Setbacks for Segregationists

Despite its apparent insensitivity to Negroes, the Nixon Administration lobbied last week to disarm legislation intended to sabotage Southern school desegregation. At issue was the "Whitten amendment," a booby trap tacked on to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare's $17.8 billion appropriations bill by Representative Jamie L. Whitten of Mississippi.

He sought to take away the Government's most effective integration weapon: the authority granted to HEW under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to withhold federal aid to school districts refusing to carry out adequate plans for desegregation. The Whitten amendment specifically barred HEW from withholding funds to force bussing, the closing of schools or the reassignment of pupils against parental wishes. In effect, it authorized evasive "freedom of choice" desegregation plans, which the Supreme Court has already declared inadequate.

When the Whitten plan surfaced last summer, Attorney General John Mitchell passed the word that the Administration had no objection. HEW Secretary Robert Finch, though he had his doubts, remained silent. As a result, the House approved the amendment by a wide margin. By last week, as the measure reached the Senate floor, the Administration had changed its tune. With Finch declaring the Administration "unalterably opposed" and Mitchell quietly going along, Republican Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott moved to amend the amendment. As modified by Scott, the bill still prohibits HEW from taking any of the actions proscribed by Whitten --"except as required by the Constitution." Thus rendered meaningless, the amendment passed by a vote of 52 to 37.

Needling the North. The Administration belatedly switched signals to avoid the embarrassment of backing a segregationist ploy already ruled unconstitutional. HEW civil rights lawyers pointed out that if the original Whitten amendment passed, the Administration would have little choice but to denounce it as such, or to institute a quick court test to underline the point. Either way, the Administration would have been forced into taking direct actions repugnant to the South, countermanding the Congress and endangering future HEW appropriations.

Although the battle over the Whitten amendment is ended--this year--the war goes on. Southern Congressmen are concentrating their fire on what Mississippi's Senator John Stennis refers to as the "sectional policy of forcing greater integration on the South than is actually practiced in many Northern cities." Stennis believes, probably rightly, that "if this pattern is enforced outside the South, it will bring about a more modified policy." He is contemplating legislation that would create an automatic presumption of illegal segregation wherever minority groups account for more than 50% of a school's enrollment. The result would affect hundreds of Northern communities.

Southern segregationists suffered another rebuff last week from the Supreme Court. Last fall, in Holmes v. Alexander, the court told 33 Mississippi school districts to desegregate "at once." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit carried out that order by giving the districts only until Dec. 31. But when 16 more districts in six Southern states came up for consideration last month, the Fifth Circuit faltered; it gave those districts, and by implication the rest of the South, until next fall to integrate student bodies. Last week the Supreme Court knocked down the "next fall" provision and ordered full desegregation in twelve of those districts by Feb. 1. When the Supreme Court outlawed "deliberate speed," it meant it.

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