Regard for a Good Name

There were three young men who wanted for themselves and in their own home states the kind of college education formerly reserved for whites.

One of them, Clyde Kennard, 35, never came close. A Korea paratroop veteran, Kennard attempted three years ago to register at the University of Southern Mississippi, in his hometown of Hattiesburg. While he was talking to Mississippi Southern's president, local law officials "discovered" illegal liquor in his car and arrested him. Convicted and fined on the liquor offense, Kennard was still appealing the case when he was convicted as an accessory in the theft of five sacks of chicken mash. His alleged accomplice, an illiterate 14-year-old Negro who said he had actually stolen the stuff and turned it over to Kennard, was given a suspended sentence and set free. But Kennard was given the maximum sentence--seven years in prison.

Last week Governor Ross Barnett pardoned Kennard, who has cancer. Said Barnett: "They don't give him much longer to live. He has a good record at the penitentiary, and under the circumstances, I think it only fair that he be released."

Blind Alley. Then there was James Meredith, still at the University of Mississippi at a cost of two lives, dozens of injuries and a U.S. Government investment of $4,500,000. Last week--three weeks after saying that he would not return to Ole Miss if conditions did not improve--Meredith announced that he would return for the second semester.

Meredith's press conference statement, as usual, was couched in the bitter, self-conscious terms of a crusader de scribed by Federal Judge John Minor Wisdom as "a man with a mission and a nervous stomach.'' Said Meredith: "After listening to all arguments, evaluations and positions and weighing all this against my personal possibilities and circumstances, I have concluded that the 'Negro' should not return to the University of Mississippi. The prospects for him are too unpromising." A white radio newsman from Jackson applauded. But Meredith kept on reading: "However, I have decided that I, J. H. Meredith, will register for the second semester at the University of Mississippi."

Lessons Learned. Things were much different in South Carolina, last of the Deep Dixie states to integrate any public school for so much as one hour. There, Harvey Bernard Gantt, 20, a second-year architecture transfer from Iowa State, walked through the front door of Clemson College's red-brick administration building. Gantt's peaceable entry into Clemson, a state-supported school with an enrollment of 4,000, was a triumph of good sense and planning. When it became obvious that Clemson would be required to accept Gantt, a call for law and order went out from business leaders, churchmen and newspapers all over the state. Convinced that Barnett had "led Mississippi up a blind alley," outgoing Governor Ernest Rollings told his legislature: "We must realize the lesson of 100 years ago and move on for the good of South Carolina and the United States."

New Governor Donald Russell, 56, a former president of the University of South Carolina and onetime law partner of retired Supreme Court Justice James F. Byrnes, told the Justice Department that South Carolina neither needed nor wanted federal assistance, since it would meet its legal commitments "peaceably, without violence, without disorder, and with proper regard for the good name of our state and her people."

South Carolina did just that. Clemson's President Robert Edwards told his students that he would stand for no repetition of Ole Miss hooliganism. Taking no chances, Governor Russell had 150 law enforcement officers in the area. Setting up highway roadblocks, they turned away anybody who was not wearing a special university identification badge. But the cops hardly seemed needed on campus. Students talked and joked with Gantt on the campus, and half a dozen of them joined him at dinner.

Gantt's case was encouraging. Even more encouraging was the manner in which New Orleans' Tulane University was integrated. Although a federal court had ruled that Tulane was a private school and under no legal obligation to integrate, the university went ahead and registered eleven Negroes. Their enrollment barely made the papers.

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