Change Comes Hard

Change Comes Hard From the deep fissions and hard fusions of the South, where no leading public figure had yet dared affirm the validity of the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees, Florida's Governor LeRoy Collins last week sounded a clear call for reason and conciliation. Said he at ceremonies marking his reinauguration: "It will do us no good whatever to defy the U.S. Supreme Court ... Its decisions are the law of the land. And this nation's strength and Florida's strength are bottomed on the premise that ours is a land of law."

With that, LeRoy Collins got down to specifics that went remarkably far for a Southern governor. His central theme: great as is the court's power, it cannot "compel social adjustments," which can only emerge from changes in "the hearts and minds of people." The court itself, he declared, acknowledged this fact in its school decision by recognizing "to a degree local conditions and problems" and thus not making integration "compulsory." Thus "segregation in Florida schools . . . can be expected to prevail for the foreseeable future."

But the problem of bus segregation is something quite different. "I am convinced," said Collins, "that the average white citizen does not object to nonsegregated seating in buses--any more than he objects to riding the same elevators with Negroes or patronizing the same stores. He does resent some of the methods being used to achieve certain ends. Boycotts, ultimatums and peremptory demands can never achieve what persuasion, peaceful petitions and normal judicial procedures can do for the Negro race."

In sum, the Collins message to both sides was the same: in order to find wise solutions, the whites must "face up to the fact that the Negro does not now have equal opportunities, that he is morally and legally entitled to progress more rapidly, and that a full good faith effort" must be made to help him lift his standards. Similarly, Negroes must contribute by changes in their own attitudes, e.g., by realizing that they "must merit and deserve whatever place [they] achieve in a community . . . There must be change, and change usually comes hard . . . Ours is the generation in which great decisions can no longer be passed on to the next. We have a state to build--a South to save--a nation to convince--and a God to serve."

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