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SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS—NOVEMBER 1958—PAGE 15
Tennessee
(Continued From Page 14)
cent of the county’s registered voters
are white.
In Chattanooga, Citizens for General
Improvement, a Negro organization, ad
vocated establishment of a “workshop”
in the community which would dis
cuss issues of integration and “first-
class citizenship.”
In a newsletter circulated in churches
and other places of assembly, CGI
charged that “since our leaders are not
teaching and explaining the problems,
it must be bluntly stated that integra
tion is inevitable—just as inevitable as
the fact that all nations of the world
must have equal rights.”
Douglas Carter is chairman of the
organization, which sometime ago asked
the city board of education to integrate
Chattanooga schools. The board has
taken no action on the request. Carter
has indicated the possibility of legal
proceedings.
President J. M. Smith of Memphis
State University told an alumni lunch
eon in Memphis Oct. 18 that “unless
something happens, there is nothing we
can do but enroll the Negroes who pass
[entrance] examinations next fall.”
He said: “In view of court decisions,
we don’t see a way out of it—yet.” But
he added: “We have been in court and
we will be back.”
Judge Scovel Richardson of New
York, the first Negro appointed to the
U. S. Customs Court, told Middle Ten
nessee Negro teachers at Nashville that
“the waves of justice and equality
enunciated by our highest judicial tri
bunal . . . are seeping down into every
village and hamlet, . . . giving new life
to the dignity and worth of the indi
vidual.”
EDUCATORS CHALLENGED
Richardson, a native of Nashville,
said desegregation and the international
race for outer space confront educa
tors with the challenge of charting
courses to “keep ‘little rocks’ from roll
ing against the doors of our public
schools and that will equip our future
citizens for living in an ever-increas-
ingly complex and competitive society.”
U.S. Rep. Brooks Hays of Arkansas,
in Nashville in his capacity as president
of the Southern Baptist Convention, said
he still hopes mediation will solve the
Little Rock integration problem. “I am
reconciled,” he said, “to a long period
of adjustment to bring together oppos
ing ideas on desegregation in Little
Rock and in other parts of the nation.”
He predicted an end to the dilemma
“will come through discussion, which is
a phenomenon of freedom—a part of the
human quest for solving its difficulties.”
Hays said the Newport, R.I., meeting
he arranged in September, 1957, between
President Eisenhower and Gov. Orval
Faubus of Arkansas “was not a total
failure.” He forecast “progress in find
ing solutions if we don’t resort to strict
ly legalistic means” and called for a
“mission of reconciliation” between fed
eral and state governments.
Discussing the Supreme Court’s de
segregation decision, the congressman-
ehurchman said “we can disagree about
legal concepts but we must not destroy
our institutions.”
A bomb rumor caused scores of par-
er >ts to rush to desegregated Fehr
School in Nashville Oct. 15 and take
their children out of classes. About half
the school’s 400 pupils were removed
during the day but were back the next
day when the “scare” faded. The school
has two Negro pupils.
The rumor of a blast threat was at
tributed to prolonged presence of a
P°lice car across the street from the
school. It had a battery failure and was
awaiting service. “Things got all excited
or no reason at all,” said Police Chief
Douglas E. Hosse.
bombing scares came later in the
?J 0 nth at East and Tech high schools in
“tsuiphis, where no schools are inte-
Srated. Anonymous callers said explo
sions would occur, and police evacuated
6 buildings while they searched and
°und no explosives.
# # #
NORTH CAROLINA
Governor Disclaims Barbs Aimed At Sister States
RALEIGH, N.C.
4 tty. Gen. Malcolm Sea well’s
outspoken stand in a series of
public addresses for recognition of
the U. S. Supreme Court’s school
decisions as “the law” brought a
churning debate and a mixed re
action within the state.
In the face of wrathful criticism
of the speeches from politicians in
neighboring Virginia, Gov. Luther
Hodges disassociated himself from
the specific references by Seawell,
whom he had appointed, to Vir
ginia and Arkansas and the
courses taken in those states to
defeat integration. (See “Political
Activity.”)
TWO PUPILS ASSIGNED
Two more Negroes were assigned to
white and predominantly white schools
in Charlotte. This brought to 13 the
number enrolled in such schools in
Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-
Salem, most of them for a second year,
and all without the pressure of specific
court actions. (See “School Boards and
Schoolmen.”)
New terminology was used to de
scribe the degree of desegregation
which has taken place since “race” was
erased from North Carolina statutes in
1955 as a factor in assignments. What
followed usually has been called limited
or “token” integration. The NAACP
holding its state convention at Raleigh
heard its National Executive Secretary
Roy Wilkins call it “eye-dropper” inte
gration.
Calling upon Negro parents to be
ready for court actions to test the laws,
he said North Carolina will “have to
come up with something better than
integration by eye-dropper.” (See
“Community Action.”)
