Racial Flare-Up

For a good four months the South had been living with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision against segregation, but familiarity was apparently breeding greater and greater contempt. Last week, through Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia and Georgia, Southern tempers flared.

In Milford, Del., already seething over the fact that eleven Negroes had been admitted to the high school (TIME, Oct. 4), a tall, wavy-haired man of 34 popped up to add his mite to the mess. He was Bryant Bowles of Washington, D.C., head of a nine-month-old pro-segregation group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People. A onetime Baltimore contractor who has brushed with the law over bogus checks. Bowles yet to say just how many members his organization has, but he has already collected enough money to support a race-baiting bimonthly called the National Forum (sample headline: SOUTH INDIGNANT AS JEW-LED N.A.A.C.P. WINS SCHOOL SEGREGATION CASE).

Last week in Milford, some 3,000 citizens showed up at a mass meeting to hear him. He assured them that he was against violence and that he was not anti-Negro but just prowhite. Then he called for volunteers to start a local N.A.A.W.P. chapter in Milford. The first to step forward was Mrs. Mildred Sharp. After her came Farmer Charles West ("If God had intended us to associate with the colored race, He wouldn'ta made niggers. He woulda made us all white"), and Evangelist Manaen Warrington. Bryant Bowles promptly made these "three red-blooded Americans" directors of the new chapter, proceeeded to tell his audience more about the dangers of integration. At one point he plunked his three-year-old daughter on the table and cried: "Do you think this little girl will attend school with negroes?" His answer: "Not while there's a breath in my body or gunpowder burns!"

Next day, when Milford's schools reopened after having been temporarily closed, only 456 out of 1,562 students attended. Later the boycott spread to nearby Lincoln, where 116 out of 146 pupils refused to go to the elementary school. That night a motorcade cruised through the county with such banners as "Stay Out of School:", "Kick 'Em Out;" and in a field opposite the Milford high school, a wooden cross was set on fire. Finally the Milford school board decided to give in, ordered the eleven Negroes dropped from the rolls. Crowed Bryant Bowles: "The only thing black in the schools tomorrow will be the blackboards."

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Delaware was not the only infected area last week. In Georgia, 24 knights of the Ku Klux Klan, wearing white robes, gathered around a burning cross near Atlanta to hear two speakers rail against the "black-robed buzzards of the Supreme Court." In Marion County, W. Va., Judge J. Harper Meredith had to issue an injunction to stop 53 white parents from threatening teachers on their way to the partially segregated Annabelle School. Such obstructionism, said the judge, "is a rebellion against the government . . . If necessary, I'll fill the jail until their feet are sticking out the windows."

Meanwhile, through Baltimore, the plague spread (see cuts). A group of women picketed P.S. 34 because twelve Negroes had been admitted to the kindergarten. Next day another group gathered about the Southern High School, paraded around with signs ("Negroes Not Allowed"), jeered and booed Negro pupils as they left the building. The situation grew so ugly that the Mayor's Commission on Human Relations finally asked all Protestant clergymen to read a special statement to their congregations. The statement was in fact a stern denunciation of "those who are in effect picketing the Constitution of the United States and law and order in Baltimore."

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