Nation: Turn-Around on Integration

SUDDENLY, in a shift that could prove historic, the nation has faltered in its determination to grapple with the toughest moral and political dilemma of the postwar era: how to ensure justice for its blacks and tranquillity among its races. The momentum created over 16 years by stern courts and forceful federal officials to eliminate segregated Southern school systems has been slowed. The first hesitant steps toward racial balance of Northern schools have been thrown off stride. The nation, at least temporarily, seems to be retreating on the sensitive and highly symbolic issue of school integration.

Signs of the uneasy new mood were everywhere last week. The South's most segregationist Governors were so emboldened that Georgia's Lester Maddox felt free to flaunt his racism in the restaurant of the U.S. House of Representatives. He passed out replicas of the ax handles he had used to bar blacks from his Pickrick Chicken House in Atlanta; when challenged by Michigan's Representative Charles C. Diggs Jr., he accused the black Congressman of acting like "an ass and baboon." Alabama's George Wallace announced that he was once more running for Governor "to get our schools back from the Federal Government," and boasted that he might not have to run against Richard Nixon in 1972, because "Nixon will give us what we want." In a memorandum to the President made public last week, Daniel Moynihan, Nixon's resident liberal in the White House, suggested that "the time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of 'benign neglect' . . . in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades."

While Southern politicians gloated, Northern liberals were in total confusion. Oregon's Representative Edith Green, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on Education, seemed to have given up on integration. "We simply cannot afford to let our classrooms turn into battlefields," she said. "We really have to go back to quality education and put our emphasis on that." Hubert Humphrey, on the other hand, charged that the Nixon Administration had "sold out" black Americans and was in "full retreat on the civil rights front." Connecticut's Senator Abraham Ribicoff, whose Senate speech denouncing "rampant racism" and "monumental hypocrisy" in the North had led to the first Southern congressional victories on civil rights issues in over a decade, said he had no regrets. "I'm damn glad I made that speech," he said. "I've touched a soft nerve in America. I wanted to make America look at itself—and that's what it's doing."

The Ribicoff speech put new life into last-gasp efforts by such segregationists as Senator John Stennis and Representative Jamie Whitten of Mississippi and North Carolina's Representative Charles Jonas. By playing on the racial guilt and fears of the North, they were able to muster passage in one house of amendments that seek to 1) require federal desegregation policies to be applied uniformly throughout the nation, 2) permit freedom-of-choice plans to suffice everywhere, and 3) ban compulsory busing of students to achieve integration. Although the Senate last week nullified the antibusing legislation and killed the freedom-of-choice amendment, the earlier victories have