Meanwhile, Seawell prepared to de
fend the whole complex of new state
laws affecting segregation against
charges of Negro parents that it was
designed and has operated effectively to
stop integration. He asked a federal dis
trict court not to require the state to
put into the record of a test suit pam
phlets and official statements issued in
the heat of a campaign to get the laws
passed. (See “Legal Action.”)
Although a campaign for governor
is two years away, Seawell’s speeches
in defense of this state’s official ap
proach to desegregation, the Pearsall
Plan, set political tongues wagging
about how the issue will figure in that
race.
Considered a possible candidate for
governor, Seawell said he had spoken
out because massive resistance had de
veloped object lessons all could see and
understand, and he felt the need to
show the wisdom of a course that rec
ognized the realities of the law.
Defiance of the law “will never result
in anything but irreparable damage to
a state and its people,” he said in an
address before Young Democratic Clubs
at Greensboro.
Seawell spoke of “dangers which lie
in the pathway being followed by the
state of Arkansas and the state of
Virginia.”
‘ON SIDE OF LAW’
And he added: “However distasteful
may be the job assigned to me by law,
I intend to take my stand on the side
of law—and neither through public ut
terance nor in any other manner will
seek to advise a people to take any
other stand than that which I know
tinder law is the only stand we may
take.”
Referring to both Virginia and Ar
kansas, Seawell said the “day should
never come” when North Carolina
would go out of the business of public
education to avoid the law of the land.
In his plea for moderation, he said
“the most damaging blows yet given to
the attempts on the part of people who,
in good faith, seek to keep alive public
education in the South, have been given
by Orval Faubus of Arkansas.”
“If this is politically inexpedient,
dangerous or fatal, I’ll just have to be
content with what the future holds for
me,” said the Hodges appointee, now
unopposed Democratic candidate for
election to the office he holds.
VIRGINIANS REPLY
The speech brought quick reaction in
Virginia, where Fifth District Rep. Wil
liam M. Tuck referred to Seawell’s as a
“voice of abject surrender.” He said
Seawell was smarting from the criti
cism “coming from his own people who
ATTY. GEN. SEAWELL
are mindful of Virginia’s fine leader
ship in this crisis.” And Rep. Watkins
M. Abbitt at Dinwiddie, Va., said Sea
well “like Judas Iscariot has betrayed
his people and wants to take the heat
off himself by pointing at Virginia.”
HODGES DISSENTS
The furor brought from Gov. Hodges
a short statement making it plain he
did not agree with the attorney gen
eral’s references in his speeches to
other states and their course of action.
He said he was doing so “without
wanting to criticize Ceawell.”
And Hodges added: “I have always
made every effort not to be critical of
what other states are doing with this
serious problem, because each state
must face its own problem in its own
way.”
Afterward Seawell’s speeches con
tinued to pound home his argument
that Supreme Court decisions are the
effective law, although he told the
North Carolina state bar there has
been a “wide misunderstanding” of re
marks he’d made earlier.
Seawell goes before Federal District
Judge Edwin Stanley early next year
to defend the state’s laws against a
broadside attempt to have them de
clared unconstitutional.
NO FORCED MIXING
Thus far no school board has been
placed under a federal court order to
enforce integration in public schools,
although 13 Negroes have been ad
mitted in the state without court action.
Stanley recently upheld the Raleigh
school board’s refusal to admit the only
Negro pupil who has pushed an appli
cation for a transfer to an all-white
school in the capitol city. He also dis
missed other test cases in which pupils
did not profess to have exhausted ad
ministrative processes set up under the
state assignment laws.
Seawell told the bar that North Caro
linians, when they passed the new laws
affecting racial assignments, recognized
as a fact that the Brown decision was
“the law of the land.”
OPPOSITE VIEWPOINT
Amid the furor, a former assistant
state attorney general often mentioned
as a possible candidate for governor,
Dr. Beverly Lake, continued to press
his argument that the Brown case de
cision was “judicial tyranny.” He de
cried its acceptance as the law of the
land.
“That decision is not the law of the
land,” Lake told the state bar meeting,
“if ... as I believe and as history
shows, that decision is in conflict with
the intent of the framers and ratifiers
of the 14th Amendment.”
Lake acknowledged that “of course
we must make plans for the education
of children of North Carolina, white
and Negro, with the fact of those de
cisions in mind, but those decisions do
not bind in conscience one who has
sworn a solemn oath that with the help
of almighty God, he will support the
Constitution of the United States . . .”
‘DEATH SENTENCE’
Lake said the Brown decision “has
laid a sentence of death upon the pub
lic schools of the southern states. . . .”
In the interchange between the gov
ernor and Seawell, the latter told an
audience he and Hodges are personal
friends without animosity. Hodges,
prodded by newsmen to amplify his
statement criticising Seawell, refused
to do so, leaving the inference he dis
agreed only with his references to other
states.
Seawell, meanwhile conducting a le
gal battle to keep integration to a
GOV. HODGES
trickle, warned Negro leaders they
might yet wreck public schools in this
state.
SCOLDS NAACP
“Blind insistence on the part of the
NAACP,” Seawell charged, “has done
irreparable harm in race relations. Its
activities, if continued, will in great
part wreck public education within the
southern states, including North Caro
lina.”
