"No State Shall Deny"

In the most closely reasoned, carefully pinpointed opinion of the whole desegregation struggle, the Supreme Court last week struck at the massive Southern attempts to avoid compliance with its 1954 integration order. Specifically, the court aimed its opinion at Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus--but its effect would be felt in Virginia and in any other Southern state that had placed hopes for resistance in hedgerows of state laws.

The opinion was an extension of the terse Supreme Court ruling of last month which turned down the plea of the Little Rock school board for a delay of 2 1/2 years in resuming its gradual integration program. At that time, trying to beat the date set for reopening of Little Rock's beleaguered Central High School, the court did not take time to write a full opinion. It more than made up for the deficit last week, with all nine Justices not only concurring but--an unusual move--sharing in the authorship of the 5,000 words read by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

One Answer. Reviewing the Arkansas record, the court found that integration violence in Little Rock was "directly traceable to the actions of legislators and executive officials of the State of Arkansas ... which reflect their own determination to resist this court's [desegregation] decision." To such defiance there could be only one answer: "The constitutional rights [of the students] are not to be sacrificed or yielded to the violence and disorder which have followed upon the actions of the Governor and Legislature ... Law and order are not ... to be preserved by depriving the Negro children of their constitutional rights."

But the court went far beyond the specific litigation of the Little Rock case to look at the web of integration-dodging laws being spun throughout the South. "State legislators or state executive or judicial officers," said the court, cannot nullify "the constitutional rights of children not to be discriminated against in school admission on grounds of race or color"--either directly or ''through evasive schemes for segregation, whether attempted ingeniously or ingenuously." And a state Governor is just as liable to a federal restraining order as anybody else. Otherwise, said the court, quoting Charles Evans Hughes, the "fiat of a state Governor, and not the Constitution of the U.S., would be the supreme law of the land."

One Course. "The Constitution created a government dedicated to equal justice under law. The Fourteenth Amendment embodied and emphasised that ideal. State support of segregated schools through any arrangement, management, funds, or property cannot be squared with the Amendment's command that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

So straight and hard was the Supreme Court line that segregationists cried (incorrectly) in outrage that it had decided questions that were not before it. But in moving beyond the specifics of the Little Rock case to set the legal standard for the "massive resistance" round of the desegregation battle, the Supreme Court was clearly moving strongly to forestall the sort of trouble that comes with doubt and confusion.

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