A Plan for Little Rock

In the seven months since federal troops went into Little Rock to enforce the law that Governor Orval Faubus had defied, there has been grim silence between opposing forces in the Central High School battle. The moderates lost ground because the Justice Department backed down from its threat to prosecute the rioters. The segregationists settled down to snipe at harassed school officials who tried to abide by the federal court's order to admit nine Negroes to Central High, and keep classes going. And while, on the strength of the hate and confusion he had sown, Governor Orval Faubus rode nearer and nearer to his goal of a third term, nobody seriously tried to put Little Rock back together again.

Last week one of Little Rock's leading citizens broke the silence with a brave try. He was Herbert L. Thomas Sr., 59, public-spirited millionaire founder of the First Pyramid Life Insurance Co. of America, who by Arkansas standards is regarded as a sound moderate in race relations. In 1948, while chairman of the University of Arkansas trustees, Thomas got a phone call warning him that a young Negro war veteran was on his way to apply for admission to the law school. He made the decision to let him in and thereby made Arkansas the first of the old Confederate states to break the college color bar. Subsequently, all of Arkansas' eight tax-supported colleges let down the bars, and by last fall eight towns and cities, other than Little Rock, opened their public schools to Negroes.

Thomas' plan for getting things going again in Little Rock: 1) Negroes would withdraw all pending integration suits in Arkansas; 2) segregationists would stop harassing Negro students at Central High; 3) with the approval of federal court, a biracial commission would be named to meet with each local school board and help it work out its own program for meeting the Supreme Court's 1954 order to integrate "with air deliberate speed." Starting time for the new "voluntary progress" plan: the opening of school next fall.

"Eloquent Appeal." The extremists were sarcastic. Sneered a leading segregationist: "A beautiful thought of everybody loving everybody else." Negro leaders welcomed the plan as evidence that contact has been re-established between whites and Negroes, but said they were opposed in principle. The Arkansas Gazette, which has been threatened and boycotted for its anti-Faubus stand, praised the plan in a Page One editorial as an "eloquent . . . appeal for a return to reason and good will. Mr. Thomas recognizes that any settlement must be in accordance with the law--or, more precisely, within the broad tenets of an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution with which most Arkansans dissent. Yet he believes, as does this newspaper, that it is possible to meet the new legal conditions without any real dislocation of the social patterns under which the two races have always lived." If successful, said the Gazette, the Thomas plan could return Arkansas to paths of progress from which the state was diverted by "the tragic events of last September."

But once again, results depended on Orval Faubus. Though Thomas paid a courtesy call on Faubus last month, in the hope that Faubus would pass the word on to the State Board of Education, or at least submit the plan to federal court, the governor last week held off permission. Once again there was strong suspicion that the last thing Orval Faubus wants is any kind of solution before he has cinched his third term.

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