In the South: Happy Shock

In South Africa last week, the supreme court put a crimp in apartheid, the system of rigid racial segregation by which Prime Minister Daniel Malan hopes forever to separate 2,600,000 whites from four times their number of nonwhites. A Cape Town Negro named George Lusu had been arrested and tried for sitting down in a railroad waiting room marked "Whites Only." Chief Justice Albert van de Sandt Centlivres delivered the majority verdict: "The State has provided a railroad service for all its citizens, irrespective of race . . . Segregation is [legal] but it could be and should be exercised without members of different races being treated with substantial inequality."

In effect, the court was invoking a "separate but equal" doctrine something like that laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court 56 years ago. Prime Minister Malan called the ruling "a great shock." "The implications," wrote his party's Johannesburg Transvaler, "are frightening . . . Railways will have to use rulers to establish whether sitting and standing room for whites and coloreds is substantially the same . . ."

Yet secretly the Nationalists were delighted at the court's decision. Deep in a national election campaign in which the No. 1 issue is "How tough should we get with the blacks?", their candidates can now paint vote-getting pictures of what might happen if apartheid is relaxed, if only on a "separate but equal" basis. The more liberal opposition United Party pays lip service to equality, but insists on separation. United Party Leader Jacobus Gideon Strauss hastily assured the voters that if elected April 15, his party too would uphold "traditional segregation."

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