No Gain

In the ugly steel-mill town of Gary, Ind. one day last week, hundreds of pupils' clustered excitedly outside Emerson school, a little uncertain what to do next. They were on strike. In a locked room inside, School Superintendent Charles D. Lutz pleaded with the members of the Emerson "Golden Tornado" football team. He figured that they could end the strike if anyone could: like most U.S. schools, Emerson is full of boys whose chief interest in life is football, and girls whose chief interest is boys who play football.

In Gary's crucible of steel and humanity, there are 5,000 Negro students; a recent school board ordinance, designed to end school segregation in Gary once & for all, had shifted about 35 Negro boys & girls into the lower grades of Emerson. When school opened last week, about 1,000 of Emerson's 1,750 pupils stayed home in protest. Next day 100 more stayed home; the third day 1,300 were out. Not all the later strikers were in sympathy with the strike: their parents, fearing trouble, had kept them home.

Emerson--and Gary--had known similar disputes before. By a strike 20 years ago, Emerson students succeeded in having Negroes excluded. Two years ago, Crooner Frank Sinatra flew from Hollywood to Gary to try to persuade Froebel High School students to end a strike over Negro pupils; the bobby-soxers squealed with delight but didn't take any of his line of reasoning. Superintendent Lutz, a strapping six-footer who used to be a football player himself, fared no better last week with the Golden Tornado team. Said one player: "We'll go back to school if you transfer the Negroes."

Next day, Superintendent Lutz suspended all striking students over 16. They could be reinstated, he ruled, only by arguing their cases individually, accompanied by their parents. All activities--including football--were suspended for the year. Unchastened, 1,300 pupils were still out the next day. That night 1,000 of them--and 500 of their parents--held a rally in front of the school, chanting over & over: "We won't go back. . . ."

The animus of the ugly strike, Superintendent Lutz was convinced, came not from the children, but from some of their parents.

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