TIME MAGAZINE

Race -

(December 22, 1952)

      For more than a year, the big & little guns of the South have been lobbing ominous shells in the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court. Said Georgia's Governor Herman Talmadge: "As long as I am governor, Negroes will not be admitted to white schools." Popped Grand Dragon Bill Hendrix of the Ku Klux Klan: if segregation is abolished, "the American Confederate Army" will march in armed rebellion. Cried South Carolina's Governor Jimmy Byrnes: "South Carolina will not, now nor for some years to come, mix white and colored children in our schools. If the court changes what is now the law of the land so that we cannot maintain segregation...we will abandon the public school system. To do that would be choosing the lesser of two great evils.

        Last week, far from shell-shocked, but obviously aware that it was dealing with high explosives, the Supreme Court settled back to listen to three days of argument on the U.S.'s sharpest social issue: segregation of Negroes and whites in public schools. Segregation is mandatory under the laws of 17 states, and is legal, if local districts want it, in four others. Before the court were cases from four states (South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Kansas) and the District of Columbia. The cases varied in detail, but they added up to a carefully coordinated effort by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other Negro groups to force the court into a far-reaching decision. The court chamber was packed for the hearings, and the waiting line (unsegregated) stretched out the doors through the long marble corridor and down the front steps.