The South: At Summer’s End

Last spring the rest of the U.S. settled back to watch the South suffer: if the civil rights bill failed to pass in Congress, people reasoned, frustrated Negroes certainly would step up their revolution; if it did pass, Southern whites certainly would resist every effort to test the new law. Either way, violence would spread. Yet, as it turned out at summer’s end, it was the North that had been racked by riots. And — with the ignoble exceptions of Alabama and Mississippi — the South’s racial summer added up to a surprising plus. Items:

∙GEORGIA. The one case of raw violence was the nighttime murder of Negro Educator Lemuel Penn on a Georgia highway. Public parks and beaches, as well as many hotels and motels, were integrated. Six more school districts were integrated without incident. About 48,000 Negroes registered to vote.

∙TENNESSEE. Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville accepted the public accommodations provision of the civil rights bill gracefully. Fourteen school districts were newly—and peacefully—integrated. Some 15,000 Negroes joined voter registration rolls.

∙NORTH CAROLINA. Even before the Civil Rights Act, the state had desegregated most of its public accommodations. For the first time, Wake Forest College added Negro football players to its freshman team. Western Carolina College boasted a Negro basketball star. Two Ku Klux Klansmen were given stiff jail terms for trying to burn a Negro church. Twenty-one school districts were integrated. More than 240,000 Negroes registered to vote.

∙SOUTH CAROLINA. For the first time, Negroes and whites attended school together as 15 districts were integrated. Public accommodations were not really tested in the state. Negro voter registration grew by 32,000.

∙ARKANSAS. Little Rock, scene of massive trouble over school integration in 1957, complied with the new civil rights law. Eight school districts were integrated, and the number of Negro students in previously white schools—though still a mere 898—was double that of a year ago.

∙LOUISIANA. A Negro was shot after trying to eat at a lunch stand, but most of the better New Orleans restaurants served Negroes. Many restaurants in bitter Shreveport became private clubs rather than welcome Negroes. After a long court battle, stubbornly segregationist St. Helena Parish gave up, integrated its schools. Louisiana State University and New Orleans kindergartens also opened their doors to Negroes. Negro voter registration, however, was virtually stalled; fewer than 1,000 signed up.

∙VIRGINIA. Resistance to integration took place almost entirely in the courts. Of Virginia’s 128 public school divisions, 80 are now integrated, 25 of them for the first time. Negro voting registration grew briskly after the elimination of the state’s poll tax, may top 140,000—a jump of 20,000 this year.

∙FLORIDA. Police, Ku Klux Klansmen and white gangs beat Negroes who tried to integrate St. Augustine restaurants, churches and beaches, and there was scattered violence in Jacksonville. Otherwise, Florida was generally calm. Negro enrollment in integrated schools grew from 5,000 to 8,000. Negro voting registration almost doubled, stands at about 300,000.

∙ALABAMA. Teen-aged toughs in Tuscaloosa mobbed an integrated movie theater. Whites slammed Negroes with toy baseball bats as they sat at a Bessemer lunch counter. State police kept a “subversives” file that included the names of out-of-state newsmen. Yet even volatile Birmingham opened its public accommodations to Negroes. Some schools were integrated in Montgomery and Gadsden and in Bullock County; desegregation continued slowly in Mobile and Birmingham. But, at best, only 10,000 more Negroes were permitted to register to vote.

∙MISSISSIPPI. Three civil rights workers were murdered, and eleven other unsolved murders had racial overtones. Four Negroes were wounded, 25 churches were bombed or burned to the ground, 400 people were arrested in civil rights disturbances. Still, four school districts were integrated, and some motels and restaurants were at least temporarily desegregated in Jackson. Only 1,000 Negroes joined voting rolls.

Throughout the South, much of the Negro progress, particularly in school integration, was still of the token variety. Yet last week Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was rightly optimistic. Said he: “We have had more widespread compliance with the bill than any one of us expected. I don’t know of a major city anywhere in the South where there isn’t substantial compliance. It’s just remarkable.”