It Pays to Desegregate

When the 1964 Civil Rights Act empowered the Government to stop aid to school administrations refusing to sign a desegregation pledge, many Southerners were talking as truculently as Louisiana Politician Leander Perez. "Our children are not for sale for any filthy, tainted federal bribes," he said. But the defiance will cost his Plaquemine Parish some $200,000 this year, and there are by now few other Southern areas willing to give up that kind of money. With the pledge deadline coming up on March 3, the rights act is rapidly imposing the desegregation that 75% of the South's school districts have managed to avoid even though the Supreme Court ordered it ten years ago. Items:

> The boards of education of six of these eleven Southern states have already taken the pledge themselves or indicated that their individual school districts may do so. Even in Alabama, State School Superintendent Austin Meadows is advising local boards: "We're damned if we do sign but twice damned if we don't."

> Counterlegislation, which cuts off state aid to desegregating districts, is no longer enforced in Louisiana and unenforced by Mississippi, the only two states that have such laws.

> Compliance is now in general evidence at the university level, with such surprising early signers as Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana State and Ole Miss.

If the federal desegregation drive is heading over the hump, it is largely because Washington has the states over the barrel. Last year the South received more than $506 million in federal education subsidies, chiefly for lunches, laboratory equipment and research projects, and this year is no time to opt out. With President Johnson counting on vastly increasing the Washington aid and concentrating it on poverty-impacted districts, Alabama's share would double, the Carolinas' triple. Alabama's George Wallace is suddenly silent on the subject of federal intervention, which could bring Alabama $35 million just as he is seeking an extra $30 million for schools.

Other Southern segregationists are going still farther and conceding that they are not so much bought as beaten. Arkansas' Orval Faubus is admitting that "there is quite a difference" between his old recalcitrant days of 1957 and the present. "Congress now has passed a law, and it is the law of the land." Thus one of his education department officials has warned possible holdout districts: "Those that go it alone are going to find themselves in court." And even in Mississippi, the president of the Greenville city school board has faced up to the fact that "the real choice is whether we are going to obey the law with federal aid or obey the law without federal aid."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.