Time & the Schools

In Washington, D.C., one morning last week, Principal Mildred Green of the Raymond elementary school solemnly walked into her auditorium, faced her audience of new pupils, and calmly began a special opening-day speech. She chose her words carefully, for this year, for the first time, her once all-white school was going to be 50% Negro. "This," said she, "isn't a school until you make it one. What kind of a school it will be depends upon you . . . You can make it happy by being fine and friendly and kind to each other."

Principal Green's words apparently had their effect at Raymond. More important, they seemed to set the tone for the entire capital. Some 3,000 Negroes were transferred to white schools last week, and plans were afoot to desegregate the whole school system by next year. By week's end, hardly a protest had been heard. Reported Assistant Superintendent Norman J. Nelson: "We don't know of one single thing untoward happening."

Elsewhere in the South, citizens and officials were also facing the problems brought on by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision against segregation in the public schools. St. Louis took the first step by removing the color line in its special schools for handicapped children. White and Negro pupils arrived in the same buses, started the year, without incident. "Similar experiences," said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "are occurring throughout Missouri ... In Little Dixie [central Missouri], 52 Negroes enrolled for high school at Fulton. In the heart of the Bootheel cotton country, 20 attended classes at formerly white schools in Sikeston . . . Time is running out on race discrimination in this America. Missouri at least can tell time a little better than some states."

Arkansas, it seemed, could also tell time. In Fayetteville (pop. 17,000), five pupils took their places in the high school as if they had been going there for years. And last week Charleston, Ark. (pop. 900) quietly let it be known that eleven Negroes had been peacefully attending the white school since opening day, Aug. 23. But though such peace and quiet were not exactly the exception in the South, they were far from being the rule. Among developments reported last week:

P:In Mississippi, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment empowering the state to abolish the public schools should no other way be found to keep the Negroes segregated.

P:In Alabama, a legislative committee formally recommended to Governor Gordon Persons the same sort of constitutional amendment.

P:In Virginia, Governor Thomas B. Stanley once again announced: "I shall use every legal means at my command to preserve segregated public schools."

P:In Texas, the Democratic state convention adopted a plank urging "every legal means to continue our public schools as they are, on a separate but equal basis."

P:In Georgia, Attorney General Eugene Cook announced that his state was joining South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana in a boycott of the scheduled U.S. Supreme Court hearings on ways and means of carrying out the court's decision.

P:In White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., school authorities ordered 25 Negroes out of the white high school after 300 students went out on strike and some 600 townspeople threatened at a mass meeting to "drag [the Negroes] out bodily if the school board won't give in." The board's excuse for its order: "Crowded conditions."

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