The Supreme Court: Integration Now

“With all deliberate speed” was the famous phrase used in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, commanding integration of the nation’s public schools. The response in much of the South has been all deliberate resistance: 1,534 local districts in the Old Confederacy and Border States are still classified as segregated. Now the Supreme Court has run out of patience. Last week in Holmes v. Alexander—the first major judgment since Chief Justice Warren Burger joined the bench—the court unanimously ruled that the deliberate-speed formula “is no longer constitutionally permissible.” The brusque, unsigned order declared: “The obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools.”

The blow, coming from what is at least nominally “Burger’s court,” startled some members of the Administration. Many Southerners who had believed that Burger’s accession to Earl Warren’s chair would somehow ease judicial pressure for integration were also shocked. The court did nothing to change the logic of decisions based upon the Brown precedent. Rather, the issue was timing: by commanding immediate compliance with the law, the Justices brought an urgent new perspective to the complex and long-delayed process of integration. The decision establishes a judicial canon that will probably end dejure segregation before the start of the 1970 school year, though full integration in the physical sense is a very different matter. At the same time, the judgment may well provoke confusion, scattered violence and, temporarily at least, some damage to public education in parts of the South.

Catastrophe. In a sense, the Nixon Administration brought last week’s ruling upon itself. Last July, Nixon settled upon a desegregation policy that would concentrate upon progress through court orders rather than through Washington’s second available weapon, the withholding of Health, Education and Welfare Department funds from noncomplying school districts. In August, HEW Secretary Robert Finch, supported by Attorney General lohn Mitchell, granted 33 Mississippi school districts a grace period of three months, until Dec. 1, to adopt a HEW-drawn plan for desegregation. Actual integration would have been delayed even further.

To force immediate compliance, said Finch, “would cause chaos, confusion and an education catastrophe” for the school systems involved. The Administration went to a federal district court to get sanctions for the delay. The N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund fought the local decision up to the Supreme Court. Thus, ironically, the Administration’s emphasis on working through the courts—an approach tending to make integration slower and less painful for the South—produced a Supreme Court demand for a faster pace.

Only a month ago, the President told a press conference: “There are those extremists who want instant integration and those who want segregation forever. I believe we need to have a middle course.” Now Burger has proved to be what Nixon described as an “extremist.” Although in some ways unhappy with the decision. Nixon declared last week: “There are, of course, human and practical problems involved. With all of us working together in full respect of the law, I am confident we can overcome these problems.”

Southern Strategy. Actually, the President’s handling of the entire issue may be subtler than it seems and he may not be entirely displeased by the decision. The 1968 election left Nixon with a debt to the South. He is still pursuing a “Southern strategy”—paying the 1968 debt and laying the Southern foundations for a 1972 victory. The strategy goes beyond geographic confines, of course. It presupposes that many whites in the North share Southern attitudes on some racial and social issues. The faster Southern segregation cloaked in local law is destroyed, the more vulnerable will be Northern segregation based on custom and housing patterns.

It may be that Nixon has contrived to satisfy both his political debts and at least some black demands for social change. He may have deliberately leaned a bit toward the South in his school policies while knowing that the Supreme Court would eventually demand a hard stand against segregation. As it is, Nixon is now relieved of much of his Southern debt, and his credit remains fairly high in the South. It was the Supreme Court, not Nixon, that drew most of the fire last week. Said South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond: “The Nixon Administration stood with the South in this case, but the court has chosen to override both the State of Mississippi and the Justice Department.” Pointing to the President’s comparatively high credibility in Dixie, a Justice Department official speculated: “Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Nixon Administration was able to do more about desegregation than a liberal administration?”

Most of the Southern reaction mingled anger and resignation. Observed Paul Anthony, executive director of the Southern Regional Council: “A lot of people started to believe that integration could and would be delayed, and now —wham!” Alabama’s Attorney General MacDonald Gallion called it the “Black Wednesday” decision. He feared, with only some hyperbole, that in the South “the public school system will become a colored school system.” Some black educators in the South gloomily concurred. C. J. Duckworth, executive secretary of the predominantly Negro Mississippi Teachers Association, predicted: “Some districts will abolish public schools.”

Enforcement Problems. The court’s pronouncement will not foreclose many delaying options still available to recalcitrant districts. The decision states a blunt principle of law, but it leaves to lower courts, HEW and the Justice Department the task of sorting out how to achieve what should, by the law, be instant integration. Aside from the 33 Mississippi districts directly affected by the ruling, other segregated Southern systems will await pressure from the Administration. Applying such leverage requires time. Moreover, Attorney General Mitchell is not expected to plunge headlong into the South armed with court orders. For one thing, the Justice Department contends that it lacks the legal manpower necessary for comprehensive enforcement. The department has been doing no strenuous recruiting. Even if Mitchell proves slow in enforcement, however, the Legal Defense Fund is pressing suits involving 100 segregated school districts.

The order for “integration now” may derail some of the desegregation schedules that the Administration has already accepted. HEW has approved plans for integrating 109 Southern districts by next September; the department is currently considering 154 similar proposals. What will become of these plans as a result of the court’s demand for immediate action is uncertain. For the moment, both the Administration and Southern school officials will await a detailed ruling by the Fifth Circuit of Appeals in New Orleans.

The confusion and threats of worse —together with the substance of the Holmes decision—will doubtless provoke new attacks on the Supreme Court. Yet dual school systems and less obvious means of perpetuating segregation clearly violate both the law and the rights of Negroes. If the Supreme Court has again trod heavily on the domain of federal and local authorities, it is because these authorities have evaded their responsibilities for too long.