He pleaded for cooperation of Ne
groes in order to permit the state to
attain success with a course of “moder
ation.”
As the Democratic nominee for the
position to which Hodges appointed
him, Seawell is assured of election
Nov. 4.
Charlotte’s school board assigned two
more Negroes to white or predomin
antly white schools, bringing the total of
such assignments to four attending
three previously white schools there.
The board turned down 14 Negro pupils
on their appeals from prior decisions
and refused the original application of
one other.
At Winston-Salem, where four Ne
groes are assigned to two white schools,
officials planned expansion of Negro
educational facilities. The plan was
interpreted by some as an attempt to
stave off further integration efforts.
A new high school would be built in
East Winston-Salem where most of the
city’s Negroes live.
A few students from closed Virginia
schools enrolled at Raleigh, Murfrees
boro and in some other North Carolina
public and private schools. But the
state’s attorney general said this state
cannot afford to become a “haven” for
children from other states where
schools have been closed. Two Little
Rock students previously were reported
enrolled at Gastonia. Seawell said state
residency requirements bar acceptance
of such students unless their parents
reside here.
BACK IN SCHOOL
At Greensboro, where five Negroes’
appeals for transfer to white schools
were turned down by the school board,
a Negro student at the partially inte
grated Gillespie Park school returned
to classes after several days absence
following a series of difficulties with
white students. School authorities de
nied he ever had been expelled, as his
father claimed.
And at Charlotte, a white sophomore
was given a one-day suspension for
pushing and tussling with Gus Rob
erts, the only Negro student at the
city’s Central High School.
Thurgood Marshall appeared as the
principal speaker at a statewide
NAACP annual convention in Raleigh.
As general counsel, he advised his
clients, “the other side has shot its bolt
—there’s nothing else they can shoot.
They shot it all.”
Marshall urged the delegates not to
let up in their fight to integrate
schools.
WILKINS SPEAKS
The NAACP also heard Roy Wilkins
say the state’s pupil assignment law
may be doomed “if it continues to filter
out a mere dozen Negro children in the
entire state for integration.” And
“North Carolina will have to come up
with something better than ‘eye-drop
per integration.’ Gradual means grad
ual,” said Wilkins. “It doesn’t mean
standing still, with three cities and a
dozen youngsters.” He urged more test
lawsuits.
North Carolina, he said, “has no plan
for integration.” But he said the state
“enjoys the enviable distinction of be
ing the only southern state where bills
which would have persecuted the
NAACP have been defeated on the
floor.”
North Carolina’s attorney general en
tered strong objections to plaintiffs’
interrogatories in a Durham integration
case (McKissick v. Durham Board of
Education and the State Board of Edu
cation), to be tried early next year.
He objected to putting into the record
a pamphlet issued last year by the
governor’s office summarizing Hodges’
statements on the Pearsall Plan and
other official expressions on segrega
tion. Seawell said the pamphlet and
other answers to questions asked him
were irrelevant.
KLANSMEN LOSE
The state supreme court found no
error in the trial and conviction of
three Ku Klux Klansmen in connection
with the attempted bombing of a Ne
gro school in Mecklenburg County last
winter.
Lester F. Caldwell, described as a
leader of the Klan group, had been
sentenced to five years in prison for
the dynamite attempt, nipped by police
while the plotters sat in a car outside
the building. Two others, William O.
Spencer and Arthur Moore Brown Jr.,
convicted of consipracy, were given two
to five years in prison.
At Greensboro, attorneys represent
ing Negroes seeking to force desegre
gation of Montgomery County schools
(Covington et al v. Montgomery Coun
ty Board of Education) gave notice
they will appeal Judge Edwin Stanley’s
dismissal.
“Whatdaya Mean, ‘Out’ ?
That’s Only Three Strikes”
—Greensboro Daily News
North Carolinians heard a prediction
by President William Friday of the
University of North Carolina that com
bined enrollment of all colleges in the
state probably will reach 90,000 by
1965. In that period the state university
was expected to jump from 15,500 to
23,000, he said.
Fund campaigns for church-related
and community colleges were launched
in the state, raising some objections
from segregationists and integrationists
alike.
While Methodist Church leaders
meeting at Raleigh opened a $5 million
drive to help finance the new Methodist
colleges proposed at Fayetteville and
Rocky Mount, Gov. Hodges told the
rally the state cannot meet all of the
increased burden of higher education in
public institutions.
QUESTIONS PLAN
But Byrd I. Satterfield, a Methodist
layman and member of the state House
of Representatives, said “the masses of
people want to know” whether the new
Methodist schools will be segregated.
He said charters of the new institu
tions reveal their trustees are under
the supervision of the General Board
of the Methodist Church. Thus, said
Satterfield, “if these colleges are built
. . . they are wide open to be inte
grated.”
A trustee spokesman countered that
the trustees will have a free hand in
determining admissions policies.
# # #
Disagreement Without Criticism