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Thunder and lightning split the sultry overcast as Grant's men fired six tear-gas bombs to disperse the mob and keep the peace, but the mob began to move against the vigilantes, shouting, "Let's get the nigger lovers! Let's get their guns and kill them!" Precisely at that moment 100 state-highway patrolmen swept into Clinton on the orders of Governor Frank Clement, sirens shrieking and searchlights blazing, to restore an uneasy peace. Next day the state rolled 633 troops and seven M41 tanks of the National Guard into Clinton to button things up, roaring and clanking and chewing up the asphalt of the courthouse square.
"They Get Along Fine." There was no such open battle in Mansfield, Texas (pop. 1,450), where the mob simply won in a walkaway. Last fortnight the Federal Court ordered three Negro students integrated with 300 whites in the Mansfield high school. On registration day last week, a mob of about 400 Texans bulled about the school grounds, hanging Negroes in effigy, displaying placards that read:
DEAD COONS ARE THE BEST COONS; $2 A DOZEN FOR NIGGER EARS. The Negroes understandably stayed away and the white students registered alone. "If God wanted us to go to school together," 14-year-old Glenda Geyer (white) reasoned, "He wouldn't have made them black and us white."
But not far from Clinton, Tenn. and Mansfield, Texas lay the greatest hope of the U.S.'s back-to-school week. Along the prospering periphery of the border states, e.g., Kentucky, Oklahoma, Missouri (where the proportion of Negroes to whites is much lower), integration is proceeding smoothly and well. Already the Supreme Court ruling has won entry there for 400,000 Negro students into formerly all-white schools, and there has been no serious trouble. At week's end Mrs. Jessie Honaker, teacher of a recently integrated school in Tram, Ky., summed up the prospects of her own class and the distant promise. "They all get along fine together," she said, "because they haven't been taught prejudice."