Caution!

In St. Louis Jim Crow walks on one leg: Negroes ride the streetcars and buses with the white folks; a portrait of Dred Scott has a prominent place among the historical monuments in the Jefferson Memorial. But in St. Louis, as in all Missouri, public schools are Jim Crow schools. So, in practice, have been the Roman Catholic parochial schools. There was no actual color line, but it was always well understood by Catholic Negroes that their children were to go to the overcrowded all-Negro schools in the crowded Negro districts.

Last week St. Louis' Archbishop Joseph Elmer Ritter ripped down this racial bar. He announced that Negro children could attend any diocesan school within their parishes. More than 700 white Catholic parents banded together to protest the seating of Negroes next to their children. They knocked at the Archbishop's door; he would not see them. They threatened court action; they would hire a lawyer and ask for an injunction against the Archbishop.

This week the protesters got a shock. Archbishop Ritter, a mild but positive man, gave them a warning in a pastoral letter, read at all Masses throughout his archdiocese. If they carried through their threat of action against the Church, he said, they would be open to the gravest penalty the Church can exercise--excommunication. "Obedience to ecclesiastical authority, said his letter, was a cardinal principle of their faith. So, he reminded them, was "the equality of every soul before Almighty God."

That night the protesting group met again, decided to take no action that would jeopardize their church standing.

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