Education: When the Barriers Fall

• Share

Governor Herman Talmadge's press conference last week was merely routine —until some one asked the big question: What will Georgia do if the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws segregation in the schools? At that, the governor began to fume. Georgia, said he, might well turn "the public schools over to a private system. It is the only thing we can do ... If we don't do this. I have not got enough national guardsmen and the Federal Government enough troops to prevent strife. Blood will flow in rivers."

Governor Talmadge is not the only Southerner to hold such views. There are now five cases before the Supreme Court on which the court may finally decide whether separate but equal schools for Negroes are constitutional. If the court says they are not, thus ending segregation, the South will face one of the greatest social readjustments since Reconstruction. But last week, in communities and on campuses all over the U.S.. there was ample evidence to prove one thing: wherever segregation has been abolished, no blood has flowed.

The change got its first major boost in 1938, when Negro Lloyd Gaines, backed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, won a Supreme Court decision forcing the University of Missouri to admit him to its law school on the ground that he could not find equal facilities anywhere else in the state. Since then. Negroes have found themselves on scores of once forbidden campuses. In almost every case, their experiences have fallen into a sort of pattern. There have been dire predictions of trouble and periods of tension. But the trouble has rarely materialized, and the tension has soon melted away.

¶ George Washington Jr. of Dallas was among the first group of Negroes to enter the University of Texas law school as a result of the Sweatt Case† At first, says Washington, the atmosphere was "icy and uncomfortable." and one night a K.K.K.-type cross was set ablaze in front of the law building. But next morning, as he walked to class, groups of white students stopped him and apologized for the Klansters. After that, Washington had only one unpleasant experience—the time when a fellow student used the word nigger in class. Washington felt that the student had acted only out of habit, but, says he, "there were a few liberals in the room who I knew would resent it if I showed no offense. So I turned around and looked at the fellow with as stern a look as I could muster." Washington never heard "that word" again.

¶ When ex-Schoolteacher George McLaurin entered the University of Oklahoma law school, he was subjected to a number of indignities. He was forced to sit alone outside his classrooms; there was a special place for him in the library, a special table in the cafeteria, a special toilet he was supposed to use. But since then, other Negroes have gone to Oklahoma, and all such clumsy attempts at segregation have gradually disappeared. Says O.U.'s Vice President Roscoe Gate: "[This] success has depended largely on the student body."