The Last Turning?

For a good 17 months the U.S. has been waiting for the Supreme Court to make its decision on five cases involving segregation in the public schools--and wondering what would happen if the court declared segregation to be illegal.

This week, as the Court did just that (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), the University of North Carolina Press published the first of a series of reports that may provide some answers. Written by Little Rock's Arkansas Gazette Editor Harry S. Ashmore, The Negro and the Schools is the result of a long investigation carried out by 45 scholars under the auspices of the Ford Fund for the Advancement of Education. It not only reviews the legal history of the issue, it also points to a conclusion: the end of segregation will not be the bloody catastrophe its traditional supporters fear.

Under the doctrine that Negroes are entitled to"separate but equal"facilities, the old wall has been crumbling for nearly 60 years. But it was not until 19 years ago that Donald Murray entered the University of Maryland Law School under court order as the first Negro ever thus to cross the color line at a Southern campus. To Editor Ashmore, Murray's experience was fairly typical "At no time whatever,"wrote Murray,"did I meet any attempted segregation or unfavorable treatment on the part of any student in the school, or any professor."

Disappearing Acts. At such campuses as the Universities of Oklahoma and North Carolina, early discriminatory practices (e.g., separate seats in the dining halls or at football games) have gradually disappeared. At Oklahoma A & M, the University of Missouri and the University of Kansas City, "white students . . . have sometimes taken the lead on behalf of equal privileges for Negroes both on and off campus . . . At the University of Arkansas a special mark of approbation was given a Negro law student when he was elected president of his predominantly white dormitory . . .

"In the main, however, the white students have maintained a detachment bordering on disinterest. It is noteworthy that there is virtually no evidence that Communist or Communist-front groups have tried to exploit the more sensitive aspects of the situation on any campus . . . Nowhere has the admission of Negroes produced anything like a boycott, nor has it been made a prime political issue."

Burning Crosses. In various Northern and border states, integration has taken place at the school level. Out of 25 communities investigated for the report, only Cairo, 111. experienced any major disorders. There, "crosses were burned, shots were fired into the homes of two local Negro leaders, and a charge of dynamite was exploded outside the home of a Negro physician." Nevertheless, by the end of the first semester 17 Negro children were attending white schools, and by 1953 the number had jumped to 60.

In New Jersey the state education department's Division against Discrimination has done such a persuasive job that there are only three school districts left with any segregation. In such border-zone cities as Cincinnati and Evansville, Ind., the transition is going smoothly, and in Tucson, Ariz, it has been complete. "The Tucson school board," says Ashmore, "went the whole way from the beginning; a call for white volunteers to teach in the mixed schools produced twice the necessary number, and a Negro principal was accepted without protest by a mixed teaching staff . . . The records show that only about 15 pupils out of a total of over 20,000 were withdrawn from the public schools in protest against integration."

Reunion Road. Will all this apply to the Deep South? Ashmore points out that today's Southerners are already partly conditioned. Not only have their universities taken in Negroes, but so have the schools connected with various mil itary bases in the South. Furthermore, with the Court's action, the change will still be gradual: So far, the decision involves only "the five school districts cited . . . No change would necessarily occur in the other 11,173 districts . . . until and unless individual suits were brought." But gradual or not, says Ashmore, the change is bound to come eventually."In the long sweep of history, the public-school cases before the Supreme Court may be written down as the point at which the South cleared the last turning in the road to reunion-- the point at which finally, and under protest, the region . . . accepted the prevailing standards of the nation at large as the legal basis for its relationship with its minority race. This would not in itself bring about any great shift in Southern attitudes, nor even any far-reaching immediate changes in the pattern of bi-racial education. But it would redefine the goal the Southern people, white and Negro, are committed to seek in the way of democracy."

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