The Powerful Tide

This time there was no simple sentence that meant "guilty" or "innocent," no terse phrase that decreed a statute "unconstitutional" or "constitutional." Yet the 1,000 words that Chief Justice Earl Warren read off to the crowded Supreme Court chamber one day last week released a powerful tide of law that will change the social face of the South before it has rolled to its farthest reach. A year ago the court decreed Negro segregation unconstitutional in public schools of the U.S. Now, after long consideration of pleas by Negro and Southern white lawyers, of advisory briefs from the Department of Justice and eleven different Southern states (TIME, April 25), the court was outlining its unanimous ruling on how the historic transition was to come about.

As Chief Justice Warren read slowly from his sheaf of papers, both the Southern and Negro lawyers mentally underscored the key points that they would have to live with for years to come:

P:"All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting [racial discrimination in public education] must yield" to the principle that discrimination is unconstitutional. Thus, in theory at least, the opinion knocked the props out from under the Southern and border states that require public school segregation by law--and likewise from under the school boards that claim they cannot desegregate because state law forbids it.

P:The process of desegregation shall be supervised by federal district courts "because of their proximity to local conditions." These courts will be guided by "equitable principles" and take into account "the public interest" in making the big transition. Yet, "it should go without saying that the vitality of ... constitutional principles cannot be allowed to yield simply because of disagreement with them."

P: District courts should require school authorities to "make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance." Once such a start is made, the court may grant "additional time" if the school authorities can prove that they are hampered by problems of "administration, school plant, transportation, personnel, revision of school districts, local law and regulations."

Justice Warren ended his reading with the traditional closing words, "It is so ordered," and put down his papers. The court had set no deadline for the desegregation, but said it should be carried out "with all deliberate speed."

Go Slow, but Go. The Deep South's professional political spokesmen hardly had time to receive telephone bulletins before they began to go out on limbs. Louisiana's Congressman Edward Hebert climbed farthest fastest. The new opinion, said he, was "a weasel-worded escape from a basically wrong decision." Georgia's Governor Marvin Griffin added: "No matter how much the Supreme Court seeks to sugarcoat its bitter pill of tyranny, the people of Georgia and the South will not swallow it." But the sober-minded said less and thought more. Editorialized the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "The South has gained nothing but time." Said Georgia's Senator Walter George in more thoughtful vein: "The court has said go slow, but go; proceed, but proceed with care."

General Counsel Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People rushed out of the court chamber, headed for Washington's National Airport and flew back to New York to restrain his own NAACP colleagues, some of whom were disappointed because there was no desegregation deadline. He himself believed that the opinion was more effective without a deadline. Had a specific period of time been granted in the two test cases, the same time period might ultimately be required in all succeeding cases. "Read the opinion again and then call me back,'' he told complainers. Once he muttered half-aloud: "Some people want the whole hog. You hand them ham on ice and they still want the whole hog."

When overenthusiastic Negro attorneys called from all over the South asking when they should file suit, Marshall cautioned restraint. At week's end, he flew off to Atlanta to address a special NAACP executive strategy meeting. Said he: "The fall of 1955 is the time for action. We will call up for action all pending suits unless school boards take action toward desegregation."

Ultimate Weapons. In a strictly legal sense, the court's mandate will not begin to have real meaning until it is acted out in specific cases, and an intermediate structure of case law has thus been built up. The mandate on the test-case counties, Clarendon (S.C.) and Prince Edward (Va.), will be officially binding on the district courts June 27. Presumably, the NAACP's lawyers will appear before the courts on that day and ask anew for an injunction against the school boards of Prince Edward County and Clarendon County. The cases will not be simple: last week the school boards of both counties announced that they would close the schools before submitting to desegregation. Prince Edward's board of supervisors cemented the decision by voting to spend school operational funds for nonschool purposes so that there will literally be no tax money in the treasury to run the schools.

Once these two key cases are under way, it will be up to Negroes to file suit wherever they wish to claim their rights to nonsegregated schools. These suits will be filed in U.S. district courts. The district court will, under the Supreme Court's order, ask school authorities to show cause why they should not obey the law and desegregate. If the court decides that the school authorities are stalling, its ultimate weapon is a contempt of court citation and imprisonment of the obdurate officials.

But the frightening prospect of school board members being jailed wholesale for defiance of the federal courts may not come to pass. There are a thousand ways --some of them now unpredictable--in which the pressure of the federal courts will bear down upon the public authorities who persist in operating segregated schools. School bond issues for segregated schools may be attacked in the federal courts and made unmarketable. Last week Virginia's Circuit Judge Leon M. Bazile held invalid a $1,000,000 Hanover County school bond issue because it had been approved by the voters on the presumption of segregated schools, and now might be used for unsegregated schools. Anti-segregationists could obviously play hob with segregated-school financing by running this ball the other way.

As for the segregationists, they promise to make the legal fight as long and as complex as possible (see box).

Conference Table. Once local and state school segregation laws have been cleared away, many a Southerner who favors ultimate desegregation will come out in the open. Arkansas, for example, may become a Deep South pace setter because the central and western sections of the state--with no real Negro problems--are tired of financing Eastern Arkansas' expensive segregated school system.

Negro leaders have no intention of picking court fights if they can make reasonable headway around the conference table. Says Thurgood Marshall: "If there's a difficult situation and a school board says, 'This will take us six years,' we may well say, 'All right, let's take six years.' But if the board says, 'We'll never sit down and talk our problems over with Nigras,' then we'll say, 'Let's get to court as soon as we can.' " It was the great virtue of the court's decision that it clearly and unequivocally demanded desegregation, and then left the time and latitude for each community to find its own way to the goal set. No one could forecast precisely how the great new tide of law would feel its way around obstacles, or how it would accommodate itself to old channels as it inched along.

But with the court's new mandate, it was clear that the tide was running, and, as long as the U.S. remained a government of law, the ultimate conquest of segregation was inevitable.

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