Education: Rebel Yells

Throughout the state of Virginia, an icy wind blew. Freezing rain fell in the north, and there was snow in the mountains of the southwest. But last week Virginians trooped to the polls in force to chalk up a vote second only to the state record set in the 1952 presidential election. By a majority of two to one, they called for a special convention to amend their constitution and circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision against segregation in the schools.

In a sense, the action called for was mild. The voters simply approved a plan recommended by a commission headed by State Senator Garland Gray to 1) provide private-school tuition to pupils in cities and counties that had closed the public schools rather than desegregate, and 2) pay the tuition of any pupil who wishes to attend a private school in cities and counties that have desegregated. But mild or not, the action was in every way a revolt, an overwhelming sign that Southerners are thoroughly aroused against a decision they think violates their rights.

Whose Constitution? Though the Gray plan may eventually be knocked down in court, Virginia showed every indication that it would continue the fight. “We are in for a long-drawn-out struggle,” said U.S. Senator Harry Byrd, “and may have to shift strategy from time to time.” But whatever strategy the South uses, it has now confronted the country with a major legal issue. Is the U.S. Constitution, as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes put it, “what the judges say it is”? Or is it what it was when the states first ratified it in the generally accepted belief that it reserved to them their full “local rights”?

Not since the days before the Civil War has the South talked with such intensity about legal doctrine. Some newspapers and legislators speak of “nullification”; others talk of “interposition,” i.e., interposing the sovereignty of the state between its citizens and the Federal Government. The South Carolina legislature now has before it a resolution declaring the Supreme Court’s decision “null and void and of no effect so far as this state is concerned.”

In Mississippi, a group of lawyers and legislators, headed by U.S. Senator James Eastland, urged the state to nullify the Supreme Court’s decision. Governor-elect J. P. Coleman countered that such action would be nothing less than an “invitation to the Federal Government to send troops into Mississippi.” He himself has come out for some sort of “interposition,” has hinted that he will make his position clear in his inaugural address this week.

A Condition Intolerable. In Alabama, the Montgomery Advertiser called the Virginia vote a “thunderous revolt.” In the Birmingham Post-Herald, Columnist John Temple Graves went into historical ecstasies. “Virginia,” said he, “with names for every chapter of American history . . . Virginia, where America’s history and philosophy were born . . . Surely this stern and determined gesture from the South gives pause to those who would impose on our people a condition intolerable to them and unknown to the Constitution.”

The Alabama legislature was “ready with determined gestures of its own. Last week the senate passed bills which in effect empower the Pickens and Macon County school boards to dismiss any teacher who advocates desegregation. The house is considering a bill, already passed once by the senate, which would set up three types of school: allwhite, all-Negro and mixed.

Before the Georgia legislature there are no fewer than six bills, all designed to get around the Supreme Court. One would permit the governor to close the public schools; another would authorize local school boards to lease their buildings for private-school purposes; still another would empower the attorney general to enjoin any community from mixing the races.

“Day by day,” cried Governor Marvin Griffin, “Georgia moves nearer to a showdown with this federal Supreme Court—a tyrannical court ruthlessly seeking to usurp control of state-created, state-developed and state-financed schools and colleges . . . Unless we act, and act decisively, we will see, one by one, the reserved powers of the sovereign states trampled under foot . . . Are we going to permit the naked and arrogant declaration of nine men to destroy our Constitution and usurp the blood-won rights of our people? The answer is no, no, a thousand times no.”