Prepared for Peace

Next week schools begin opening in the South, and the biggest effort yet to integrate Negro boys and girls into white classes. Since 1956, the hatred and ugly riots accompanying this ritual have dealt annual black eyes to assorted Southern cities (and to the U.S. in world opinion). The lesson has not been lost on the South. This year the major cities that plan integration have elaborately prepared to bring it off peacefully.

New Pattern. When school integration came to New Orleans last fall, that tolerant old city got the shock of its charming life. Hardly anyone expected Governor Jimmie H. Davis to start rabble-rousing like an 1860 secessionist, or foresaw screaming teen-agers mobbing the school-board offices, or envisioned cursing women haunting the integrated schools. Yet the pattern was there from the start: Davis was a 1960 Louisiana politician on the make; the two schools chosen for integration were in the one low-income area where whites most fear Negroes as economic rivals and race hatred runs highest.

This year, what Southern whites call integration (meaning token) is due at four more New Orleans schools--in higher-income areas--and perhaps ten Negro children will be enrolled. Chances look good for calm acceptance. The courts have stymied segregationist legislators from seizing the schools, and Jimmie Davis, facing a possible $21 million deficit, is hunting new business, not trouble, for the state. The housewives' group called SOS (Save Our Schools) is energetically holding coffee parties to persuade white parents to leave their children in desegregated schools.

Businessmen, who have found how badly riots cut profits, will soon issue a call for peace. No one is more eager to respond than Mayor Victor H. Schiro, who needs business support in next winter's primary election. Says he: "I am putting all on notice that law and order will be maintained at any cost."

Every Resource. Biggest school systems to be desegregated are Dallas, where tough-minded businessmen are paving the way to peaceful integration through the Dallas Citizens' Council, and Atlanta, where the most elaborate preparations ever seen in the South are summed up in Mayor William B. Hartsfield's favorite motto: "We're too busy to hate."

From church sermons to police dogs, every resource of Atlanta is aimed at guaranteeing that next week's entry of ten Negro students into all-white high schools will not cast "the New York of the South" into the dismal ranks of the "anothers" ("another" Little Rock or "another" New Orleans). Atlanta approaches the test at a time when Georgia's once rigid laws against compliance are a dead letter. Victory belongs to the courageous housewives who in 1958 organized HOPE (Help Our Public Education) and are now united with 49 other groups as OASIS (Organizations Assisting Schools in September). All over town, they have 126 discussion leaders answering questions on everything from academic standards to venereal disease; they stage skits and workshops on race relations, supply ministers with sermons, and make sure they get back from vacation by next week to provide "your normal leadership."

Law of the Land. Atlanta's School Superintendent John Letson has given more than 100 speeches on peaceful compliance, making sure that every high school student grasps the "good citizenship" aspect of desegregation. Just as impressive is Atlanta's Police Chief Herbert Jenkins, who recently lectured his men: "As policemen, we are the law. Supreme Court decisions are the laws of the land that must be obeyed by everyone, especially law enforcement officers." Every cop has been required to make a written report on "racial violence and law enforcement." Says Jenkins: "I think we have the would-be troublemakers worried--and they have us worried, which is a good situation."

Of 2,813 racially mixed districts in 17 Southern and border states and Washington, D.C., at least 18 will be desegregated in September, bringing the total to 801. States still holding out are Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi. In the districts to be integrated this year, the determination to accept legal pressure gracefully is the major motivation. But a few are so confident that they are desegregating voluntarily. Four towns in industrial eastern Tennessee will do so, the first such action in that state. In Chapel Hill, N.C., schools will desegregate on a purely geographical basis, the first step beyond token integration in that state.

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