National Affairs: Signposts

Segregation’s signposts last week: In Norfolk, the city council voted 6-1 to cut off operational funds in all school classes above the sixth grade, beginning Feb. 2. Affected: 7,173 junior and senior high school students (1,914 white, 5,259 Negro) in 36 schools—boosting to more than 17,000 the number of Norfolk children who have been denied public school education since last September, when six white secondary schools were closed by Virginia’s massive-resistance to Federal District Court integration orders. ¶ In Little Rock, Governor Orval Faubus, beginning his third term, called for a state constitutional amendment that would turn over state and local education funds to school districts which, in turn, would dole funds to each student. Pupils would then use the money to pay for their schooling elsewhere. And a state legislative committee, finishing its investigation of the integration crisis, reported with straight faces, that “there has been and now is subversion present in the racial unrest in our state . . . deliberately planned by the Communist Party. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People appears to have been heavily infiltrated with subversives and, wittingly or unwittingly, is now a captive of the Communist apparatus.” ¶In Charlotte, N.C., Superior Court Judge Walter Johnston Jr. denied anN.A.A.C.P. request for the release of two Monroe Negro boys from the state reform school. The boys, David Simpson, 8, and James Thompson, 10, were locked up on Oct. 29 after a white mother complained that the older boy had forced her seven-year-old daughter to kiss him. The boys’ version of the story: they were playing down in a culvert with several other white boys and girls; there, two of the girls sat on the laps of white boys, and a third sat on Thompson’s lap and kissed him. The Negro boys, who had already been in minor scrapes with the local police (housebreaking, petty thievery), were committed, without formal charges or trial, to the reform school for an indeterminate term.