Education: They Don’t Want Riots

While Student James Meredith hangs on at the University of Mississippi,* other Negroes are girding to breach all-white public campuses in Alabama and South Carolina, the only states that still have totally segregated public education. The top targets:

> University ofAlabama, now considering its third Negro applicant in five weeks. The only one publicly known is Vivian Malone, 20, of Mobile, daughter of a housemaid. Applicant Malone, presently a junior majoring in business education at all-Negro Alabama A. & M., will not have to go to court to establish the right of Negroes to enter the university. The school has been under federal court order not to discriminate ever since 1956, when Coed Autherine Lucy (now studying education at Texas Southern University) was expelled because she charged university collusion with the mobs that chased her from the campus.

> University of South Carolina, defendant in a federal suit brought by Henri Monteith, 17, the Roman Catholic daughter of a Columbia schoolteacher and now a pre-med student at Baltimore’s College of Notre Dame of Maryland. The university has three weeks to show cause why she should not be admitted along with all Negroes “similarly situated.”

> South Carolina’s state-run Clemson College, which rejected Harvey Gantt, 19, a Charleston mechanic’s son who made the National Honor Society in high school, went on to Iowa State as an architectural engineering student. Gantt’s request for admission to Clemson is before Federal Judge Cecil C. Wyche, 77, a fair-minded South Carolinian who is expected to rule in Gantt’s favor if Clemson fails to disprove discrimination.

Memories of Mississippi. Odds are that at least one of the Negro applicants, probably Gantt, will make it in time for spring semester in February. Is the prospect peace—or another Ole Miss mess? Last week Alabama’s Governor-elect George C. Wallace rattled his battle plans in a speech before the Mississippi state legislature. “All that I am advocating is that these forces of evil bridle themselves in their lustful desires to destroy the South,” he said. Like Mississippi’s Ross Barnett (“your gallant Governor”), Alabama’s Wallace hopes to foil desegregation by making himself “chief official defendant” in a fight against the “Department of Iniquity,” meaning Justice.

The question in Alabama is whether Wallace will listen to calls for moderation increasingly heard since the Mississippi riots. Business, church and civic groups want no trouble. The university, which federal troops burned to the ground in the Civil War, is still combustible. But it takes a Southern pride in cheerful fraternities and ferocious football, wants no riots. The trustees sternly proclaim that “law and order must be maintained at all times on the University of Alabama campus.”

Pride in Carolina. Even more determined to have order is South Carolina, a state so proud of its colonial past that it is often said to regret the American Revolution. South Carolina has always preferred a polite white supremacy to redneck ruffianism. Unlike Mississippi, it is run by gentlemen to whom disgrace is far worse than desegregation. Governor-elect Donald S. Russell, former president of the university, paid only lip service to segregation in his campaign.

The current university president.

Thomas F. Jones Jr., left his native Mississippi years ago to teach electrical engineering at M.I.T. and Purdue, is all for taking desegregation “in our stride.” Already well in stride is Clemson’s President Robert C. Edwards, a former textile manufacturer, who is foresightedly preparing his 4,250 students so well that some of them even paid a sympathetic visit to Negro Applicant Gantt in court.

*Last week, meeting in Dallas, 388 college delegates of the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools decided not to disaccredit Mississippi—for now. The charge against the school, and all seven other public campuses in the state, was that meddling by Mississippi Governors and state legislators had made the schools political pawns. The association will keep Mississippi under “continued and careful observation,” warns that any future meddling may kill accreditation at any time.