A SOUTHERNER FACES FACTS

As the South seethed and rumbled around him, Mississippi-born Publisher Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal, speaking at the University of Florida, had some telling words last week for his fellow Southerners. Excerpts:

DESEGREGATION, integration--call it what you will--hangs like a dark cloud over the South, and no editor can dare ignore it as a major editorial problem. Unfortunately, even tragically, the supreme court decision has set in motion some of the evil forces and evil actions which are too reminiscent of our dark est days. Councils have sprung up throughout the South that are, despite the feelings of their respectable sponsors, nothing more than uptown Ku Klux Klans, using instead of tar and feathers and the lash the equally destructive economic pressure. They say they are dedicated to the idea of defeating desegregation "by means short of violence." But already the spirit of violence has manifested itself . . .

Now nobody desires to hurry the transition which the Supreme Court decreed to be the law of the land, which our intelligence told us was inevitable, which our consciences told us was right. Nor has the Supreme Court insisted upon a hurried transition. It has given the 17 states affected a "reasonable time" and, moreover, it returned enforcement to the local courts, knowing that special problems are presented where the population is overwhelmingly Negro. But Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have not responded with the same understanding which the court had.

THE SPIRIT OF SECESSION

Under the leadership of Virginia, which presented an idea, not a plan, they have ridden off like headless horsemen into the woods of nullification--even though they call it interposition--and in the pursuit of every evasion of the decree that slick, if not smart, lawyers may devise. Nobody has proposed firing upon Sumter again, but the spirit of secession is there: secession from the moral conscience of the rest of the country and indeed of the world that is giving men of color --who far outnumber us of the white race--their civil rights, their right to be free and to share fully in the bounties of civilization . . . I must in candor say that the N.A.A.C.P. is vulnerable to attack. It is not one of my favorite organizations. It is as radical on its side as [Mississippi's] Senator Eastland is on his. By trying to hurry too fast, it could violate the spirit if not the word of the Supreme Court decision quite as grossly as Senator Eastland in trying to defeat it. It is contributing nothing toward a calm and rational working out of a very difficult situation. The reasonable people of the South are caught between two [dangerous] forces: one of them sitting down in the traces like a balky mule, the other trying to move it by setting firecrackers under its belly.

THE NEED FOR EVIDENCE

But when all that has been said, it must be repeated that there are hard facts to be faced by calm and sober people--facts not advanced by political demagogues or agitators.

One of them is that the South will not be allowed to withdraw from the union; it will not be allowed to establish defiance of the Supreme Court as the law of the land; it will not be allowed to bend the will of the union to denial of the civil rights or full citizenship of a tenth of our population any more than it was allowed to continue to enslave that minority. It will not profit by attempts at slick evasion, even though it may long delay integration.

The rest of the country, I repeat, has no desire to hurry the process of integration, but it does most earnestly want some evidence of good faith and good will.

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