Drawing the Lines

On the eve of this week's Supreme Court decision on the Little Rock school integration crisis, the traditional lines of basic national conflict were hardening around the South. The conflict: states rights v. federal law. In the South last week, as it had been through plantation growth, secession, civil war, surrender, reconstruction and recovery, states' rights was the legalistic bond that held most Southerners together. "We live in a federated system," said Virginia's courtly Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. in Richmond, "in which the Federal Government has no powers other than those delegated by the states." "It must be remembered," said Arkansas' rabblerousing Governor Orval Faubus in Little Rock, "that the Federal Government is the creature of the states . . We must either choose to defend our rights or else surrender."

In Washington the hardening line was that the U.S. must stand for equal opportunity for all citizens as defined by the Constitution and defended by the courts.

Massive Resistance. In Richmond, Governor Almond, 60, able lawyer, onetime Commonwealth attorney general, big wheel in the machine of U.S. Senator Harry Byrd, was the man who struck the South's first blow. He sent state troopers out of the capital to Norfolk, Charlottesville, Arlington, Prince Edward County, with a tough message warning the school boards not to assign Negroes to white schools under current pressure from federal courts. Was his message a warning, above all, to the Norfolk school board not to carry out its announced intention of assigning 17 Negroes to white schools? Said Almond: "Precisely that."

"This state can't secede from the Union," said he. But the moment the federal courts hand down "a final, unappealable, operating order" to integrate the state's public schools, he intends to invoke Virginia's new state laws of "massive resistance," closing public schools, transferring students, state funds to new private schools, etc. Said Almond: "There's no such thing as limited integration. It's all integration--open the door and let us in, we'll do the rest and destroy you as rapidly as we can in the administrative processes of education."

But in Norfolk, Federal Judge Walter E. Hoffman sternly turned down a new schoolboard appeal to delay integration another year while reserving the right to rerule after the Supreme Court is heard from; and in Charlottesville, Federal Judge John Paul told Warren County that it could not keep Negro pupils out of white high schools--the Negro high schools there were nonexistent.

Hymn of Hate. In Little Rock, Governor Faubus even translated states' rights, in press conferences, TV shows and off-the-cuff statements, into a virtual hymn of hate. He went back on his statement before his meeting with President Eisenhower in Newport, R.I. last year that the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation decision must be obeyed. Lied he: "I was required to issue that statement as a basis for the negotiation with the White House." He chewed out Little Rock's man-in-the-middle School Superintendent Virgil Blossom, for merely delaying high school's opening until the Supreme Court could speak. Said Faubus: "It's very much in the minds of the people . . . whether the Federal Government has any authority whatsoever to interfere in the conduct or the carrying out of public education in any state."

What if U.S. marshals were to enforce a Supreme Court order for integration? Said Faubus: "I will resist any federal force." How? "I could close the schools." He would not close the schools just to prevent integration, he added, but only if there was violence--a point that was surely not lost on Little Rock advocates of resistance through violence.

Nor was Orval Faubus Arkansas' all. At the state Democratic convention in Little Rock at week's end, none other than Arkansas' distinguished Senator John McClellan declared that 1) "The Supreme Court should have the courage to acknowledge the error of its action in 1954," and 2) "The sovereign states must not become subservient to a dictatorial authority that is akin to the presidium of a centralized government such as is now the ruling power in Russia."

Counterstroke. Meanwhile the U.SL Justice Department took a hardening line of its own. Target: Georgia. For the first time Assistant Attorney General Wilson White, head of Justice's new Civil Rights Division, invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to stop violation of Negro voting rights in redneck-teeming, cotton-and-peanut-growing Terrell County, Ga. The Justice Department suit, filed in federal court in Columbus, Ga., charged that Terrell County registrars last year denied the vote to four Negro college graduates and one Tuskegee Institute-trained Marine Corps civilian employee on the grounds that they could not read or write or speak correctly. (Sample: one Negro pronounced "equity" as "eequity.")

The action held promise of more to come, because under the Civil Rights Act, the Justice Department--instead of the victims themselves--can now seek redress, and from a federal judge rather than from a jury of local Southerners. Georgians protested in terms that hardened the lines even more. Said Georgia's Superior Court Judge Walter I. Geer: "Arrogant and unwarranted, a highhanded attempt on the part of radical Republican leaders to intimidate the people." Judge Geer issued orders to Terrell County registrars to withhold voter records from federal agents if it took a special police force.

Viewing these hardening lines, sympathetic to states' rights, nonetheless determined to enforce federal law, President

Eisenhower called Attorney General William P. Rogers into conference in Washington at week's end to range over the nation-splitting dispute. Meanwhile, somehow, thousands of U.S. schoolchildren in thousands of U.S. communities were threading through legal hairsplitting, hoodlum threats, racist hobgoblins, across small steps of progress and bridges of hope on their annual way back to school.

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