An Ax for the South

The Federal Government gives no signs of relenting in its drive to desegregate Southern schools and hospitals.

Last week, in a show of strength that can only worsen Lyndon Johnson's al ready battered popularity in the South, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare decided to cut off all fed eral funds from six segregated school districts in Arkansas, Mississippi and South Carolina, bringing to 37 the number deprived of financial assistance in Old Confederacy states. It also is terminating aid, mostly student-loan and construction funds, to South Carolina's Baptist-run Anderson College, making it the first institution of higher learning to have its federal funds cut off.

The U.S. Office of Education is in the process of axing aid to another 185 segregated Southern school systems, eventually may end up denying funds to more than 400 districts serving a to tal of at least 1,000,000 children. At the same time, HEW is getting tough with segregated hospitals. It has scheduled hearings with an eye to ending all fed eral aid, including construction and research funds, to 17 or so Southern hospitals. Up to now, some 340 hospitals have been denied requests for new funds, notably Medicare payments, but none has been cut off from federal aid altogether.

In the case of the schools, the Gov ernment for a long time accepted local assurances of desegregation, only this year began asking evidence of "substantial progress." Even then, it was content merely to defer aid to transgressors; but when Southern Congress men blocked that option by getting legislation passed limiting deferments to 60 days, the Government had no choice but to push for outright fund cutoffs.

The need for action was demonstrated by a new federal survey that showed that during the present school term, only 12.5% of the 2,900,000 Negro children in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy are attending school with whites. Though that is a marked improvement over last year's 6% figure, the rates remain appallingly low in sev eral Deep South states. A dozen years after the U.S. Supreme Court urged "all deliberate speed" in school integration, only one of every 28 Negro chil dren attends classes with whites in Louisiana, one of 31 in Mississippi, one of 42 in Alabama.

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