Desegregation's Hot Spots

Pudgy Ed Turner, a Democratic candidate for Congress from Maryland's First District, paused for an instant in his speech to an Eastern Shore audience one day last week. Then he got off a remark that, on the surface, seemed singularly unexciting. Said Turner: "You know how I stand on our traditional way of life here on the Shore." His listeners immediately began stomping the floor, broke into wild whoops and hollers of approval. For the Eastern Shoremen did know how Ed Turner stands; he stands foursquare for the continued segregation of whites and Negroes in Maryland schools.

In this year's campaign the segregation issue burns mostly beneath the surface, but it nevertheless burns hot. In its de segregation decision last May, the Supreme Court decreed a social change that cannot fail to leave its mark on the nation's politics for years to come.

Desegregation may be a balance-changing factor this year in ten congressional races in Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Missouri, Florida and Virginia. In each case it works against the Republican candidate, even though, for the most part, the Democrats are not pushing it publicly.

"Keep 'Em Out." In Maryland and Delaware the segregation issue may have decisive statewide effects. Just a few weeks ago, before Maryland's schools opened, Republican Governor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin was an odds-on favorite for re-election over Democrat H.C. ("Curly") Byrd. Then came trouble in the newly desegregated schools, and by last week the race was a tossup.

Curly Byrd has been working hard, and for the most part privately, on the segregation issue. Example: with a newsman within earshot, a farmer sidled up to Byrd and asked: "What're you going to do about the shines?" Said Curly: "Keep 'em out!" When the nearby reporter said he was going to include the exchange in his story, Byrd blew up, flatly denied having made the remark.

Now Byrd is handling the issue more openly. Said he, in a speech at Snow Hill on the Eastern Shore: "You will want members of the school board appointed who will be able to deal and act in accordance with the age-old customs and traditions that have been part of our way of life." As with Ed Turner, there was stomping, whooping and hollering. Governor McKeldin's reply to this veiled demagoguery is: "I stand for the law."

"By the Hand." In Delaware, candidates of both parties have been dragged into the segregation fight almost despite themselves. Republicans generally have been blamed for an inept performance by G.O.P. Governor J. Caleb Boggs in dealing with the Milford school riots (see EDUCATION). The chief victim is Senate Candidate Herbert Warburton. He has lost ground to Democratic Senator J. Allen Frear, who consistently votes with the Senate's Southern bloc.

Last week Delaware's Republican Attorney General H. Albert Young went into court to argue on behalf of the ten Negro children who were turned out of a Milford school. Cried he, in what later turned out to be a flight of purest fancy: "If it becomes necessary for the governor of this state and its U.S. Senators, as they have expressed it to me, to lead these Negro children by the hand, after a decree of this court, into the school, they will do so." Within a few hours, both Frear and Republican Senator John Williams denied that they had authorized Attorney General Young to promise their hands.

Young explained that his statement had been merely "symbolic." Even then, he was not quite right; it was the Frear-Williams reaction that was symbolic in Delaware.

Maryland and Delaware are desegregation's hot spots in the 1954 political campaign. But there will be other campaigns in other years in other states--and there will be other Ed Turners and Curly Byrds.

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