Southern Milestones

"Atlanta is on trial," warned Mayor William Hartsfield. "Asia is watching. Africa is watching." And a Lutheran minister named Robert E. Lee added: "What happens this week is happening 96 years too late. It should have happened in 1865."

Last week the moral siege of Atlanta (pop. 487,455) ended in spectacular fashion with the smoothest token school integration ever seen in the Deep South. Into four high schools marched nine Negro students without so much as a white catcall. Teachers were soon reporting "no hostility, no demonstrations, the most normal day we've ever had." In the lunchrooms, white children began introducing themselves to Negro children. At Northside High, a biology class was duly impressed when Donita Gaines, a Negro, was the only student able to define the difference between anatomy and physiology. Said she crisply: "Physiology has to do with functions."

Atlanta's Police Chief Herbert T. Jenkins had anticipated every conceivable possibility of trouble, armed his men with a helicopter, dogs, and an armored car. As if to symbolize how most white people felt, a pretty drum majorette furiously attacked a sign-toting segregationist with her baton. The cops were so watchful that on the opening day of school they moved to arrest two loitering men who turned out to be FBI agents. The police did pull in six demonstrators, who got sentences of 30 to 60 days that were reduced, when the excitement subsided, to nothing in the case of four teenagers.

Atlanta's story was the outcome of exhaustive preparation for peace (TIME, Aug. 25) by a city that in five years has integrated its libraries, public buses, golf courses and taxicabs, with department- and variety-store lunch counters to follow school integration. Negro pressure triggered these changes, just as two Negro students entering the University of Georgia last winter helped to topple the entire fac,ade of Georgia's once rigid state segregation laws. But equally important was the graceful acceptance of the inevitable by white Georgians. Their turnabout must be accounted a milestone in the history of the U.S. South.

In New Orleans this week, 60 U.S. marshals stand by as perhaps 14 Negro children enter six desegregated grade schools. Peace or violence may hinge on segregationist reaction to another Southern milestone. Last week a three-judge federal court in New Orleans ruled unconstitutional the school-closing law that Louisiana's legislature enacted last winter as the keystone of a dozen state segregation laws.

Using the key law, a Louisiana parish could vote to close public schools to prevent integration, then lease or sell the schools to a segregated "private" operation supported by state money. In April, rural St. Helena parish, in southeastern Louisiana, voted 1,147 to 5-c- to do so. Having ordered St. Helena schools to integrate, the federal court made the case a test of the state law. Being thorough, the court even asked the attorneys general of all 50 states to file briefs on a curiously unsettled question: Does the U.S. Constitution require states to provide public education? Of those who replied, 17 said yes, n no. The court's ruling was based on something more obvious: the state law denied equal protection and circumvented desegregation. Summation of the Louisiana decision, written by Judge John Minor Wisdom, onetime Republican national committeeman appointed to the court by President Eisenhower in 1957: "This is not the moment in history for a state to experiment with ignorance."

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