The Bus Bust

The bulletins from Washington that were front-paged across the nation one day last week held sensational legal and social implications: the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that segregation is unconstitutional even on buses operating within single states, on the basis of the Fourteenth A.mendment.

That was enough to send many a major and minor Southern politician, including the governors of North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia, and the attorneys general of Texas, Virginia and South Carolina, into a spate of purple phrases. "I hereby defy the ruling [of] the Supreme Court," snapped C. C. Owen, president of the Alabama Public Service Commission. Yet, elsewhere in the South, e.g., in Richmond, Little Rock, Dallas, many a bus driver calmly removed signs directing Negro passengers to the rear. In the North there was a crackle of excitement: newspapers front-paged the story, and editorial writers pontificated about constitutional law and the new need for wisdom and forbearance on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

It all added up to one of the biggest U.S. news snafus in years, triggered by a U.S. Supreme Court order so terse that the entire Washington press corps misunderstood it. "The appeal is dismissed," the Justices said, as they refused to accept an appeal of a case in which a lower court had held South Carolina's bus segregation law unconstitutional. Then the Supreme Court cryptically cited an obscure, 27-year-old Nebraska civil case, Slaker v. O'Connor, that touched off the bulletins. Actually, the only relationship between Slaker v. O'Connor and the case at hand was that both had reached the Supreme Court improperly, i.e., before being tried in lower courts.

As the last cliché died away, a sheepish realization dawned that about all the U.S. had witnessed was a demonstration of how tautly its racial nerves are stretched. There was, nonetheless, a silver lining: some of the Southern bus lines that prematurely took down their segregation signs found the new arrangement working so well that they decided to leave things that way.