THE LAW: The Tension of Change

(See Cover)

One midnight in the bitter year 1932, two journalists—one white, one Negro—walked south along Philadelphia's Broad Street in a sleety drizzle. They were talking of the Negro problem, the white man with a vehement impatience for justice, his companion more calmly and out of a deeper feeling for the scope and depth of the subject. Before parting, they stood a while under the marquee of the old Broad Street Station. Across the square under the arcade of city hall, dozens of men, wrapped in newspapers, slept. Panhandlers and a few night-shift apple-sellers stood on corners. A bus from upstate unloaded job-seekers; a bus for upstate loaded job-seekers. Soggy streetwalkers drifted to and fro in a depressed market. The Negro concluded the conversation: "After all, the very most we can hope for is complete political, economic and social equality with the white man." Then, gazing at the Hogarthian scene, he added, not derisively but with compassion: "And look at the white man."

In the bright, lush September of 1955, in a day of confidence—as in a time of despair—the central problems of U.S. whites and Negroes again blended into one: how to shape law, government, customs, practices, schools, factories, unions and farms in ways more consistent with man's nature and man's hopes. How, within the enduring framework of U.S. society, to let one change call forth another in some reasonably harmonious order. One of the most important changes on the U.S. scene in September 1955, as the nation's children trooped back to school, was the astounding progress of racial desegregation. In Kansas City, Mo. and Oklahoma City, in Oak Ridge, and Charleston, W. Va., white and Negro children for the first time sat together in classrooms. This simple fact, part of a vast and complex social revolution, resulted from a legal victory: the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions of May 17, 1954 and May 31, 1955, holding segregated schools contrary to the 14th Amendment.