Hodges Defends North Carolina's 'Moderate' Integration Answer

With pin-stripe suit, white hair, and carnation, Governor Luther H. Hodges of North Carolina launched an attack Friday night on both the correctness and the desirability of the 1954 Supreme Court integration decision.

Speaking to the Law School Forum, Hodges declared that the Court's judgement departed from the traditional idea of judicial precedent, placed too much emphasis on social and psychological data, misused a power that belonged to the legislative branch, and want beyond the bounds on judicial self-restraint. He derived these four points from what he called a "prominent lawyer's ideas on this issue."

Quoting next from Judge Parker's 1955 decision on the enforcement of the 1954 Court judgement in Little Rock, Hodges held that the states are required only "not to deny anyone attendance to state operated schools." This decision calls not for integration but for the removal of discrimination in the public schools, Hodges said. With such a literal interpretation of the Parker decision, North Carolina has constructed one of the "more admirable and moderate" anti-integration schemes, The Pupil Placement Program, he declared.

Outlines Placement Plan

The Pupil Placement Program attempts to avoid the problems of the "massive resistance" approach to integration which other Southern states practice. Hodges pointed out that the "safety valve" aspect of this plan allows North Carolina "to pinch off trouble spots in the state without jeopardizing the education of all citizens." Assignment of students in that state is now broad enough to stymie any Court condemnation, Hodges commented. The NAACP has called the Pupil Placement Progam "one of the most difficult obstacles to integration in the South" perhaps because of this "disarming moderation" itself, he added.

"After all the stir, Negroes never wanted to go to school with white people to begin with," Hodges concluded.