to see the whippings, but if you're a man, you are permitted to look on...

...So I went up to the office to register my daughter who had finished the last grade in the Benjamin Benneker School, the Negro school...

...But there is strong down-state support for right to work legislation and the bill will undoubtedly be brought up again...

...Her books include "A Frenchman Must Die," "His Human Majesty," and "The Smoking Mountain...

...And then I was given for the first time in my life a Main Street, elm-shaded once but now in the process of being widened and modernized and ruined by tradesmen's enterprise...

...After several unsuccessful tries at that, I left a note for Mr...

...I guess I'm just an ordinary, law-abiding American.'" During that interview, Clarence J. Evans of the board (all white), suggested to Shockley that he resign immediately...

...Respect for one's fellow-man is the sole requirement...

...In exploring this state that had become my own, I found that all backward legislation brought before the House in Dover is supported by the lower areas of Delaware...

...His father had had little schooling and could teach him nothing except how to work...

...Sure, I'm for integrating the schools," he said, "but you've got to be realistic...

...This bill, too, failed to pass the House...

...Shockley, a graduate of the Delaware State College at Dover, with an M.A...

...But in 1954, when we started integrating the local school, agitators like Bryant W. Bowles began working things up, and we had the Milford school incident...

...The members of the board asked me if I was a member of the NAACP, and I said yes, I was, but that I wasn't a member of any organization that did not uphold the Constitution of the United States...

...and this was another triumph for law-respecting citizens of Delaware—short-lived though the triumph may be...

...I believed I belonged more to those whose particular moment of history I shared than to those who had lived before me and whose blood and memories were in my veins...

...given backstreets that slept deeply still, with ancient graves crowding close to the tilted paving stones...

...It's as personal to all of us as a part of our religion...

...There is almost no area on earth which has not been rather thoroughly explored . . . But the frontier of human relations has scarcely been touched...

...It was better for them not to say this, and not to do that, not to breathe too deeply or think too clearly, if they wanted to sleep well...

...This was the first public meal of hope and promise he had eaten, he said, below the Delaware canal...

...We sat in the living-room of his modern, well-kept home on the outskirts— always on the outskirts—of the town of Milford...

...One of his duties was to encourage Negro boys and girls to get an education, and for his outstanding work as an educator in Delaware, the recently built men's dormitory on the campus has been named for him...

...I'm not a Communist, and I'm not a Fascist,' I said to the members of the Board...

...On May 28, such a decision was given by Judge John Biggs, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals...

...This was the "Little Rock Bill," designed to prevent the President of the United States from moving troops into a school district...

...I thought I'd let things take their course...

...And the writer must speak of another man, a Negro this time, who has managed to leave behind him, like some ancient guilt, the houses of the Negro quarter, and who lives on the same side of the street as white men do...

...Over the years the whipping-post in Delaware has become only a symbol of white power, but now that social changes are in process, some people have tried to activate this old colonial tradition to restore threatened white authority...

...On this brightening side of the medal, another fellow-citizen of mine, George Wilson, a Negro contractor, has just been elected to the town council of Newark, Delaware...

...And up in Wilmington, Wagner Jackson said quietly: "These threats to human rights would seem to be the dying threshings of the segregated system...

...Down here it's a truth as firm as you'll find that the Negro doesn't belong in the same classroom or the same school or the same restaurant with whites...

...I've done what I could to prepare my own people, but bucking public opinion isn't going to get the Negro anywhere...

...Don't you sell my Sussex people short," one school administrator below the canal said to a reporter...

...Twenty years later, I married a Frenchman in New York and went to France and England, remaining in Europe for another 20 years without ever coming home...

...I knew that they and their fathers had been a long time getting onto these porches...

...It has for generations been divided in attitudes and allegiances as well as in economic activities...

...My mother and father were teachers and civic workers in our state...

...I've been a social studies teacher," Shockley said to them then, "and I know I'd be a bad sociologist if I thought any differently about the nature and laws of human society than I do...

...Below the canal, men and women you talk to about school integration will quote Bryant KAY BOYtE is a well known novelist, short story writer, and essayist...

...If we do otherwise, we will destroy our present form of constitutional government...

...W. Bowles, self-appointed president of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, an agitator who was summoned to Delaware in 1954 to take public leadership of the anti-integration movement in the southern part of the state...

...The high school principal told me I would have to see the district superintendent, Chester T. Dickerson...

...That means Negroes can take out books on the same day as everybody else...

...But this was my own territory, my own continent, and if this man in whose house I sat couldn't live the quiet, law-abiding life that he wanted to live, then something in our inheritance had gone wrong, and the last wills and testaments of our fathers needed probating anew...

...France seemed my native soil, such talk had little to do with reality...

...We've had inter-racial basketball games and musical programs, and integrated Y.M.C.A...

...A part of it is bound through social usage and custom to the South, and yet Delaware cannot be said to be rightly of the South...

...Representative Charles P. West, Democrat from Gumboro, the leading champion of the right to work bill, recently sponsored another measure...

...Following a two-day hearing in May the board voted to sustain its decision, in the face of powerful support for Shockley, and an appeal is now being made to a higher tribunal...

...But the Republican representative from Dover called it "a rabble-rousing bill that was striving to stir up a situation already full of tension...

...That put us back a number of years...

...As he spoke, his father and the other fathers seemed to come alive in the quiet hours of the afternoon, the long dead fathers of these men, Negro and white, who sat on the porches of the brick and white-shingled houses, with the refrigerators in the kitchen where they belonged and not out on the lawns...

