The Supreme Court: Integration Now

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"With all deliberate speed" was the famous phrase used in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, commanding integration of the nation's public schools. The response in much of the South has been all deliberate resistance: 1,534 local districts in the Old Confederacy and Border States are still classified as segregated. Now the Supreme Court has run out of patience. Last week in Holmes v. Alexander—the first major judgment since Chief Justice Warren Burger joined the bench—the court unanimously ruled that the deliberate-speed formula "is no longer constitutionally permissible." The brusque, unsigned order declared: "The obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools."

The blow, coming from what is at least nominally "Burger's court," startled some members of the Administration. Many Southerners who had believed that Burger's accession to Earl Warren's chair would somehow ease judicial pressure for integration were also shocked. The court did nothing to change the logic of decisions based upon the Brown precedent. Rather, the issue was timing: by commanding immediate compliance with the law, the Justices brought an urgent new perspective to the complex and long-delayed process of integration. The decision establishes a judicial canon that will probably end dejure segregation before the start of the 1970 school year, though full integration in the physical sense is a very different matter. At the same time, the judgment may well provoke confusion, scattered violence and, temporarily at least, some damage to public education in parts of the South.

Catastrophe. In a sense, the Nixon Administration brought last week's ruling upon itself. Last July, Nixon settled upon a desegregation policy that would concentrate upon progress through court orders rather than through Washington's second available weapon, the withholding of Health, Education and Welfare Department funds from noncomplying school districts. In August, HEW Secretary Robert Finch, supported by Attorney General lohn Mitchell, granted 33 Mississippi school districts a grace period of three months, until Dec. 1, to adopt a HEW-drawn plan for desegregation. Actual integration would have been delayed even further.

To force immediate compliance, said Finch, "would cause chaos, confusion and an education catastrophe" for the school systems involved. The Administration went to a federal district court to get sanctions for the delay. The N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund fought the local decision up to the Supreme Court. Thus, ironically, the Administration's emphasis on working through the courts—an approach tending to make integration slower and less painful for the South—produced a Supreme Court demand for a faster pace.