THE SUPREME COURT: Presumption of Faith

Like nine other states since the Supreme Court’s 1954 school-desegregation decision, Alabama enacted a pupil-placement law which by common agreement was designed to thwart integration. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Alabama’s law—on its face—and provoked hopeful Southern punditry about having finally found a legal way around integration. The punditry was premature.

The Alabama law sets up 17 separate standards for assigning pupils to public schools. Nowhere is the question of race or color mentioned, but school boards obviously had a wide-open chance to preserve the segregation status quo in several placement qualifications, including: 1) “the psychological qualification of the pupil for the type of teaching and associates involved,” 2) “the possibility of threat of friction or disorder,” 3) “the possibility of breaches of the peace or ill will or economic retaliation within the community,” and 4) “the maintenance or severance of established social and psychological relationships with other pupils and with teachers.”

Last May a three-judge federal panel upheld the Alabama law on the ground that none of the 17 qualifications were, in and of themselves, unconstitutional unless proved, by evidence submitted to the courts, to be administered so as to exclude Negroes from white schools. “In some future proceeding,” warned the lower court, “[the law] may be declared unconstitutional in its applications.” That, in sum, was the judgment that the Supreme Court sustained last week.

“There’s a new law of the land today on the integration problems of public schools,” proclaimed Columnist David Lawrence, a Virginia Democrat. “Token integration now has become possible on a constitutional basis everywhere.” Alabama’s Lieutenant Governor-elect Albert Boutwell, one of the leading advocates of the law, talked of calling a South-wide conference to spread his doctrine. But what the Supreme Court had actually done was grant Alabama the right that it or any other state is entitled to: the presumption of good faith until otherwise proved. When and if Alabama demonstrates by its application of the pupil-placement law that it is aimed at keeping Negro children out of white schools, then another Supreme Court ruling will control. In its Little Rock decision last September, the Supreme Court specifically barred any “evasive scheme for segregation, whether attempted ingeniously or ingenuously.”