When the Barriers Fall

Governor Herman Talmadge's press conference last week was merely routine --until some one asked the big question: What will Georgia do if the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws segregation in the schools? At that, the governor began to fume. Georgia, said he, might well turn "the public schools over to a private system. It is the only thing we can do ... If we don't do this. I have not got enough national guardsmen and the Federal Government enough troops to prevent strife. Blood will flow in rivers."

Governor Talmadge is not the only Southerner to hold such views. There are now five cases before the Supreme Court on which the court may finally decide whether separate but equal schools for Negroes are constitutional. If the court says they are not, thus ending segregation, the South will face one of the greatest social readjustments since Reconstruction. But last week, in communities and on campuses all over the U.S.. there was ample evidence to prove one thing: wherever segregation has been abolished, no blood has flowed.

The change got its first major boost in 1938, when Negro Lloyd Gaines, backed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, won a Supreme Court decision forcing the University of Missouri to admit him to its law school on the ground that he could not find equal facilities anywhere else in the state. Since then. Negroes have found themselves on scores of once forbidden campuses. In almost every case, their experiences have fallen into a sort of pattern. There have been dire predictions of trouble and periods of tension. But the trouble has rarely materialized, and the tension has soon melted away.

P: George Washington Jr. of Dallas was among the first group of Negroes to enter the University of Texas law school as a result of the Sweatt Case/- At first, says Washington, the atmosphere was "icy and uncomfortable." and one night a K.K.K.-type cross was set ablaze in front of the law building. But next morning, as he walked to class, groups of white students stopped him and apologized for the Klansters. After that, Washington had only one unpleasant experience--the time when a fellow student used the word nigger in class. Washington felt that the student had acted only out of habit, but, says he, "there were a few liberals in the room who I knew would resent it if I showed no offense. So I turned around and looked at the fellow with as stern a look as I could muster." Washington never heard "that word" again.

P: When ex-Schoolteacher George McLaurin entered the University of Oklahoma law school, he was subjected to a number of indignities. He was forced to sit alone outside his classrooms; there was a special place for him in the library, a special table in the cafeteria, a special toilet he was supposed to use. But since then, other Negroes have gone to Oklahoma, and all such clumsy attempts at segregation have gradually disappeared. Says O.U.'s Vice President Roscoe Gate: "[This] success has depended largely on the student body."

P: At the University of North Carolina, in 1951, John Kenneth Lee and four other Negroes entered the university expecting the worst. "When we went into the dining hall for the first time." says Lee, "you could have heard a pin drop. But nothing happened, and after a few days, nobody noticed us." White students made a point of sitting next to Lee, backed up his protest against the university's special "Reserved for Negroes" section in the stadium, raised no objection when the Negroes ignored the segregated toilets in the law building. Says Lee: "We never did have a bit of trouble with the students."

P: When the Harvard football team arrived six years ago at the University of Virginia with a Negro tackle, cries of pain could be heard all over town. Today Virginia makes no such fuss: it has grown accustomed to unsegregated student meetings, even allows Negro nurses to serve on the university hospital staff.

P: At Indiana University, student-union barbers no longer refuse to cut Negroes' hair, and the old segregated dormitory reserved for Negro coeds ("They had the nerve to call it Lincoln House," says one) has disappeared.

P: At New Mexico A & M, Eddie Richardson last year became the first Negro editor in chief of the yearbook, and at Del Mar College (Texas), students elected their first Negro to the student council. At the University of Kentucky, the "Reserved for Negroes" sign that Lyman T. Johnson and 28 other students faced in 1949 has long since been removed. Last year U.K.'s legal fraternity. Phi Delta Phi, took in its first Negro member.

P: When the N.A.A.C.P. went into action in Cairo, in southern Illinois, in the winter of '52 to fight segregation in the schools, some citizens decided to take the law into their own hands. One band of whites lit a cross on the levee, another fired a shotgun at the house of a Negro dentist, and still another tossed a dynamite bomb into a Negro physician's backyard. But, in spite of such hooliganism, Negro children began enrolling in the white schools. In the last year there have been a few fist fights, but gradually, Cairo is learning to take some kinds of desegregation in its stride. For the first time, Negroes have even begun to appear at meetings of the P.T.A.

P: In East St. Louis, scene of the race riot of 1917, the police were out in force on the day that Negro children entered the white schools: several principals had received anonymous letters from white adults threatening to burn down the buildings. But, says Chief George Dowling, "there were no demonstrations. Before some of the hotheads knew it, the whole thing was over, and everybody just settled down to live quietly." White and Negro children now share everything from lockers to cafeterias. Once, when some white high school seniors learned that they could not take their Negro classmates on a Jim Crow excursion boat, the whole class kicked up such a fuss that the boat's skipper had to relent.

P: In Tucson, Ariz., Superintendent Robert Morrow spent "some sleepless nights" before complete desegregation went into effect in 1951. But in spite of all the hue & cry, only five white pupils in the entire city changed schools in protest.

P: In Edwardsville, Ill., there was some tension between the whites and Negroes in the newly desegregated high school. But then, says County Superintendent George Wilkins, "a very fortunate thing happened. In the first football game of the year, the coach put in the only Negro player on the squad, and on the first play in which he carried the ball, he ran the length of the field for a touchdown. We haven't had the slightest difficulty among the boys since. Now I wonder what the sociologists would make out of that."

t Heman Sweatt, a Negro mail carrier, was turned down in 1946, when he asked admission to the University of Texas law school. A 1950 Supreme Court decision ordered him admitted.

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