Budding Confrontation

In the 13 years since the Supreme Court ordered "all deliberate speed" toward school desegregation, the Deep South has deliberately dallied. Even today in some states, fewer than 6% of Negro students attend classes with whites. Last week the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in New Orleans, finally made clear that it will not tolerate flagrant evasion of the law.

The court ruled 8-4 that beginning next fall local school authorities must start desegregating all classes from kindergarten through the 12th grade. "Boards and officials administering public schools in this circuit," it said, "have the affirmative duty under the 14th Amendment to bring about an integrated, unitary school system in which there are no Negro schools and no white schools--just schools."

The no-nonsense order applies directly and immediately to only seven school districts in Louisiana and Alabama.

However, federal district courts will now be under a mandate to apply the same ruling to all school cases throughout the Fifth Circuit's territory: Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Mississippi and Georgia.

Most of the states affected greeted the order with relative calm. A few politicians denounced it, notably Georgia's Governor Lester Maddox, who called the court's decision "ungodly and un-American."

Police Power. Only in Alabama did the state government seriously threaten to defy the courts. Under George Wallace and his wife the Governor, Alabama has the lowest degree of integration of any state (2.4%) and was already under injunction to comply with the law by another three-judge federal panel (TIME, March 31), which held that its state education officials are responsible for desegregating the schools.

While George watched on television in a nearby office, Lurleen went before a joint session of the legislature to demand that jurisdiction over public education be transferred to the Gover nor's office, which could then use "police power" to foil the courts. Her fiery speech invoked the tired old doctrine of interposition--the theory that a state government has the authority to prevent federal action it deems unconstitutional--and conjured up visions of parents being arrested wholesale by federal agents and of imprisonment without trial for anyone who speaks against the court. All Alabamians must "resist in every way possible."

The legislature greeted Lurleen's--or George's--speech with joyous Rebel whoops and will doubtless give her whatever she requests, including an expanded state police force. Thus Alabama may well be inviting a confrontation between federal and state authority, comparable to those at Little Rock and Oxford, Miss. The Wallaces, with George's third-party presidential candidacy firmly in mind, clearly would like nothing better.

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