Piling Up the Tinder

Well before the polling places opened in Little Rock's special, Faubus-arranged integration referendum last week, clusters of Arkansans were already waiting eagerly to cast their votes. At 14th and Pulaski Streets, white men and women marked their ballots outdoors, resting them on the shiny red fenders of a fire truck, so peckers could see that they were voting "against." At a store a few blocks west, a woman ostentatiously swung her marked ballot in front of her to show that she too was "against." Another eager woman triumphantly kissed her ballot before dropping it into the box.

When the votes were tallied up, the citizens of Little Rock had decided overwhelmingly, 19,470 to 7,561, against integration of the city's schools. In the upper-income Pulaski Heights section, with its high education level, the voting went 2 to 1 against integration. Only in Negro precincts did a majority vote "for." Said victorious Orval Faubus: "The people have now spoken." But the election really proved and decided nothing. Faubus had offered the voters a seemingly simple choice for or against, but no such choice was legally available to the people of Little Rock.

Manufactured Murk. In the days before the vote, both the for and the against got befogged in a murk of segregationist propaganda, with Faubus himself the No. 1 befogger. A single issue of the daily Arkansas Democrat carried 27 anti-integration ads, several of them paid for by out-of-state meddlers. In ads, handbills and radio and TV broadcasts, the segregationists told the voters that:

1) Victory for "integration" meant swift and total integration of the schools. Fact: the word "integration" on the ballot really meant the Little Rock school board's courtapproved, go-slow plan, which this year would put six Negro children into one (Central) of the city's four high schools.

2) Defeat of "integration" meant that the district's schools could legally operate as 100%-segregated, state-subsidized "private" schools. Fact: the Faubus plan to lease the school facilities to a newly formed private corporation may stall the inevitable for a while, but it collides with established federal law, as 61 Little Rock lawyers warned a fortnight ago.

Comeuppance Postponed. Faubus put great hopes in Federal District Judge John E. Miller's refusal last week to advise the Little Rock school board whether or not it could legally lease out the schools. The constitutionality of the state's newly enacted segregation laws was involved, said Arkansan Miller, so a full, three-man district court would have to decide. But Miller's refusal to say no only postponed the Faubus plan's courtroom comeuppance.

Sooner or later, federal courts will inevitably order integration in Little Rock's leased schools. The big question for then: What will happen to the tinder of hatred that Orval Faubus has piled up while he built support for his empty legal stratagems and his phony referendum?

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