... One Step Back

While the Nixon Administration took a relatively favorable position in an integration case last week, the Supreme Court came out on the other side in a decision concerning the public swimming pools of Jackson, Miss. By a 5-to-4 vote, the court ruled that Jackson had not violated any civil rights law by closing its pools instead of integrating them, as a lower court had ordered the city to do in 1963.

Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black was not moved by the fact that the local Y.M.C.A. had taken a pool it had leased to the city and now runs it strictly for whites. As he saw it, Jackson officials made no effort to encourage or otherwise support private, segregated pools. Instead, said Black, the evidence on the pool closings "shows no state action affecting blacks differently from whites."

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Byron White wrote that he had "little doubt" that the closings were an official "pronouncement that Negroes are somehow unfit to swim with whites." Black felt it necessary to warn from the bench that the majority view should not be taken as encouragement for the closing of public schools to evade integration--a tactic long since outlawed. But distinguishing between pools and schools sidesteps the point that perhaps no distinction should be made at all.

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