ARKANSAS: Turmoil Ahead

“Mr. Faubus has baldly drawn the line between defiance of the law and orderly adjustment of our difficulties,” said the Arkansas Gazette two days before the Arkansas Democratic primary last week. “In effect, he is asking the people of Arkansas to endorse armed rebellion against the United States.”

Orval Faubus got his endorsement. In a landslide that rattled the nation’s teeth —much as they were rattled when the troops landed in Little Rock last September—Faubus won the primary, thus is slated to be the second man ever to spend three terms in the Arkansas Governor’s chair. In a record turnout he defeated two opponents, won a historic 68% of the vote, carried every one of the 75 counties, from the rich, black Delta, heavily populated with Negroes, to the northwestern mountain counties, where Negroes make up only a tiny minority of the population.

As the returns cascaded into his headquarters in Little Rock’s Marion Hotel, Faubus paraded his pleasant smile before the Dixie-singing, button-wearing hundreds on hand to celebrate his certain victory. “Don’t leave now. Governor,” cried a hanger-on as Faubus started off to make a victory statement somewhere else. “Ike’s on the phone.” Faubus’ cocky answer brought cackles and rebel yells out of the sultry night. “Tell him to call back later,” he drawled.

Yankee Go Home. Orval Faubus’ two opponents had tried first to run against the third-term issue, found that voters had accepted the calculated Faubus definition of the campaign: show the “outsiders,” including President Eisenhower and “the Yankee press,” that Arkansas does not want integrated schools. With the courage to win or lose on horse sense, Chancery Judge Lee Ward of Paragould (pop. 10,000) grimly contrasted his own law-and-order segregationism with the “bullet and bayonet approach” taken by Faubus. “Orval Faubus stands today on the brink of treason,” said he in an election eve TV speech. “Is it war between Arkansas and the United States?” But early election night Judge Ward conceded, wished Faubus “and the people of Arkansas a happy and prosperous administration” and went back to his bench.

Around the South, politicians felt the rumbling landslide, scurried to get with it. Georgia’s Governor Marvin Griffin, who had pushed Faubus toward making a big issue of integration at Central High School last fall, weighed in quickly with an expected telegram on the “splendid victory.” Mississippi Democratic Chairman Bidwell Adams wired: “Northern Democratic leaders should scrape the wax out of their ears.” Louisiana’s Governor Earl Long thought it was “a pity there are not more people like him at the helms of government.” Florida’s LeRoy Collins saw the results as reflecting “overwhelming resentment” against federal troops; North Carolina’s Luther Hodges said they were a measure of the “intensity of feeling” against Ike’s dispatch of troops. Virginia’s J. Lindsay Almond Jr., who may soon decide for law or violence in communities (at least three, one pending) facing school-integration orders effective next month, wired: “You have my cordial good wishes.”

“A Pretty Good Governor.” In Washington, Democrats, with one strike against them because they voted to water down the Administration’s civil rights bill last year, were stunned into temporary silence by the realization that they would go into the fall and the 1960 campaigns with Orval Faubus around their necks. Finally, Democratic Chairman Paul Butler found his voice to deliver an odd defense of Faubus: “His election was not determined on the question of segregation as opposed to integration. The issue was largely on the use of troops in Little Rock. Further, without endorsing his action at all—actually I’m against everything he did in that instance—Governor Faubus has been a pretty good governor.”

Faubus’ landslide raised points far more serious than politics. A Federal Court of Appeals is reviewing Federal Judge Harry J. Lemley’s decision to delay for 2½ years integration at Little Rock Central High; if the delay is refused, it will take a brave Negro to claim his rights at school’s opening. Most Arkansans also expect trouble in the seven other communities that have already begun integration. In seven Southern states—Alabama, Florida. Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia—there is no integration at all, and the newly emboldened anti-integration forces are waiting to see the outcome of next month’s tests of Virginia’s “massive resistance” laws, designed to close public schools that obey a court order to integrate.

Summed up the Gazette’s Executive Editor Harry Ashmore: “The moderate position formerly espoused by many Southern political leaders, and by this newspaper as a matter of principle, has been rejected by the mass of voters in this upper Southern state and is now clearly untenable for any man in public life anywhere in the region. A period of struggle and turmoil lies ahead.”