Children Around the House
By RICHARD H. ROVERE New York
ONE year ago this week, the AtiA Arkansas National Guard was ordered by Governor Orval Faubus to prevent ten Negro children from attending Central High School in the capital city of Little Rock. Later, President Eisenhower ordered Federal troops to replace the guardsmen and provide safe passage for the Negro students. It all made a strange spectacle, but hardly more curious than the present one. This week, there have been no troops, State or Federal, outside Central High School, and no students, Negro or white, inside it. There are, however, teachers. To fulfil the terms of their contracts with the Board of Edu- cation they go to their posts each morning and sit in classrooms barren of students. The United States Supreme Court on September 12 sustained the denial of an appeal by Little Rock school authorities to delay integration for a period of years, and Governor Faubus, upon receiving this melancholy intelligence, asked that the city's four high schools be closed to students while he and the State Legislature worked out a plan to get around the court's decision. The plan was, as everyone knew it would be, to abolish free public education wherever the courts had ordered the mixing of white and Negro students and to re- open • the schools as private institutions ad- ministered by corporations chartered by the State and receiving subsidies from it.
This has been the plan favoured by the re- sistance not only in Arkansas but in several other States. In Virginia, the legislature gave the Governor the power to close schools at his dis- cretion, and he has exercised this discretion 'in several cases. Georgia and North Carolina may shortly be closing some of their schools and seek- ing to reopen them as private institutions. The legality of the reorganisation procedure will shortly be brought to a test. If the courts hold it to be illegal, then the segregationists will be faced with a hard choice: integrated public schools or no schools at all for the bulk of their children. There is no doubt about the legality of closing down schools altogether. It can be done if the people'will put up with it. No Federal law requires communities to provide free instruction for their young. State constitutions may do so, but State constitutions can be amended.
The advocates of compulsory integration have always looked forward to this stage and have banked much on their conviction that a majority would prefer integrated schools to no schools. They had more to go on than the value the American public places on education; they could, they felt, count on the displeasure of the Ameri- can mother at the prospect of having all the children around the house all the time. It is, of course, too early to say that events have proved them right, but there are signs that point that way. In Little Rock, a group of Central High School students, all white and all segregationists, has petitioned for an integrated reopening on the ground that their futures are imperilled by . Faubus's policy. (Doubts have been raised about the acceptance of reorganised schools by colleges and accrediting boards outside the State.) In Virginia, several groups of both students and parents have taken a similar stand. In one Vir- ginia county, it is, according to reporters who have been observing the public reaction to closed schools, pretty certain that the majority have less anxiety about admitting Negro students than about depriving white ones of what they regard as the right to education. These people have raised the question of local option. That is to say, they have directed at the State government the same argument their Governor has turned on the Federal government; they have asserted the county's right to determine educational policy just as the Governor has asserted the State's right against the. Federal government. It is an argument that has a good deal of force in this country, for it is one of the treasured beliefs of our people that the smallest unit of govern- ment is necessarily the most virtuous and the most deserving of any power it is capable of exer- cising.
In the four years that have passed since the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was a denial of rights guaranteed all citi- zens by the Constitution, resistance in the Deep South has mounted steadily, and a good many people who despise segregation have been close to concluding that it could never be destroyed. Indeed, more than a few have come reluctantly to the conclusion that the decision itself was to be regretted. Now there is reason to believe that the worst of the resistance is over. No troops stand outside schools this fall, and the centre of the struggle is in the courts. If it develops that there is no legal and practicable way of getting around the 1954 decision, and if the South must finally decide between mass illiteracy and mixed classrooms, it may be found that the worst is over. There have been some people, your correspondent among them, who have always felt that the difficulties of achieving integration were being hugely overstated and that when segrega- tionist walls were finally breached the whole system might crumble rather rapidly. That view, too, may soon be tested.
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