ARKANSAS: Lavatory Level

Having worked the classroom for all its demagogic worth. Arkansas’ Democratic Governor Orval Faubus last week descended to what the Washington Post and Times Herald called “the lavatory level.” U.S. paratroopers, he cried, were escorting Negro students into the girls’ locker room at Little Rock’s Central High School—and were lingering around to leer at ungarbed young Southern white womanhood. The facts of the matter proved Orval Faubus less a master of morals than mendacity.

Faubus’ latest lie came in a letter addressed to “Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, Commander of Occupation Troops.” Because of the sneering (and incorrect) address. Walker, a tough Texan, returned the letter unopened. Governor Faubus, playing his little game, had already released it to the press. Two days later, asked for documented facts, the governor fell back upon his favorite saying: “I do not choose to release them at this time.” He did, however, display news photographs of a paratrooper general and aides walking past girls playing softball outside the school. What connection could these pictures have with his other charges? Said Faubus with rubber logic: “There may not be any connection. These, perhaps, can be explained as being part of their duties, but it is an indication that the other can be true.”

The truth was that no paratrooper had entered the girls’ locker room, none had come closer than the non-transparent doors leading to the locker room. But there was method in Orval’s mendacity: Little Rock opinion was plainly turning against him. A Friday night meeting of hard-shell Baptists—to which, in their own words, “Jews, Catholics and modernist Protestants” [and, of course, Negroes] had not been invited—drew perhaps 600 restless souls to hear North Little Rock’s Rev. E. T. Burgess intone, as a final prayer: “Especially, dear Father, we pray for the man who sent troops to Arkansas and then went back to the golf course as if nothing had happened.”

But the next morning, 84 other Little Rock churches took part in the citywide prayer session suggested by Episcopal Bishop Robert Raymond Brown (TIME, Oct. 14). Some 7,000 citizens, a sizable Saturday morning turnout, prayed for a peaceful, lawful end to Little Rock’s troubles. Said Mississippi-born Methodist Minister Aubrey Walton: “We know, our Heavenly Father, that we must share the blame for what has happened in our city. Forgive us for the influence we have not used, for the positions we should have taken but did not take.”

Among those who sat with heads bowed were some of Orval Faubus’ closest associates. The Governor himself was fooled up in the Executive Mansion with a cold —and his conscience.