Integration's Next Battle

A decision of the U.S. Supreme Court last week singled out Virginia as a likely setting for next fall's major battle in the war of public-school desegregation. The court refused to review an order from a U.S. District Court judge compelling the Arlington County school board to admit to white schools the Negro students who have applied in a test case; Charlottesville, Norfolk and Newport News face similar orders. The result is to pit the power of the federal courts against the elaborate machinery of "massive resistance" enacted in 1956 and 1957 by the Virginia legislature under the spur of the state's political patriarch, Senator Harry Flood Byrd.

The major weapon of massive resistance is a state law empowering Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. to close any school where integration takes place. If an integrated school is kept open by local authorities anyhow--as might happen in tolerant Arlington, partly a suburb of Washington, D.C.--the state must shut off state financial aid. Another weapon: under so-called "Little Rock bills," any school patrolled by federal troops is closed automatically, and the Governor can close all other schools in the district.

No one knows whether this fall's showdown will be fought by lawyers or rednecked mobs. The cities affected are not truly Deep-South. Arlington has only 6.8% Negroes in its school system; its citizens, if not in favor of integration, at least want to keep the schools open. Charlottesville is the moderate-minded home of the University of Virginia. But each community has a possible source of violence: the few dozen "Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties," a kind of dandied-up White Citizens' Council.

A short-term hope for avoiding a damaging fight is the possibility that the state legislature will convene by September, vote a local-option plan for integration. Arlington County school-board members, polled privately, have said they would vote to integrate if an option plan allowed them to do so. But the legislature would have to be called by Segregationist Almond, who last week said: "We have state laws which we believe to be intact, and they will be applied in an honest effort to save public education from chaos."

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