The School Buses Roll

The South took a big, though uncertain step last week over the corpse of legally dead school segregation laws. There was more good will than ill, more threats made than carried out --and more confusion than harassed officials may be able to handle.

Only a small number of systems were initially involved, most in nonurban areas. The real test will come this week and next, when major cities will undertake a degree of desegregation, some through large-scale busing of students. The end result could be the classification of 94% of the South's school systems as "desegregated," though many students will still be attending all-black schools.

Hello Whites. The generally good beginning--marred by the bombing of an elementary school scheduled to be desegregated this week in Edgecombe County, N.C.--was exemplified in the semirural district that includes Thomaston, Ga. Most of the 5,700 students went to integrated schools for the first time. Threats of white disruption failed to materialize; a black boycott fizzled.

The legal barrier had fallen, human barriers remained. A black ninth-grader described his first day in the integrated high school this way: "You say hello to the whites in the hall and they don't even speak. It seems like we're never gonna get there."

In Augusta, 170 miles away, the same depressing feeling moved Thales Elliott, a black Army veteran of 17 years who had lost both his legs in Viet Nam, to direct confrontation. Elliott, head of his P.T.A., was watching an antibusing demonstration at the black school across the street from his home in a middleclass, modern, black housing neighborhood. It was total-integration day, and seven protesting white parents stood at the base of the flagpole urging a boycott. "I just had enough," Elliott said. "So I put on my wooden legs, got in my car and drove over there." Facing the demonstrating whites, he said: "I have kids over here. Consider your children. Act like a man. This makes me mad, man." The encounter ended in an inconclusive shouting match.

Refused to Delay. Nixon Administration officials are watching closely, but staying out of sight in order not to exacerbate tensions, as more than 600 school districts follow federal mandates to end dual, legally segregated systems.

Even as the old issue of de jure segregation became a dead issue, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger made rulings on the appeals of five school systems involving what may become a still more volatile dispute on a national rather than sectional level: the question of de facto segregation, racial separation existing without legal sanction. As applied to the schools, the question is whether the law requires positive action by school officials, such as busing, to achieve racial mixtures that neighborhood schools, because of housing patterns, prevent. Without comment, Burger last week refused to delay lower-court orders for substantial busing in five large Southern systems. The court is scheduled to hear full-scale argument on the issue in October.

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