THE SOUTH: D-Day in New Orleans

The first court-ordered racial integration of public schools in the Deep South began last week in New Orleans, and the deep-seated force of racism squared off against the push of sociological change.

Two men stood at the head of the opposing forces. In the state capital of Baton Rouge, segregationist Governor Jimmie Davis—a smudged, folk-singing carbon of Arkansas' Orval Faubus—guided his legislature through a stormy special session, signing into law a paroxysm of sweeping resolutions aimed at tearing apart the New Orleans school system and whooping up segregationist emotion. In New Orleans' federal courtroom, U.S. District Court Judge J. (for James) Skelly Wright, who had ordered the school integration, countered every new law with a restraining order. New Orleans-born Judge Wright, in an unprecedented display of judicial power, eventually enjoined the Governor, the state attorney general, a whole host of city officials and the entire legislature from interfering with integration.

Caught between the fires was the five-man Orleans Parish (New Orleans) School Board, which fought desegregation for nearly eight years, then gave up to prepare for Monday, Nov. 14—marked on the desk calendar of School Board President Lloyd Rittiner as Dday.

Hoots & Hoses. D-day morning came last week, humid and sultry. By 8 a.m. crowds had begun to gather in front of McDonogh 19* and William J. Frantz, the two elementary schools chosen for integrated first-grade classes. Squads of city police stood guard, some joking with the baiters, carefully refusing to answer the taunting question: "Are the niggers here yet?" Shortly after 9, when the white children were safely in class, patrolmen herded traffic away from the two schools. Up drove several carloads of U.S. marshals with their charges: three neatly dressed, hair-ribboned, six-year-old Negro girls for McDonogh 19, one for William Frantz. The crowds, composed mostly of angry housewives, booed and yelled as the little girls were marched up the school steps by the marshals. Later, when white mothers stormed past police lines to take their children home, the fast-growing mobs applauded and brandished crudely lettered signs, e.g., "WE WANT SEGRAGATION." But New Orleans' four pioneering Negro pupils stayed in class all day, were escorted safely home at night.

Next morning a mob of some 350 teenagers from nearby Nicholls High School cut classes and charged toward McDonogh 19, roaring out a football-styled chant: "Two-Four-Six-Eight, We Don't Want to Integrate." Police steered the students away from their target, but segregationist tempers started to flare. That night 6,000 whites jammed into a White Citizen's Council rally at the municipal auditorium. They stamped and shouted as former State Senator Willie Rainach ranted warnings of the "conspiracy for the destruction of the white race," and Leander Perez, the notorious political boss of Plaquemines Parish in the Mississippi Delta, foamed at Jews, Catholics, Negroes, "Judge J. Scallywag Wright," and at Mayor de Lesseps Morrison as "weasel, snakehead Morrison."