End of Reconstruction

BLACK Americans have known two major eras that promised racial justice. The first came during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The second, amounting to another Reconstruction, occurred during the late '50s and the '60s, when at various times the three branches of the Federal Government made common cause with the civil rights movement, "an idea whose time has come." Only months ago, integration seemed an irreversible process. Now it seems that the idea's time is waning; that, as happened 93 years ago, a racial Reconstruction may be collapsing. The pattern coalesced last week with extraordinary swiftness: > The White House ordered the firing of Leon Panetta, the liberal lawyer who heads the civil rights division of the Department of Health, Education and Weifare. Panetta, 31, was forced out because of his allegedly excessive zeal in coercing Southern school districts to integrate under threat of losing their federal subsidies. "Panetta," explained a White House source, "was doing his thing, not the President's thing." The ouster further weakened the position of HEW Secretary Robert Finch, one of the few progressive counterweights to conservative influence on the racial issue in the Administration's top echelon. It also raised the suspicion that Education Commissioner lames E. Allen, another liberal subordinate of Finch's, might soon be forced out. > The Senate, by 56 to 36, passed an amendment--sponsored by Mississippi's John Stennis--that seems to require the North as well as the South to abandon segregated schools. Actually, the measure amounted to acquiescence to more and more Southern delay in complying with the Supreme Court's 16-year-old desegregation ruling. The vote revived the coalition of Republicans and Southern and Border State Democrats --a bad omen for future civil rights fights.

-- By 145 to 122, the House sent through three related riders, two of them devised by Mississippian Jamie Whitten. They would sanction the South's "free-dom-of-choice" plans, which offer a rationale for continued dual school systems, and would discourage the busing of pupils to achieve racial balance.

In purely legal terms, the Senate and House votes may come to little. The Stennis amendment, attached to a $35 billion aid-to-education bill, faces a vote in the House and then a House-Senate conference, where the members, mostly liberals from the congressional education committees, may dilute the rider or scrap it. Besides, the amendment is framed as "a policy of the U.S. Government," which lacks the force of law. The House antibusing and freedom-of-choice provisions must go to the Senate and then to joint conference. Further, the amendments are part of a $19.4 billion Labor-HEW appropriation bill that Nixon has vetoed once as inflationary and may well reject again for economic reasons.

End of Persecution. The cumulative psychological impact of the measures, however, plus the firing of Panetta, delighted segregationists. "The lamp of liberty shines brighter," triumphantly announced Mississippi's Governor John Bell Williams. Echoed Georgia's Lester Maddox: "I'm really thrilled by this." Replied the Urban League's Whitney Young: "We are in the throes of a systematic destruction of all the gains made in the 1960s." There was a sense that a new corner had been turned, that a different standard of ethics was operating, that the new trend would continue. Tallahassee's Judge G. Harrold Carswell seemed relatively certain of Senate confirmation, and Southerners believed that with more vacancies to come as septuagenarian Justices depart, "strict constructionism" will be well represented. If HEW's power continues to sink, the administrative push needed to enforce the law in individual cases will suffer accordingly.

Southern conservatives were encouraged to think that what they consider their long persecution had ended. The Stennis amendment declares that the guilt of segregation is nationwide --which is certainly true--and so the penalties for failing to desegregate must apply to Northern cities, with their ghettos, as well as the South. Connecticut's liberal Senator Abraham Ribicoff astonished both segregationists and civil rights advocates by agreeing with Stennis and backing the amendment. Doing so, Ribicoff broke the liberal lines and introduced a new logic.

Co-opting Wallace. The idea of Stennis' amendment is formally correct. Morally, there should be no distinction between the legally established dual educational systems of the South and the school segregation of the North, usually resulting, de facto, from housing patterns. Yet the idea is also subversive. The de facto separation of the North has still not been declared unconstitutional by the courts. Assaulting it across the board would represent a virtually impossible enforcement problem in many cities, whereas the de jure segregation of the South could legally be broken down. If the Stennis amendment became official policy, it would stretch the Justice Department's enforcement resources so thin that desegregation would be markedly slowed down. The Stennis-Ribicoff logic suggests that school integration cannot occur unless and until all U.S. society changes--so that the classroom would become not the first but the last place to integrate. If anything is to change according to this formula, integration must occur in such fields as jobs and housing--and it remains in doubt what the backers of the Stennis amendment are willing to do about that. To proclaim sectional equality in order to preserve racial inequality has become at once Southern strategy, liberal confusion and a kind of moral Catch-22.

President Nixon has allowed the impression to spread that his "gradualism" on desegregation is a political maneuver to co-opt George Wallace's constituency and placate other whites who think that blacks have come too far too fast. "The Administration," says Southern Historian C. Vann Woodward, "is in tune with the reaction and quite accommodating to it." The White House greeted questions about the segregationist amendments with ambivalence. When Senate G.O.P. Leader Hugh Scott, for example, tried to head off the Stennis amendment with a more innocuous rider, Presidential Counsellor Bryce Harlow sent around a note saying, "Your amendment is Administration language." But, Harlow added, "other approaches would also accord with the President's basic objective--racial equality." The "other approach" was that of John Stennis.

Distorted Cries. Late last summer Nixon promised "a middle course," meaning that the South can go slow. The question remains what the Supreme Court will decide, having ordered last fall that integration must occur "now." Says Panetta: "There is no such thing as the status quo in the desegregation effort. You're either going to move forward or backward. The real danger is that the White House is listening to distorted cries about arguments such as busing and is backing away from the real issues."

More deeply, the question concerns presidential leadership. Confronted last week by a television interviewer, Spiro Agnew described the presidential position as "a responsibility to enforce the laws of the land." Surely a President's franchise is larger than a sheriff's. Americans look to him for moral leadership.

Everyone--or nearly everyone--agrees that the process of school desegregation has involved instances of injustice and stupidity. Busing is the most objectionable tool. Yet in many districts it is the only tool that promises to be effective. The question Nixon has yet to answer is whether he prefers a retrenchment because he may have a better solution in mind--a way to break up the ghettos of the North, for example --or whether, out of political or other motives, he would keep the status quo. Nixon could argue, of course, that most of the nation is simply not ready for the changes, and cannot be pushed too hard. But such an argument makes new and perhaps dangerous demands upon the black American's exhausted patience.

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