TIGER AT OLE MISS

...Tiger at Ole Miss by REESE CLEGHORN In the years following the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision of 1954, the state of Mississippi passed through a period of convulsed reaction from which emerged a powerful, ultra-segregationist white Citizens Council organization, a repression of Negro voting more violent than ever, and at least five racial killings, including the macabre Era-mett Till case...

...Then came a statement that the University followed the same personnel policies as those in practice at all accredited institutions...

...It was not until 1957 that a sort of moratorium in the REESE CLEGHORN is the assistant city editor of the Atlanta Journal...

...Not only the power but the prestige of the councils suffered in consequence...

...One distressed faculty member observed: "If they get away with this one, there will be more...

...And as a university, we already are getting into trouble, because we have let a tiger in the gates...

...His colleagues at Ole Miss assumed he had survived the tempest intact, if not unscathed, for when the next summer's course listings were posted early in 1961 Professor Murphy was down, as usual, for constitutional law...

...The state has even subsidized the Citizens Councils by as much as $60,000 a year to help the Councils pay for their radio and television programs inside and outside Mississippi...

...Within the faculty, however, his case has been discussed with agonized concern...

...J. P. Coleman, the governor then in office, was given substantial credit for controlling the Jacobins of segregationist extremism...

...The trustees' office, however, showed an immediate interest, and shortly thereafter the board took unusual action: It approved a summer position for Murphy at a salary of about $2,000 but privately advised the University that he was to teach no courses...

...They later expressed their confidence in University Chancellor J. D. Williams and also announced that they had found no evidence that he or faculty members were "engaged in a plan or scheme of operation to subvert the Constitution, laws, and customs of Mississippi...

...His removal from the scene was accomplished in one of the quietest, smoothest attacks ever made in a state where battles over such matters are often clamorous...

...Already the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association, whose accreditation is crucial for a law school, have investigated Murphy's case...

...In this incident some faculty members see the specter of a slow, compromising purge of faculty members in moments of crisis, an ignoble surrender by the University's trustees to the extremists, and even the possibility of the loss of University accreditation...

...Coleman ..worked quietly against odds to reduce the influence of the Citizens Councils, which had sprung up in the Mississippi delta and spread all over the state under a banner of white supremacy preserved by economic and political pressure...

...In the summer of 1959 a Mississippi professor was invited by an acquaintance to attend an alumni meeting in Jackson, the state capital...

...Their reasoning is simple: If they do not allow him to teach his last term under contract, the only law school in the state of Mississippi may lose its accreditation...

...All this changed when Coleman, who by law could not serve another term as governor, was succeeded in 1960 by Ross Barnett, a sometimes-buffoonish, sometimes-shrewd lawyer who had campaigned proudly as a Citizens Councils member and advocate...

...Those familiar with the matter say that the ACLU called Murphy to ask whether the organization should send lawyers to help King at a sanity hearing...

...The ominous implication seemed to be that dismissals were ruled out because of accreditation requirements, rather than because the trustees were backing up the accused faculty members on principle...

...and apostasy, a term which had to be explained for some of the Twentieth Century alumni present...

...While the storm over the charges was still a squall, Murphy conveniently departed to teach at the University of Kentucky on a year's leave of absence...

...Murphy himself has had this to say about teaching: "I have discussed the teaching of constitutional law and also the handling of racial cases with other professors in Southern law schools, and I do not believe that my approach is substantially different from that followed elsewhere...

...violation of Mississippi's laws and traditions...

...However, thoughtful friends of the University fear that the trustees' bowing to the extremists forebodes even greater trouble in greater crises...

...Murphy was, in truth, a member of the ACLU...

...The accusations made by those of the alumni who arose to speak were the same ones that the Citizens Councils had been making verbally for two years: subversion, the precise nature of which was unspecified...

...he saw to it that no lawyers were sent in from some Northern city to represent King in a small-town Mississippi courtroom...

...Having opened the way to the claim that these remarkable indictments were originating with University alumni, the Citizens Councils leaders subsequently took them before the Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning, which operates Mississippi's state universities and colleges...

...The professor forced out by the ultra-segregationists is William P. Murphy, a pug-nosed, sandy-haired man in his mid-forties, who holds a doctorate in law from Yale...

