Union-Made Segregation

The handsome, white-columned Warren County High School overlooking Front Royal, Va. opened its doors last week in compliance with a U.S. district court order. But just 23 Negro pupils--and not one of the 1,044 white students locked out by massive resistance last September --went in to register. The whites chose to boycott rather than integrate. The 780 white pupils still in town kept right on attending private, segregated classes in the Methodist, Baptist and Episcopal churches, a museum and a former youth center. Cracked Front Royal's Town Manager G. Douglas Hamner: "This is what you call technical compliance."

Oddly enough, the boycott bore a union-made label. As a business agent for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Textile Workers Union, burly Charles E. Leadman bosses the 2,000-member Local 371 at American Viscose Corp., biggest local employer. "Chuck" Leadman and Plant Manager A. G. McVay teamed up last fall to lead moderates against massive resistance, were prevented from getting the school reopened on an integrated basis by Governor J. Lindsay Almond's school-locking order. Soon after, Leadman was outraged when the Negroes rejected his demands that they postpone their applications. "I had to give up all my colored friends or all my white friends," he says. "I chose my own race."

Last fortnight Union Boss Leadman chaired a citizens' meeting that in eight minutes railroaded through a plan to keep the private school going full blast, thus prepared for the boycott. Despite the opening of the public school last week, the viscose plant employees stood by the $1-a-week voluntary check-off system first proposed by Leadman's union to support the makeshift private schools. As a result, townsmen noted last week, Leadman's local is "achieving status by the bucketful."

In Florida's first public school integration move, the Dade County school board last week voted unanimously to admit four Negro pupils to an all-white Miami elementary school next fall. The board acted without waiting for court pressure, thus reduced to five the number of Southern states that have made no move to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.

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