For Non-Performance

The school boards of King George and Gloucester Counties in eastern Virginia were caught on the horns of two constitutions. Virginia's constitution requires that white and Negro schools be separate; the U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, requires them at least to be equal in facilities, courses of instruction and quality of teachers. But in King George and Gloucester Counties, as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pointed out, the counties' separate schools were as different as black & white.

King George County's high school for white children had a gymnasium, central heating, showers, a good cafeteria and a fair-sized library. King George's Training School for Negroes got its heat out of old oil drums converted into makeshift stoves. It had rickety outside privies and so little classroom equipment that not even the most elementary science courses could be given. When the N.A.A.C.P. found that conditions in Gloucester followed much the same pattern, it decided to go to court. Result: last summer, a federal judge in Richmond ordered the Gloucester and King George school boards to "equalize" facilities.

Microscopic Success. Both school boards set to work. King George bought a microscope for the Negro Training School, installed a new pump. It collected some 2,000 secondhand books for the library, bought some typewriters and added a stenography course.

But the N.A.A.C.P. lawyers decided that the secondhand books (sample items: ten volumes of the Bell Telephone Quarterly, the Rollo Code of Morals') were "worse than useless," and that, considering everything, King George had not even made a respectable beginning. As for Gloucester's Negro schools, the exposed and battered stovepipes were still there, and the toilet facilities were still inadequate. The N.A.A.C.P. took the two counties back to court.

With the King George case postponed until next fall, the Gloucester County case was decided first. U.S. District Judge Sterling Hutcheson last winter found Superintendent J. Walter Kenney and the three-man school board guilty of contempt for failing to carry out the equalization order. But the judge delayed sentence to give the defendants a little longer to try.

$300,000 Failure. Last week the grace period expired. The Gloucester school board had tried to float a $300,000 bond issue to build a brand-new Negro high school, but Gloucester County had voted it down. In the court's view, the defendants had failed; Superintendent Kenney and Gloucester County's school-board members were fined $250 apiece.

It was the first time a Southern school board had ever been fined for discrimination. It might not be the last. Since the Gloucester case began, the N.A.A.C.P. has filed similar charges against four other Virginia counties. One N.A.A.C.P. victory: King George County has voted to build a new $150,000 Negro school by next September.

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