Hello, Earl

Ever since he wrote the opinion in the 1954 school case, the mere mention of Chief Justice Earl Warren has been enough to redden the neck of any good segregationist. When Warren agreed to speak last week in Atlanta at Georgia Tech, authorities began preparing for trouble.

Their concern was only prudent. Some 25 signs appeared in Atlanta neighborhoods, pleading "Help Impeach Earl Warren," most of them paid for by Frank H. Benning, 36, a member of the John Birch Society. The Atlanta Committee to Impeach Earl Warren wired Warren: YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE. The North Side News, a scruffy Atlanta weekly, called Warren "a California politician who has the Fascist heart of a dictator." Handbills signed by an "Alumni Committee to Combat Communism at Georgia Tech" begged people to "let this unwelcome visitor speak to the empty hall he deserves, or attend and boo."

Agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Atlanta and airport police carefully checked Atlanta Municipal Airport before Warren's commercial airliner landed last week. Two police cruisers followed the limousine that took him to the Biltmore Hotel. Next day eight uniformed Pinkerton guards, five plainclothesmen and six state and local security cops screened the crowd at Tech's Alexander Memorial coliseum.

But as it turned out, Southern hospitality overcame Southern hostility. When the 71-year-old Chief Justice was introduced, he received standing applause from some 3,600 persons--four times the number that turned out for a lecture in December by Georgia's newly elected Governor, Carl Sanders, a moderate segregationist. Warren's serious talk on the relations between science and law ("Law has not kept abreast of science . . . A world without law is hell-bent for destruction with or without scientific discoveries") drew long applause at its end. There were no pickets, no boos, no threats.

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