Nation: Where Jim Crow Is Alive and Well

Three weeks ago, the Nixon Administration asked a federal court to delay the enforcement of an order requiring 30 Mississippi school districts to integrate this fall. According to Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch, the delay, which will forestall integration in these districts for at least a year, was necessary to prevent “chaos, confusion and a catastrophic educational setback.” Last week, TIME Correspondent Marvin Zim traveled to Mississippi to examine Finch’s premise in a district typical of those granted a reprieve. He sent this report:

LEAKE County, in the geographical center of Mississippi, is an area of fields, farms and forests. Most of its 17,000 people live on the land, although an increasing number are finding work in the apparel factories and metalworking plants that are beginning to sprout in the lush countryside. Blacks comprise about 40% of the county’s population, and to them and their white neighbors, Jim Crow is alive and well despite the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Negroes still sit in the balcony when they go to the movies in Carthage (pop. 2,442), the county seat, and use separate waiting rooms when they visit local white doctors. Earlier this month, three Negro women were beaten when they brought their clothes to a white self-service laundry. Typically, the police did nothing.

Only about 70 of Leake County’s 2,100 Negro schoolchildren have elected to brave harassment and enroll in white schools under the “freedom of choice” plan that has been in effect since 1965. Most attend all-black schools. The schools and their physical facilities are no longer unequal to those used by white children. But the education is, since segregation denies black children the opportunity to mix with whites. “How can you bring a black child up separately and then put him out there to face the man and expect him to do well?” asks Ferr Smith, the black director of a county poverty program.

Until the Nixon Administration granted it a year’s respite, Leake County was scheduled to integrate its schools this fall in accordance with a plan drawn up by HEW’s Office of Education. Under the program, one of the county’s seven “attendance centers,” or groupings of schools for grades one through twelve, would be abolished, while two presently white centers would become integrated high schools. Three Negro centers and one white one would become integrated elementary schools. Attendance at all would be governed only by residence.

There is little doubt that carrying out the plan would have caused some of the “chaos and confusion” of which the Administration warned. Desks would have to be moved, blackboards raised or lowered, textbooks shifted, transportation arranged and teachers reassigned. But the Administration’s reasons for seeking the delay were political, not logistical.

Most of the county’s white teachers had threatened to abandon the system if the schools were integrated; none had signed contracts for the coming year, though it was customary to do so by March. Taking their cue from the teachers, wealthier parents had enrolled their children in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Day School, 55 miles away in Jackson. Some even rented apartments so that mothers and children could live there during the week. Other families moved to neighboring Scott and Attala counties, neither of which was yet under court order to desegregate.

Still other parents talked of sending their children to a private school system being formed by a local citizens’ group. The majority of whites, aware that Mississippi has no compulsory attendance law, intended to try do-it-yourself schooling at home. Sensing the popular mood, school officials did nothing to prepare the way for compliance with the HEW plan. “We wouldn’t have implemented the plan,” said School Superintendent F. F. Mundy, an ex-sheriff. “It called for complete integration.”

That integration would have resulted in the “catastrophic educational setback” predicted by the Administration is highly doubtful. Few Leake County whites will admit publicly that they will send their children to school with blacks. But most acknowledge that they could not afford private schools and would not keep their children out of the public schools for long. “People say a lot of things,” declares J. Edwin Smith, a prominent Carthage attorney and adviser to the county board of supervisors, “but when it gets right down to it, they don’t always do what they say they’re going to do.”

County officials say that their people need more time to get used to the idea of integration. But even they admit that local whites are unlikely in the next year to accept the Supreme Court school desegregation decision that they have resisted since 1954. What they are likely to do instead is continue their attempts to defer the inevitable. Convinced by the current reprieve that the Administration can be pressured into granting even further concessions, Leake County’s whites are already planning new delaying actions. As long as the Administration encourages or permits these delays, Leake County’s Negroes will continue to be denied the equality of educational opportunity promised them by the Supreme Court 15 years ago.