Judicial Quarterbacking

Before the Supreme Court issues its school segregation decree, it will have spent nearly a year studying Southern psychology. For the first time since the Dred Scott ruling in 1857, there is serious danger that mass disobedience and even violence will interfere with enforcement. This month the nine Justices must decide what plan of integration will minimize this civil disobedience. Before the end of May the nation will know how soon the Court feels it can enforce the Constitutional rights of 3,200,000 Negro schoolchildren.

If the Court follows the advice of Southern spokesmen, it will grant at least a five or ten year "period of adjustment" to Dixieland schools before pressing integration. The U.S. Solicitor General has suggested flexibility of less sweeping import; he would give the Federal District Courts wide discretion in enforcing de-segregation in what they deemed the shortest practical time. In striking contrast to these arguments, however, the able attorneys for the NAACP have spoken vigorously for a Supreme Court decree that would proclaim "immediate integration of all Southern schools." The massive evidence of sociology that has engulfed the Court in the past months seems to support the NAACP solution.

The Southland Armed?

Sociologists and Justices have studied carefully the grave Southern threats that "Negro blood will boil into the gutters of Memphis." Even though many of these gruesome promises are designed merely to discourage radical de-segregation, some Southerners may feel pride-bound to fulfill their rash avowals. Particularly in rural areas, where Negroes compete for jobs directly with whites; where illiteracy, bigotry, and violence combine in a sordid tangle, racist strife seems likely as integration approaches. Yet these social experts could point to Baltimore and Washington as examples of successful rapid integration. They cited numorous cases in labor and military de-segregation where threats of violence dissolved into racial harmony, once integration became a fact. These experts have presented convincing evidence that violence increases when integration is drawn out. Slow surgery may well prove more painful than a quick incision.

Yet however radical its decree, the Supreme Court is unlikely to achieve immediate school integration. Where governmental and educational leadership sympathize with the Court, integration can proceed smoothly--as indeed it already has in many border states. But in the Deep South, where leaders are by instinct--or at least by political necessity--hostile to integration, evasion will be the rule for at least four or five years after any "final date" that the Supreme Court lays down for de-segregation. Professor Gordon Allport, who has studied the decline in prejudice that accompanies forced de-segregation in schools and factories, sees grave problems in the Southern leadership's drastic opposition to compliance. Integration is surely the best way to dispel racial bias, but integration cannot occur until Southern politicians have exhausted their evasive ingenuity.

Segremanders

In Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, voters have adopted resolutions which would allow their states to sponsor "private school systems" which might escape court jurisdiction. Artistic gerrymandering can define districts so cleverly that not a single Negro will live in most white school zones. The Schools Commissioner of Memphis could proudly tell worried citizens, after the momentous Court segregation decision a year ago, that the problem of integration is "all taken care of in Memphis"--by a gigantic gerrymander, of course.

The long "adjustment period" which Southern politicians advocate--a delay long enough to last them through present and future terms of office--would provide even more time for gerrymandering, cultivation of bigotry, and ridicule of the Supreme Court. During this extra time very few School Committees would take even a mincing step toward the integration goals the Court constructs.

By decreeing "immediate integration" instead, the Court would tacitly recognize the inevitable delays of evasion and legal prosecution. But such a firm proclamation would at least force Southern educational leaders to take immediate action, and allow the District Courts and Supreme Court to commence the long process of curbing their evasive devices.

Social science has demonstrated the worthlessness of "adjustment periods"; the evidence on integrating all grades of school at once is not so clear. When the Court decides whether it wants simultaneous integration, or desegration that proceeds through the grades with next year's class of children, it strikes out on pyschological soil--it must weigh the enhanced efficiency of teaching and probably diminished bigotry of the grade-by-grade scheme, against the domestic problems for families with one child in a segregated class and another in a mixed group.

The Supreme Court must of course rely on District Courts for help in enforcing its decrees, but it should not rely on District judges for policy decisions, however complicated the social problems may seem. For as new District Court vacancies occur, Southern Senators will resort to "Senatorial courtesy" to thwart appointment of judges who would proclaim a rapid integration policy.

If, in the face of threats of violence and civil disorder, the Supreme Court Justices hand down an equivocal decree, their action will be understandable. But with a forthright proclamation, history is more likely to award them a heroic niche.