NIxon Goes South for Integration

FOR 16 painful years, the symbolic measure of racial progress in the U.S. has been the rate at which Southern school officials have stopped requiring black children to attend separate public schools. That gauge is too narrow, and may be unfair to the South, since the entire nation has failed the test. Now, finally, after more prodding from the Supreme Court, the last of the holdout school districts are under direct orders to desegregate. No one is certain just how they will react as Dixie's school bells signal the start of the new academic year, which in some cases will be next week. But last week President Richard Nixon dramatically flew into the South to assert the prestige and weight of his office in behalf of cooperative acceptance of the law of the land. "The highest court has spoken," he told his Southern audience, and it is "the responsibility of the President to uphold the law."

For a President who has seemed wishy-washy on racial issues and who has been accused, with some justice, of pursuing a strategy of appeasing the South, the move was forthright and forceful. Nixon was emphatically urged not to make the trip by Attorney General John Mitchell and Political Adviser Harry Dent, who argued that he would be tagged by Southerners as the "chief mixmaster." And if the school opening does lead to disorder, they advised that he let the courts take all the heat. But Nixon overruled such expediency; he felt he had a duty to become involved.

Cheered Warmly. The President's low-key approach was to stress cooperation over coercion. His audience consisted of the members of state advisory committees on education from seven Southern states. He emphasized that the race-relations and school-segregation question "is not a sectional problem--it is a national problem." Even before he expressed such views, it was apparent that many Southerners were convinced that Nixon holds no grudge against them, despite the purpose of his trip. Nearly 100,000 of them jammed the city's streets, many of them in the carnival-like French Quarter, to watch his open car pass. They pressed close, tore off his cuff links, cheered him warmly.

A major goal of the President's preventive leadership was to bolster the persuasion potential of the state committees, which have been carefully nurtured by key White House aides, including Robert Mardian, a conservative who is staff director of Nixon's Cabinet Committee on Education. Composed of about 20 members each, the committees have no statutory power. But the members are mainly professionals, business leaders and educators of both races who carry influence in their states on economic and school issues. They have stuck their necks out to take on the job of trying to persuade local communities to accept school integration.

For a time the whole committee structure seemed in danger of collapsing before the President's eyes. As the newly appointed Louisiana committee met for the first time, presidential aides found its members quarreling over tactics and duties. "It was like an armed camp," said one aide. "They were threatening to walk out." Blacks on the committee were complaining that the Administration was showing no concern about protecting black teachers and administrators from losing their jobs as dual systems are dissolved. Nixon helped calm down the group in a 30-minute exchange of views.

Ocean of Confusion. Despite all of the pressures toward compliance, the committees' task is a tough one. Out of the 2,697 school districts in eleven Southern states, 635 were still operating dual systems last spring. Almost half (311) of these have voluntarily agreed to desegregate this year. Many of the rest are especially difficult areas in which blacks constitute a majority and few whites want any part of putting their children in black-dominated schools. Federal officials are uncertain what form the white resistance may take: school boycotts, a further flight to the all-white private academies, or actual confrontations at the schoolhouse doors.

TIME'S Atlanta Bureau Chief Joseph Kane sees no sign of serious new tensions across the South as the school opening approaches. But he detects "an ocean of confusion that can breed sporadic violence" in districts where desegregation plans have not yet been detailed, parents do not know what schools their children will be attending, and there are last-minute plans involving long bus rides or predominantly black classrooms that could "radicalize"' whites. There is also a mood of increased militancy among young blacks, who are less likely than before to accept meekly any unfair treatment in their newly desegregated schools.

But the more prevalent danger is that relatively affluent whites will increasingly abandon the public schools to the blacks and poor whites. There are possibly 300 white academies ready to open or reopen in Georgia, 100 in Mississippi, at least one in most of the counties of South Carolina. Many communities are reducing their tax support of public schools so that taxpayers can better afford private tuition. "The cause of public education in Mississippi is at the lowest point since the schools started in 1870," warns R.W. Griffith, Mississippi's assistant superintendent of public education. "It's a pathetic situation."

Should resistance in the diehard districts take the form of defiance rather than defection, Attorney General Mitchell indicated last week that the Federal Government is ready to deal with it. Appearing before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, headed by Minnesota Democrat Walter Mondale, Mitchell said that he had more than 300 Justice lawyers, as well as FBI agents and U.S. marshals, ready to take legal action against defiant school officials.

Already, the 28 U.S. Attorneys' offices in the South are manned by 250 lawyers. Asked by Senator Jacob Javits how Southern blacks could feel free to complain about any noncompliance with the law without fear of reprisals in their communities, Mitchell took a tough, uncompromising stance. "If there is any question of retaliation," he vowed, "we will take the swiftest and most drastic action possible under the law."

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