(8 of 10)
After 24 hours' deliberation, the jury reported back "hopelessly deadlocked." Coolly Johnson replied: "There is no reason to assume that the case will ever be submitted to twelve more intelligent, more impartial or more competent men to decide it, or that more or clearer evidence will be produced on one side or the other." He sent them back. After three more hours, the jury reached a verdict: guilty. Johnson sentenced all three Klansmen to the maximum ten years in prison.
Positive Clout. Predictably, Johnson's bold blows for justice have triggered an increasing number of collisions with George and now Lurleen Wallace. Johnson's current battle with the Wallaces grows out of a 1963 case in which he ordered twelve Negro students admitted to all-white Tuskegee High School. After the whites switched to a private school, receiving state tuition grants of $185 a year, Governor George Wallace sent 216 state troopers to bar the Negro children from the high school. In the ensuing struggle, Wallace mobilized the Alabama National Guard, President Kennedy federalized it, and Wallace closed the school. Johnson put the Negroes in other white schools—and a five-judge court convened at Johnson's request ordered Wallace to quit sabotaging desegregation.
This March that order was given the most positive clout in Southern school history. Invoking the 14th Amendment, a three-judge court mustered by Johnson ordered Alabama to "take affirmative action to disestablish state-enforced or -encouraged" segregation across the state. Wallace & Co. could no longer pin the rap on individual school boards, said the court. By all evidence, the state itself controls all public schools and most state colleges. As a result, Alabama has the lowest percentage of Negro integration of any state (2.4%). More than 25% of Negro high schools are unaccredited, compared with 3.4% of the white schools. School spending is $607 for each white student, only $295 for Negroes. Of the state's 28,000 teachers, only 76 teach students of another race.
Affirmative Precedent. To right the wrongs, Johnson's court issued a top-to-bottom desegregation plan that allows every student to designate the school of his choice. Choices must be made during the current school year, with no second guesses permitted when the new year begins. If overcrowding results, students will be assigned to the schools nearest their homes, without regard to race or color. The state is enjoined to foster integration in all other areas of public education: the location of new schools, faculty assignments, bussing, and spending per pupil.
Much of this plan for Alabama, notably the school-choice system, was echoed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this month in a no-nonsense decision ordering "affirmative" desegregation next fall in all grades in seven school districts in Alabama and Louisiana. The Supreme Court has refused to stay that order. District courts are now obliged to apply it throughout the Fifth Circuit's territory: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and
Texas. After 13 years of deliberate delay, 77.5% of the