Even Stephens

It looked as if interracial football had finally reached Crawfordville, Ga. Each morning at 7:30 a squad of husky Negro teen-agers huddled on one side of the road while white-helmeted Georgia state troopers lined up on the other.

The Negroes charged, the cops stopped them with body blocks and flying tackles, and several dozen white rooters cheered themselves hoarse. Then, after 20 minutes or so, everyone went off to work.

The play was repeated each school day last week outside Crawfordville, a dismal cluster of 20 stores and 786 inhabitants that clings doggedly to its one fading claim to fame: it was the home of Alexander Hamilton Stephens (1812-83), Vice President of the Confederacy. Naturally the town has a school named after Stephens, and though nearly all other Georgia schools are now integrated, its classrooms remain Stephens-white. Last summer, presumably to qualify for sorely needed federal funds, county officials assured Washington that they stood ready to open Stephens to Negroes. Thereupon, white parents transferred their children in droves to schools in neighboring counties. Though 70 of 560 eligible Negroes applied for admission to the white school, Stephens was closed.

To protest, Negroes--who outnumber whites almost 2 to 1 in Taliaferro County--mounted a daily campaign to board the public school buses that carry white children to nearby communities. By last week the daily scrimmage had aroused one of Georgia's worst racial flare-ups in years. The Ku Klux Klan announced its own drive to "increase tension" in Crawfordville, and for good measure Georgia Klan Dragon Calvin Craig got himself arrested on assault and battery charges for roughing up a Crawfordville Negro demonstrator. Hosea Williams, a Southern Negro leader directing the Crawfordville campaign, vowed that he would "call out every Negro child in every damned school in the state" in sympathy boycotts. Martin Luther King threatened to descend on the community, and there was brave talk of a march on Atlanta.

With the board-the-bus game still a scoreless tie, the best hope for Crawfordville's Negroes lay with a three-judge Federal Court scheduled to hear a protest suit, brought by a dozen Negro parents, this week in Augusta.

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