New Language on Inauguration Day

The most finely calibrated gauge of the South's resistance to integration has been the oratory of the region's politicians--the classic promises of segregation forever, of a last stand at the schoolhouse door. Six newly sworn Deep South Governors have been taking a startlingly calmer line since the new year began. Most striking example: the inauguration of Georgia's Jimmy Carter, who stepped in front of his predecessor, Lester Maddox, and an audience of 5,000 to declare: "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over." Throughout the South, there has been a note of acceptance, of moving on to the problems long neglected while race dominated the sectional debate.

In South Carolina last week, John C. West pledged a "colorblind" administration and appointed a young black to a top position on his staff. West had been a winner over Republican Albert Watson, whose campaign bluntly played on fears of busing and defiance of court orders and had the benefit of personal campaigning by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Housing, education and hunger, West said, were the problems that would occupy his administration, not the old bitterness of race.

When Reubin Askew was sworn in as Governor of Florida, there was a promise of fair government for both races in his inaugural address. Then Askew turned to problems of tax reform, education, the environment.

White Flag. Democrat Dale Bumpers, the neophyte politician who upset Orval Faubus in the primary runoff, then went on to beat Winthrop Rockefeller for Governor of Arkansas, also talked of improving education and promised reform of the state's infamous prison system. "The future I envision," Bumpers said, "must be shaped and shared by all Arkansans--old and young, black and white, rich and poor."

Most startling of all, his words were echoed even by George Wallace as he took the oath of office for his second term: "Our state government is for all, so let us join together, for Alabama belongs to all of us--black and white, young and old, rich and poor alike." To be sure, Wallace continued his attacks on the Federal Government; he has hardly turned liberal, but the tone of the day was moderate and restrained by comparison with the past.

It may be years before the South or the rest of the nation will know if the new promises of the 1971 Southern inaugurations are kept. But they are evidence that the Congress, the courts and the 3,324,000 blacks registered to vote in the states of the old Confederacy have combined to forge a new political reality. Harry Dent, the White House overseer of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy, conceded last week that "the race question is going bye-bye as a political force."

Before Carter's inaugural address in Atlanta, a cannon salute boomed over the capitol lawn, belching smoke over the statues of Tom Watson and former Governor Eugene Talmadge, two premier practitioners of the old politics of racism. The concussion shattered windows in a state office building across the street and soon after, an employee ironically waved a white flag of surrender from one of the windows. If the new oratory means what it says, the symbolism was apt.

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