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Eleven weeks after court-decreed integration began at two New Orleans elementary schools, the court order was still being treated with legalized contempt. At the William Frantz school, where as many as 23 white students had once defied a howling segregationist mob, only seven whites were left in school with a solitary six-year-old Negro youngster. At McDonogh 19 the white boycott was complete; the only students were three little Negro first-graders. Then one day the boycott seemed to crack. Gregory Thompson, 10, reported to McDonogh 19. A couple of days later, Greg's brother Michael, 8, walked to school with him.

Neither the Thompson boys nor their father John, 33, were particularly concerned with the scrap over school integration. Alabama-reared John Thompson had moved his family of seven into the McDonogh 19 school district after the boycott began, joined his neighbors in sending his boys on the long bus ride to the lily-white schools of St. Bernard Parish. Then Thompson noticed that Greg was reading from the same primer he had used the year before in Alabama, where "the schools ain't too far ahead." And one rainy day the school bus driver bawled the boys out and made them walk home. Thompson got sore and decided to transfer them to nearby McDonogh 19. "That school's right there," said he, "it's free, and I want my kids to go to it."

Taken aback at first, the flannel-mouthed females who have trademarked the New Orleans school rebellion turned up at school to scream at the youngsters. White housewives picketed the Walgreen's drugstore where John Thompson worked as a $73-a-week clerk, and he lost his job. (Later, Walgreen officials insisted that Thompson had asked for a transfer.) The landlady ordered the Thompson family to get out of their $70-a-month apartment. Without telling anyone where they were going, John Thompson and his family took a load of wet wash off the line, packed the rest of their belongings and left New Orleans.

In the same week responsible New Orleans moderates turned out 1,600 strong for a testimonial dinner to five members of their board of education who have been battling the state legislature in an effort to obey the court. But tensions were high. On the eve of New Orleans' famed Mardi Gras more than 100 Negro organizations canceled their usual celebrations. Schwegmann's supermarket chain advertised a formal denial in the Times-Picayune that sales of ice picks and lye have been heavier than usual.

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