Schoolroom to Courtroom

"It is a tragic day in American history," mourned Syndicated Columnist David Lawrence. "What's happened to the government of the State of Tenessee and its governor? Is it still a state of the Union or has it abdicated entirely to the Federal Government?" States'-Righter Lawrence was reflecting the anguish and anger of other states'-righters as the Clinton, Tenn. integration case (TIME, Sept. 10 et seq.) moved from the local schoolroom to the federal courtroom with the arraignment last week of 16 segregationist leaders before a federal judge on con-tempt-of-court charges.

Peace of a sort had come to Clinton itself. Clinton High School, forced by violence to close the previous week, was open again. Negro children walked to school unescorted, attended class unmolested. From Anderson County Attorney Eugene Joyce, 38, came one of the most forthright Southern law-enforcement performances thus far in the desegregation struggle. Facing students in the Clinton High School auditorium, Joyce said: "I have beesn asked and directed by the Board of Education to come before you and tell you what the Board of Education and what the faculty of this school expect of you in the future."

Acts of segregationist misconduct, said Joyce, will be "dealt with severely and swiftly." Not only would students be expelled, but the high-school faculty had been instructed to "pass on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation any actions on behalf of the students that might be construed as violative of the [Federal Court's integration] injunction." Joyce concluded hopefully: "With active assistance from all of you, I believe all students can return to the carefree and rich student life you all deserve." When Joyce finished, the high school auditorium echoed with applause.

Forces Gathering. Stunned by such direct action, the segregationists turned their eyes toward Knoxville, where their leaders' trial was set for Jan. 28, and where in preparation for it great legal forces were already gathering.

Digging up evidence for the trial of the 16 Clinton racists were FBI agents on the one side and investigators for the pro-segregation Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government on the other.

Lined up against U.S. Attorney John Calvin Crawford Jr. (described by a Tennessee judge as "the best all-around U.S. attorney in the country today") were four experienced trial lawyers (including Nashville's Thomas Page Gore, a first cousin to Tennessee's Democratic Senator Albert Gore). The attorneys general of Louisiana and Texas sent word that they would attend the trial themselves or have representatives there. Fund-raising drives for the defense were organized in Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia. The issue to be fought out in Knoxville: Can the federal judiciary properly invoke its broad contempt-of-court powers to enforce the Supreme Court's desegregation decision?

Strategy Backfiring. Many Southern legal eagles argued no, and Conservative Democrat Dave Lawrence stated their case: "Contempt charges . . . have been applied heretofore primarily to acts committed in a courtroom or with respect to property seized by an individual which he may be forced to bring into a courtroom." This view ignored the classic use of the contempt-of-court charge to enforce the injunctive power, e.g., in the fines totaling $30,000 levied in 1946 and 1948 against United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis for disobeying a court order to return his miners to work. The contempt citation is, in fact, the obvious way and the only reasonable way that the courts have to back up the Supreme Court's two-year-old desegregation decision.

Nonetheless, in line with the South's general strategy of stalling on integration, the case of the Clinton segregationists is almost certain to be dragged out in the courts for months. In Clinton, happily, that strategy of deliberate dallying may backfire: with each peaceful day, the segregationist cause suffers as the law-respecting students of Clinton High School demonstrate that integration can be made to work.

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