Desegregation NOW

It has been 14 years since the Supreme Court ruled Southern school segregation unconstitutional, 13 years since the court ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed," and four years since it ruled that "the time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out." Last week, on behalf of an impatient and unanimous court, Justice William Brennan wrote: "The burden on a school board today is to come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work, and promises realistically to work now."

Bluntly, Brennan spelled out the court's dissatisfaction with the so-called "freedom of choice" plans that have been adopted in more than 1,300 of Southern school districts. The trouble with the plans is that they simply do not work. In New Kent County, Va., and Gould, Ark.--the two areas specifically examined by the court--schools remain largely segregated because the responsibility for action has been placed on the Negro students: they must take it upon themselves to request a transfer. And all too few of them make the effort. But they should not have to, said the court. It is the school boards, not the students, who are "clearly charged with the affirmative duty to take whatever steps might be necessary to convert to a unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch." Unless a freedom-of-choice plan achieves that goal, it is unacceptable.

Some constitutional-law experts saw in the decision a new pragmatism, an emphasis on tangible results that can be read as a warning to many Northern de facto segregated schools. In any case, Georgia Governor Lester Maddox understood full well what the court's decision meant for the South. He ordered all flags on state property flown at half-mast, and in an official proclamation announced that it had been "another black and tragic Monday, when the United States Supreme Court again ruled in support of the demands of the Communist Party." The decision, he predicted with desperate hyperbole, would result in "more assaults, rapes, burnings, deaths and violence in our public schools."

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