How to Integrate

While unmarked police cars stood inconspicuously by, more than 2,000 Negro students filed into 54 previously segregated elementary and secondary schools in Louisville, Ky. last week. They were received without protest or excitement. ''The Negro and white youngsters sat down together and started studying together, and that was that,'' said one school official.

Louisville's quiet achievement in integration drew admiring comment from editorial writers the country over and from President Eisenhower at his weekly press conference. Said the President, of Louisville School Superintendent Omer Carmichael, 63: "[He] must be a very wise man . . . He pursued the policy that I believe will finally bring success in this."

Climate of Opinion. Louisville's Carmichael has been preparing for integration almost from the day he took the superintendent's job in 1945. "We really started getting ready for it then," he says, "because integration is more than simply mixing two races in a classroom. It is the creation of good human relations throughout the community." A native of Alabama (and a cousin of Dr. Oliver C. Carmichael, president of the University of Alabama, where the Autherine Lucy riots occurred), Superintendent Carmichael had climbed steadily but unspectacularly through Southern public-school ranks, arrived at Louisville convinced that segregation would soon be on the way out. To create the "climate of public opinion" for integration, he appointed joint Negro and white teachers' committees, held meetings of Negro and white principals. When the Supreme Court gave its decision in May 1954, he promptly announced he would "carry it out without undue delay or effort at subterfuge."

After setting the current school year as the date for full integration, Superintendent Carmichael that year launched with his staff into a public-speaking campaign to explain what he was doing to P.T.A. and civic groups, veterans' organizations and church bodies. To take some of the sting out of integration, he told parents that they could choose whatever school they wanted their children to attend, provided it could accommodate them.

Right Relationship. His campaign was immensely aided by the fact that the city was desegregating generally. Branch libraries, the General Hospital, city-owned parks and swimming pools were being thrown open to Negroes. "The school-community relationship has been right," he says. "A lot of people still prefer segregation. But the Supreme Court has ruled, and the people realize that the law has to be lived up to." The best measure of Louisville's success is the fact that 75% of the city's 44,697 schoolchildren were integrated last week (with the remainder segregated only by residential area).

Although Superintendent Carmichael recognizes that opposition to integration may still crop up in Louisville, he and like-minded Southern educators received substantial encouragement last week from the St. Louis board of education, which completed integration a year ago. The board noted that from the outset the reception of Negro students had been "as satisfactory in schools in which they constitute less than 1% of the population as in schools where they constitute more than 30%." Moreover, said the board, anticipated opposition to integration had never developed: "Seldom if ever has there been a project on which the key civic and religious organizations and social agencies have cooperated more unanimously than on this."

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