National Affairs: Advance in North Carolina

Wedged between fire-snorting South Carolina and adamant Virginia, North Carolina offered a rare chance for school integration to break into the Solid South —or to blow off the roof. Last week Negro and white children began attending school together in Greensboro (pop. 87,100), Charlotte (pop. 158,800) and Winston-Salem (pop. 115,800). And, thanks to careful advance planning, a strong governor and purposeful law enforcement, the roof stayed on.

The North Carolina school plan, endorsed by Governor Luther H. (for Hartwell) Hodges was actually designed to minimize integration while appearing to satisfy the Supreme Court’s desegregation order. It gave the state’s 172 local boards complete authority over assigning individual students to the public schools. Many a segregationist who had supported the plan was shocked when the Greensboro, Charlotte and Winston-Salem boards decided last July to integrate—on a highly selective basis. With some Negro leaders helping screen applicants, strict standards were set up, e.g., to be accepted in white schools, Negro pupils must live nearer to them than to their old schools, have top grades, be socially adaptable. Of 40 applicants, Charlotte accepted only four, Greensboro took six out of seven, and

Winston-Salem three out of six (two of the successful applicants later withdrew).

To Uphold, Not Upset. No sooner had the three school boards acted than the pressures began building toward a blowoff. Fiery crosses burned at night near Charlotte. A hooded Klansman promised to “muster 50,000 men by the time schools begin to open.” Fanatic John Kasper of New Jersey roared into Greensboro, Charlotte and Winston-Salem, harangued his followers to drive school-board members to “nervous breakdowns, heart attacks and suicide.”

Governor Hodges, 59, a Virginia sharecropper’s son who became a vice president of Marshall Field & Co. before turning to politics, moved hard and fast to prevent trouble. Speaking over a statewide network of radio and television stations last week, Hodges expressed his personal feelings: “I think the U.S. Supreme Court made a tragic mistake.” But, he said, “we are forced to recognize that that court has the final word. [We] do not like lawlessness.” Luther Hodges meant to use the power of the state to uphold, not upset, the law of the land.

The first morning they entered a white school, Greensboro Negroes were jeered; there were no hecklers the second day. The abusive “Damn Nigger” scrawlings on the asphalt driveway outside Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem were predictable. What was not predictable was the group of white students who scrubbed the drive clean. Said one: “This reflects on the name of the school, and we don’t want that.” Winston-Salem’s only integrated Negro student entered, passed about 100 white students. Not one offered insult. A few smiled hello. Gwendolyn Yvonne Bailey, 15, walked into the school auditorium and quietly took her place among her fellow students.

“Spit on Her.” It was in Charlotte that the worst trouble occurred—and, in a dramatic sense, it was in Charlotte that the finest victory was won. A crowd began to gather at 8:30 a.m. to await the only Negro assigned to Harding High School (three others were sent to other schools). Mrs. John Z. Warlick, small, shrill wife of a truck driver, began whipping up excitement. “It’s up to you to keep her out,” she told teen-age boys. At 10:30 a.m., the crowd spotted the girl: Dorothy Geraldine Counts, 15, daughter of a theology professor at Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University, was walking down the street with a friend of her father’s. The crowd, screaming, swarmed around her. It taunted her, pointed at her hair, stuck fingers up behind her head to resemble horns, held its nose as if against a bad smell. “Spit on her,” screeched Mrs. Warlick. Some did. Dorothy, a tall and pretty girl, walked head high toward the school.

Inside, a group of girls began to chant: “We don’t want her/ You can have her/ She’s too black for me.” But in the auditorium, a white girl sat down beside her with comforting words: “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.” Recalled Dorothy later: “She said she hoped we’d be in the same class—and we are.” And when Dorothy was called to the front for her room assignment, white girls sat on either side of her. Soon they were talking and laughing together.

But Dorothy Counts’s cruel day was far from over. When she left school, the crowd was waiting, louder and even more threatening than before. Sticks flew at her (Liston Wood Flowers, 18, was arrested for throwing one). She was spat upon (Patricia Elizabeth Smith, 15, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct after spitting full in her face). Dorothy Counts kept her eyes ahead, walked quietly, calmly to a waiting car.

Next morning Dorothy’s father sent word that she was under a doctor’s care for a sore throat. Would she return to school? No one seemed to know. But Mrs. Warlick knew who had won. Warned away from the school on penalty of arrest, she announced that she was disgusted because she had so little support and was quitting as secretary-treasurer of the White Citizens’ Council. Said she: “I’m ashamed of the white race.”