"That's What'll Happen"

Under a federal court order to integrate 67 parks, 38 playgrounds, eight public swimming pools and four golf courses by Jan. 15, Birmingham, Ala. (pop. 340,000), decided instead to close them. The three-member city commission cut off all park funds (except $295,000 for the zoo), sent out dismissal slips for park employees, prepared to seal off sites with no-trespassing signs. At about that point, a lot of Birmingham's citizens, not necessarily integrationists, decided that they liked their public facilities too much to give them up. "Why not keep the parks open," asked the segregationist Birmingham Post Herald, "and give our people a chance to see whether they can continue to operate without trouble?"

Last week some 60 Birmingham taxpayers went out on a rainy night to protest the park closings before recently installed Mayor Art Hanes, 44, a onetime FBI agent. They made little headway with Hanes. Said he, as the meeting got under way: "You for opening the parks? Then, friend, you're for integration. You for closing them down? Vice versa. It's as simple as that."

There could be no successful appeal to reason. "You're realistic, Mayor," pleaded a delegate from the Jefferson County Women's Service Legion, "and you must know that integration is coming ultimately whether we like it or not." Snapped Hanes: "That's your opinion madam."

One man in the audience had a particular question. "I'm not much bothered about niggers coming into that park of ours," he told Hanes, "I can take care of myself. But what I want to know, Mayor, is, does that no-trespassing order keep me from going to the park with my little boy and shagging a few fly balls now and then?" Hanes, a onetime football and baseball star at nearby Birmingham--Southern College, smiled. "If it were me and my boy, I think I just might slip right over rather than deny that boy of mine the sort of pleasures I used to know." At the end of the two-hour meeting the mayor remained adamant. "I don't think any of you want a nigger mayor or a nigger police chief," he said. "But I tell you, that's what'll happen if we play dead on this park integration."

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