Reversal in Little Rock

Revesal in Little Rock

Delivered in the mail at the district clerk's office in Little Rock, Ark, one day last week was a 35-page legal ruling that reopened the running sore of the Little Rock desegregation crisis. U.S. District Judge Harry J. Lemley, sitting temporarily in Arkansas' Eastern District, granted a petition by the Little Rock school board to suspend racial integration at Central High School until January, 1961. Reason: while the Negro students "in the Little Rock district have a constitutional right not to be excluded from any of the public schools on account of race," desegregation has simply "broken down under the pressure of popular opposition," and the community needs a breathing spell.

Judge Lemley, Virginia-born grandson of a Confederate soldier, 74-year-old veteran of law practice in Arkansas, in effect reversed the integration orders of his North Dakota-based predecessor, Judge Ronald Davies--the orders that President Eisenhower had moved federal troops into Little Rock to enforce.

Spokesmen in both the South and North reacted predictably. Illinois' Democratic Senator Paul Douglas declared that Judge Lemley seemed to have "yielded to the threat of mob violence. I have never understood that mob violence took precedence over the law of the U.S." Said Arkansas' Democratic Governor Orval Faubus, who was now helped mightily by Judge Lemley's ruling in a primary campaign for an unprecedented third term (TIME, June 23): "Most gratified . . . The Negro citizens in the community would do well to accept this ruling." Little Rock's School Superintendent Virgil Blossom summed up the sentiments of Little Rock's moderates: "I am very pleased."

In Washington the Justice Department waited watchfully, hopeful that the reopened sore could be healed again by legal means. Preparing for the next move, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis. Meanwhile, the N.A.A.C.P. asked Judge Lemley for a stay of execution to allow the remaining seven of the original nine Negro students at Central High (one girl was expelled last February, studied in New York City; one boy graduated last fortnight, is entering Michigan State University) to stay on at Central High next September and thereafter until the final word from the U.S. law is in.

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