Back to School

The soggy heat and humidity of late summer lay across the U.S. last week as parents bought new shirts and shoes and got ready to send their children back to school. From Key West, Fla. to Port Angeles, Wash, a record-shattering 41,533,000 students began to enroll in the U.S.'s often overcrowded and understaffed schools and colleges--1,754,300 more than last year, and an astonishing one-fourth of the nation's population. "It gets to be more fun each year," said Mrs. Creta McVean, teacher of the first grade of Dallas' James W. Fannin Elementary School, as she looked forward to her 30th year of teaching school. "I anticipate what we'll be doing with a great deal of pleasure."

There was little pleasant anticipation, however, in the problem-racked Deep South, where the passions and prejudices of the grownups are piling up like thunderheads above the schools of their chil dren--Negro and white. Already the legislatures of eight Southern states are framing ways of evading the Supreme Court ruling that public schools should be desegregated "with all deliberate speed." Already Southern voters are turning out to support racist legislation in lopsided referendums. "Our schools will run on a segregated basis or they will not be run at all," said South Carolina's Clarendon County School Superintendent L. B. McCord, speaking the voice of his kind. "Our way of life calls for separation of the races, and come hell or high water we plan to keep it that way."

"Get the Nigger Lovers." In two distant and different Southern small towns last week hell and high water almost came. In Clinton, Tenn. (pop. 4,000) white mobs rioted in the tree-shaded streets and the old courthouse square to stop the enrollment of twelve Negro students in the local high school. Clinton is the only place in Tennessee (except the federal enclave of Oak Ridge) to integrate its school, and outsiders came streaming in last week to lash the little town back into line.

One night a howling mob of 1,000 whites, inflamed by a self-appointed foe of integration from Washington, D.C. named John Kasper, banged and battered the cars of Negroes passing through, blocked traffic, swamped and demoralized the local police. Next night the showdown came. Forty citizens of Clinton were sworn in to help the eight Clinton cops in a vigilante "peace guard." They armed themselves with "everything we can get our hooks on," and formed a skirmish line before the mob in the courthouse square. "Lock them up if they give you any lip," ordered the submachine gun-toting commander of the vigilantes, a lawyer and paratroop veteran of Korea's Heartbreak Ridge named Leo W. Grant Jr. Said one of Grant's citizens: "Hell, it ain't a matter of wanting or not wanting niggers in the school, it's a matter of who's going to run the town, the Government or that mob out there. It's not easy to go out there and face maybe your neighbors, but it's got to be done."

Thunder and lightning split the sultry overcast as Grant's men fired six tear-gas bombs to disperse the mob and keep the peace, but the mob began to move against the vigilantes, shouting, "Let's get the nigger lovers! Let's get their guns and kill them!" Precisely at that moment 100 state-highway patrolmen swept into Clinton on the orders of Governor Frank Clement, sirens shrieking and searchlights blazing, to restore an uneasy peace. Next day the state rolled 633 troops and seven M41 tanks of the National Guard into Clinton to button things up, roaring and clanking and chewing up the asphalt of the courthouse square.

"They Get Along Fine." There was no such open battle in Mansfield, Texas (pop. 1,450), where the mob simply won in a walkaway. Last fortnight the Federal Court ordered three Negro students integrated with 300 whites in the Mansfield high school. On registration day last week, a mob of about 400 Texans bulled about the school grounds, hanging Negroes in effigy, displaying placards that read:

DEAD COONS ARE THE BEST COONS; $2 A DOZEN FOR NIGGER EARS. The Negroes understandably stayed away and the white students registered alone. "If God wanted us to go to school together," 14-year-old Glenda Geyer (white) reasoned, "He wouldn't have made them black and us white."

But not far from Clinton, Tenn. and Mansfield, Texas lay the greatest hope of the U.S.'s back-to-school week. Along the prospering periphery of the border states, e.g., Kentucky, Oklahoma, Missouri (where the proportion of Negroes to whites is much lower), integration is proceeding smoothly and well. Already the Supreme Court ruling has won entry there for 400,000 Negro students into formerly all-white schools, and there has been no serious trouble. At week's end Mrs. Jessie Honaker, teacher of a recently integrated school in Tram, Ky., summed up the prospects of her own class and the distant promise. "They all get along fine together," she said, "because they haven't been taught prejudice."

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