ARKANSAS: Prophecy by Faubus

In Orval Faubus’ Arkansas, still be clouded by the storms that Faubus stirred up in Little Rock three years ago, it is a big and scary decision for a school board to assign a Negro pupil to an all-white school. Last week, after a long spell of foot dragging, the Dollarway school board at the segregationist stronghold of Pine Bluff (pop. 40,000) got up its nerve, and in minimum compliance with a 1959 federal court order, hand-picked six-year-old Delores Jean York, daughter of a Negro mill hand, to enter the first grade of the all-white Dollarway public school. “First-graders,” the board said hopefully, “do not have prejudices and fixed ideas concerning traditions to the extent that older students have.” But if first-graders had no formal prejudices, Governor Faubus had. In the same kind of meddling that encouraged the racists in Little Rock, Faubus rumbled that if integration comes to Dollarway, there will be “a strong possibility of trouble.”