The Next Stand

Wherever the revolt of the Negro may lead in the long run, one direct clash looms dead ahead. Alabama's Democratic Governor George Corley Wallace, 43, a fiery ex-Golden Gloves featherweight, is looking toward a showdown next week when two Negroes will attempt to enter the University of Alabama for the summer session.

Wallace intends to defy a federal court order for the enrollment of Vivian Malone, 20, at the university's main campus in Tuscaloosa, and David McGlathery, 27, at the school's Huntsville extension. Wallace's plan, as outlined to confidants, goes like this: 1) he will ring the Tuscaloosa campus with highway patrolmen; 2) escorted by a large force of patrolmen, he will go to the campus himself; 3) U.S. marshals will presumably bring Vivian Malone to the campus, and Wallace personally will bar the way; 4) if the marshals attempt to push past, Wallace may order his state cops to remove the Negro girl bodily from the premises. After that, not even George Wallace knows what will happen, but the results are not apt to be pleasant.

Slight Victory. To enforce federal court orders against Wallace's defiance, the U.S. Government stands ready to use not only marshals but at least 2,500 riot-trained troops. Many of those troops, sent to Alabama at the peak of Birmingham's riots last month, have since been removed. But they can return on short notice, as nobody knows better than Wallace. He recently filed a suit with the Supreme Court insisting that President Kennedy had threatened "a military dictatorship" by ordering the soldiers into Alabama in the first place. Last week the court brushed off the Governor's suit in one terse paragraph, which said that the presence of troops was part of "purely preparatory measures," and harmed no one.

At the same time, Wallace did win one slight victory. A Federal Court in Birmingham ordered Wallace to appear at a hearing on an injunction against his threat to interfere with university integration. Two marshals chased Wallace all one day, trying to serve a subpoena on him. Wallace kept 16 armed state cops surrounding him constantly, and the marshals could not break through. They finally gave up and handed the subpoena to the Governor's maid.

"Call to Arms." It is Wallace's boast that "I am a professional Southerner." But he by no means represents the whole South, or even all of Alabama. Last week he forced a resolution through the state legislature giving him a vote of confidence in his stand at the schoolhouse door. But before it passed,

State Senator James E. Horton Jr. cried to his colleagues: "The presence of Governor Wallace will by implication attract a mob which by comparison will make Oxford, Miss., look like a Sunday-school picnic." And Senator George Hawkins warned, "This resolution is a call to arms to every hoodlum in the state."

For months, Wallace had been deluged with pleas from clergymen, businessmen and educators that he take a moderate stand in the university's integration. Last week 212 Tuscaloosa business and professional leaders signed a petition urging him to carry on a fight for segregation "by whatever legal redress you choose to seek--but we respectfully urge that you do not carry out your announced intention of personally and physically interfering with the order of the United States Court."

Moreover, unlike the spineless, stand-aside attitude taken by the University of Mississippi faculty during last fall's bloody Oxford riot, the University of Alabama faculty seems determined that there will be no student violence on their campus. President Frank Rose, an able educator and a moderate, months ago called in student leaders, pledged strict disciplinary action against segregationist demonstrators. Last week, with most of the main campus' 9,000 students already gone from Tuscaloosa for the summer, there seemed little inclination toward violence on the part of those who remained. Said one young man: "We're not going to let just one person stop all the rest of us from getting an education."

He meant Vivian Malone. But as things now stand, the one person who seems most likely to disrupt education at the University of Alabama is the Governor of the state.

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