...You got to civilize them first, and then talk about living on the same side of the street with them...

...In January of this year, still another bill came before the General Assembly in Dover, a bill to make the use of the whipping-post mandatory when sentence calls for it...

...this state of Delaware gave me an actual soil on which to set my feet, a locality whose history I had an obligation to share, and I knew how wrong I had been about where my roots are...

...That was September...

...District Court requiring the state board of education to put into effect at the earliest possible date a desegregation program in all schools under its jurisdiction...

...Up in Wilmington you may not like it, but it's there...

...He is Alon-zo H. Shockley, Jr., a man in his late thirties, solid as rock both in flesh and in conviction, principal for eight years of the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Negro elementary school in Laurel, Delaware...

...In accepting Delaware as my home-state, I have accepted, too, the fact that Henry B. Appleford, Republican Representative from Wyoming, Delaware, and Nelson Massey, Democratic Representative from Dover, duly elected spokesmen for the people of Delaware, have asked in the year 1958 drat the whipping-post be brought back into use again...

...There were times when American friends spoke or wrote to me of roots, but in that long time when...

...Last August, I saw a notice in the Milford Chronicle about all students registering for the 1957 fall term...

...Wilson walked into the place a little uneasily, but quietly and deliberatedly, certainly under no illusion that President Eisenhower would invite him to breakfast at the White House if they threw him out...

...Sure, integrated housing is on the way, but the Negro's got to learn to keep his iceJbox inside his house instead of out on the front-porch or on the lawn before his neighbors are going to like him being there...

...One evening recently, George Wilson stopped his car in front of the Howard Johnson establishment outside Dover where the finance minister from Ghana, K. A. Gbedemah, had been refused an orange-juice some months before...

...The University of Delaware has been giving integrated extension programs down here for years, right in the high school buildings, and there's never been any disturbance caused by that," he said...

...Up in Wilmington, a young Negro named Wagner Jackson, who is working for a degree at the University of Delaware and is president of the Wilmington branch of the NAACP, says quietly: "The frontiers of the world are constantly being reduced...

...This decision reads in part: "The time for hesitation is past and the time for definitive action has arrived...

...So I just waited...

...My mother taught here for 37 years...

...A canal cuts through the state, and although it would be an exaggeration to compare that canal with the Mason-Dixon line, still to the south of it flourishes more openly the bigotry, prejudice, and poverty of the deep South...

...I believe they reflect the general belief that the forthcoming decision of the appellate court will sustain the ruling of the U.S...

...The law as enunciated by the Supreme Court of the United States must be obeyed by all of us...

...Paul when I was six months old, and I have never returned...

...He's the principal of a high school in Wilmington, and he has a doctorate from Harvard...

...In the New Castle county jail, the whipping-post has a more casual look, being part of the beams which extend from an overhanging roof in the open courtyard...

...But keep die do-gooders out of it, the NAACP, the whites who are so smart, so intelligent, who talk of 'morality' and 'the right thing.' These do-gooders talk about no compromise with truth and the right...

...With the exception of Wilmington, where Negroes have been on the city council for some years, George Wilson is the first Negro councilman in the state...

...What is truth and the right...

...Lecturing, writing, listening, I found I was committed through a common national past to men and women I had never seen before, for Delaware seemed to me America itself, America in miniature, seen in this concentrated form with greater precision and clarity...

...The red carpet was rolled out for me wide and handsome," he said, and he sat down and ate a steak dinner like any other American...

...Protest meetings against the right to work bill helped organized labor score a smashing victory in the legislature this spring when the bill failed to pass...

...Calling for passage of the bill, West said: "The situation in Arkansas is a good example of why we need this bill...

...His backyard and those of his white neighbors open into each other's, and when you sit on the porch with him on a Sunday afternoon, you can hear the conversation of the white people who sit on their porches just beyond...

...Although it has been some time since a man was flogged in Delaware, the posts have not been abolished...

...And yet it is a field in which significant and lasting progress can be effected by persons having little or no formal training...

...He asked me not to take notes of our conversation because he had nothing of any importance to say...

...As for going away, going up north," Shockley went on to me that hot afternoon, "that's something I can't do...

...I have often declared my belief that the voice of the writer, the artist, the voice that speaks with such authority in France, England, and in Scandinavia, as well as from the prisons of subjected countries, must become a voice of authority here...

...given a territory divided in activity and in history as America is, one portion of it still adamant in maintaining the unequal status of many of its citizens, and another part awakening to the realization of equality...

...It must speak out loudly and clearly, for instance, against the superintendent of schools in Delaware, a man with, uneasy eyes...

...The whipping-posts in the southern counties of Kent and Sussex are upright structures kept painted a bright, fresh white...

...You've got to have the buildings to put the students in, and they've got to be ready themselves, the Negroes...

...I don't want to send my children away from Delaware for their schooling...

...Enlightened citizens of Delaware say that the right to work campaign is intended solely to keep the status of the down-state laborer nonunion and his wages permanently low...

...This is where we live, this is where I've paid my taxes for years, this is where my children belong...

...I was born in Minnesota, but my family moved away from St...

...If ever the day comes when I do, then I'll tender my resignation right away, because I wouldn't be the right kind of principal or teacher any more...

...It is a protective bill that looks forward to what might happen in Delaware...

...I can't change my ideas on the Constitution of our country or about the decisions handed down by the highest court we have...

...My family has lived in Sussex County since 1820, maybe even earlier than that...