Squeeze in New Orleans

"God demands segregation," says New Orleans' Mrs. B. J. Gaillot Jr., president of segregationist Save Our Nation Inc. She is a Roman Catholic, and when Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel, 85, ordered full desegregation of New Orleans parochial schools for next fall, Mrs. Gaillot responded with picketing and loud protest. She was not alone. Leander Perez, influential political boss of Plaquemines Parish and also a Catholic, suggested reprisals against the clergy: "Cut off their water. Quit giving them money to feed their fat bellies." And State Representative Rodney Buras of New Orleans proclaimed that he would fight Arch, bishop Rummel's demand for desegregation "even to the extreme of being excommunicated."

Last week the archbishop answered some of his loudest parishioners with firm letters of "paternal admonition." The letter to Mrs. Gaillot, mother of two children in Catholic schools, was a "fatherly warning'' of automatic excommunication if she continued promoting "flagrant disobedience to the decision to open our schools to ALL." Said she nervously: "If they can show me from the Bible where I am wrong, I will get down on my knees before Archbishop Rummel and beg his forgiveness." Postponing that experience, the archbishop spent two hours conferring with State Lawmaker Buras, recipient of another Rummel letter, who emerged saying that he still opposed all integration. "However," he added, "as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, I must abide by its laws and decisions."

Parochial schools enroll half the white pupils in New Orleans. After Rummel's order, segregationist Catholics considered transferring their children to public schools. But in a landmark decision last week, New Orleans' Federal District Judge J. Skelly Wright took a severe look at New Orleans' public schools, which still have admitted only twelve Negroes to six previously all-white schools. Judge Wright agreed with 102 Negro petitioners that the city school board is hardly desegregating "with all deliberate speed." Wright forbade the board from further use of the Louisiana pupil-placement law, and ordered desegregation of the first six grades in all New Orleans public schools next fall. As a result. New Orleans faces the biggest wholesale school integration yet attempted in any major Southern city.

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