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...