Utter Contempt

The biggest roadblock to token integration in New Orleans schools is not the picket line of screaming women but the rabble-rousing state legislature, under the thumb of songwriting Governor Jimmie (You Are My Sunshine) Davis. Early in the six-week-old battle of New Orleans, Federal Judge J. Skelly Wright issued a series of sweeping injunctions to prevent Governor and legislators from intervening, by one legal subterfuge or another, with integration.

Last week a three-man federal court went further, issued contempt citations against Lieutenant Governor C. C. ("Taddy") Aycock and two other top state officials for refusing to sign salary checks owed to teachers at New Orleans' two integrated schools. (The city's other teachers have had no trouble getting their pay.)

Since "equality of opportunity to education through access to nonsegregated public schools is a right secured by the Constitution to all citizens," said the judges in a roundhouse ruling, "every law or resolution of the Legislature, every act of the Executive, which seeks to subvert the enjoyment of this right, [is] unconstitutional and null and void." At the same time, the court ordered four timorous New Orleans banks to honor checks that the school board had written against its own account, further demanded that the city of New Orleans release to the board $800,000 in withheld funds.

The school board meanwhile had received offers of loans and gifts totaling $855,000. The handsomest offer, $500,000, came from St. Louis-born Heiress Ellen Steinberg, a social worker in Manhattan, who perhaps made the best point of all. "Perhaps it is not the children who are the real sufferers," she said. "Those who jeered and spit are the ones in shackles."

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