Governors Against the Law

In a crassly political, last-gasp attempt to block school desegregation, Southern Governors last week were openly encouraging their constituents to defy the Supreme Court. In Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana, where school districts have been ordered to desegregate by Feb. 1, the Governors were making speeches and leading rallies against the court. The latest court order also applied to Archsegregationist John Bell Williams, Governor of Mississippi, who had watched helplessly as 29 of his state's school districts were desegregated by court order after the Christmas recess.

All school districts will eventually go the way of Mississippi's, but the Governors were letting white voters know who was to blame. The clarion calls ranged from Florida Governor Claude

Kirk Jr.'s flat announcement that his state was "financially and physically unable" to meet the deadline, to Lester Maddox's threat to enlist other Georgians for a march on Washington.

In New Orleans, the state school board convention no sooner had voted "support of public education to the end" than Governor John McKeithen told the delegates: "I will not allow my children to be bused." McKeithen, who has ambitions to run for the Senate, had brought along a more moderate speech, but realized that there was more political capital in the defiant version. He was right. The speech was televised, and immediately afterward his office received 1,500 calls and telegrams endorsing his stand. In decrying busing, McKeithen and the other Governors are largely attacking a straw man. They talk as if busing were the law; in fact, the Supreme Court has not ordered busing and seems unlikely to.

Of the five Governors confronting the February deadline, none is more nervous about the political implications of the court order than Alabama's Albert Brewer. Brewer had been a responsible conservative during his first term but now faces a possible primary challenge from George Wallace. The result is that he has turned strident, calling for defiance of the court and saying: "I will tell [local school boards] to resist" the desegregation orders. The pity is that many school boards, businesses, labor unions and parents are struggling, however reluctantly, to accept the law of the land and to prepare for what is inevitable. But they are being undercut by the Governors, who seem persuaded that there are still more points to be made in the South through racism than moderation.

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