Education: White Man’s Poison

In all her 17 years, Florence Iva Begay, a shy, dark-eyed Navajo, had never strayed more than 100 miles from the reservation at Window Rock, Arizona. Graduating as valedictorian of her high-school class at Flagstaff, she became the first to win a new $2,000 annual scholarship for Indian girls at New York’s progressive Sarah Lawrence College. Florence wanted to become a doctor, so that she could go back to the reservation to help cure her people of tuberculosis and trachoma. Last week Florence was home again, without getting to New York. She had tasted white man’s poison along the way.

Bouncing along in a bus through Arizona and New Mexico, it was all sunny skies and schoolgirl daydreams. Then the bus crossed into the Texas Panhandle, and she was gruffly ordered to get back in the rear where she belonged; the front seats were for white folks only. Bewildered and frightened, Florence got off, took the next bus back to the reservation.

In Oklahoma City last week, a three-judge federal court ruled “unconstitutional and void” a state law that barred Negroes from the University of Oklahoma’s graduate school. The judges, all Oklahomans, did not outlaw segregation, but insisted that Negroes must have equal facilities without delay, or be taken in with white students.