...The accusations against Murphy, verbal and written, were that he was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, which some of the alumni called a "subversive" organization...

...If anything, then, Murphy not only did not give King legal aid...

...The segregation extremists lack only the satisfaction of making a public spectacle of the affair...

...The Murphy story reveals something of the plight of a state university at bay, and it points up the quiet desperation that often characterizes the moderate-extremist struggle in Mississippi...

...Although the Councils' active membership has declined greatly, their influence during the past two years, because of Governor Barnett's backing, has been stronger than ever...

...If Murphy can be removed, why not others who have provided no more substantial cause than he and who also have been under fire for many years...

...Along with many other alumni, he went there under the impression that the meeting had been arranged by the alumni association...

...This infiltration of state government has finally brought a victory coveted by the Councils since their formation: a successful assault on the faculty of the University of Mississippi which recently resulted in the departure of one of its members...

...he had joined only after asking a high University official whether membership would be acceptable to the University...

...Murphy has been at the University of Mississippi since 1953, occupying what one faculty colleague has described as the "highly sensitive" position of professor of constitutional law...

...As for Murphy's writings, they were traditional scholarly commentaries, with little in them to stir anyone who could accept rational discussion of the law and segregation...

...His lectures on Brown v. Topeka and other legal cases involving segregation are not recalled by his students as incitements to insurrection...

...The trustees granted the one-year leave with resounding unanimity, and the professor again departed, taking with him, for a second school year, the Murphy Problem...

...Murphy is said to have advised the ACLU that the man's rights probably were in no danger at this hearing, and this proved to be correct: King was ruled sane and subsequently left the state...

...It appears to me that the real criticism against me is not that I have propagandized in the classroom, but that I have not affirmed the proper kind of propaganda...

...The Citizens Councils, while gaining strength and eventually claiming 80,000 members, were frustrated throughout Coleman's administration because they could never bring the executive branch o£ state government into their corner...

...Clennon King, a former Negro state college teacher in Mississippi, had taken steps to register on the campus and then had been hustled away incommunicado to a mental institution...

...The governor leans heavily upon the advice of the Citizens Councils' leading figure, William J. Simmons, a middle-aged resident of Jackson active in the organization from its earliest days...

...But despite the fact that Murphy will make one more appearance on the Mississippi campus, the segregation extremists may rejoice that they hit their target and brought him down, even though he did stagger for a remarkably long time...

...A forceful teacher, Dr...

...Beyond the faculty itself, few Mississippians understand what has happened to Professor Murphy...

...crisis had been achieved, and with it some relaxation of tensions...

...The fact was, however, that it had been organized by Citizens Councils leaders, and it was immediately clear that the purpose was to assail some of the University's faculty...

...Then, as the fall term approached and it appeared that the trustees no longer could stave off a showdown, the University of Missouri invited Murphy to join its law faculty as a visiting professor, as Kentucky had done the previous year...

...However, the trustees said they had found evidence "that there have been some tactlessness and imprudence on the part of a very few of the faculty and staff...

...Professor Murphy, who has not taught on his own campus for two years, has submitted his resignation so that he may permanently join the faculty at the University of Missouri...

...After some prodding, the trustees investigated...

...It will come sooner or later...

...that in his constitutional law classes he taught that the state must abide by the U.S...

...The relevant accrediting rule is the one providing that a faculty member of Professor Murphy's status cannot be dismissed without good cause...

...The University administration was accused by one disturbed alumnus of allowing a Communist cell to operate on the campus, a charge that not even the harshest critics ever tried to substantiate...

...the former has notified the University that it is closely watching what looks like a bad situation...

...Murphy is expected to return to Ole Miss this summer, however, with the full approval of the trustees...

...he has been the subject of no public outcry...

...and that some of his writings, especially a review in the Mississippi Law Journal, reflected altogether un-Mississip-pian views on the law as it applies to the sovereign state of segregation...

...Supreme Court's desegregation decision...

...Under this arrangement, Murphy became the highest-salaried original thinker on the campus...

...that he had given legal aid to Clennon King, a Negro who tried unsuccessfully to integrate the university in 1958...

...Now, three years after it began in earnest, the affair is ending, with the same smoothness and subtlety of action that characterized it ever since it got into the hands of the trustees...