About five miles south of the Mason-Dixon line, the bleak, coal-mining town of Osage, W. Va. (pop. 900) promptly obeyed the Supreme Court's 1954 decision against segregated public schools. The Negroes (1958 count: 93 among 358 pupils) took their places in the nine-grade school (elementary and junior high) and became a reliable part of the basketball team. Two Negro teachers joined the 17-member faculty.
Osage's race relations soon grew so healthy that two Negroes were elected to the five-member city council organized in last year's self-improvement drive. "We're trying to get the community fixed up a little," said Councilman Louis Toka, "and getting along pretty well so far."
At 2:15 one morning last week Osage was rocked awake by a blast bigger and closer than the ones that every miner had learned to sleep through. The explosion of almost a full case of dynamite—which any real man in Osage can handle in the dark—gutted the town's biggest building, the 17-room school. Sheriff Charles J. Whiston, 42, quickly reinforced by squads of FBI men, found that the bomb had been set off by mining detonation wire, which would work from the headlamp battery a miner wears on his hip, went to work on such fragmentary other clues as a snagged thread from a pair of blue jeans.
With only $96,000 worth of insurance, hard-up Osage reckoned its damage at upwards of $250,000. Said Councilman Toka: "It's sickening."
Other events last week in the nation's struggle between racial rights and wrongs: ¶In Pittsburgh's Beechview section, where Negro Charles Miller's new home was smeared and smashed by race baiters, white neighbors finished a repair and repaint job with materials bought by the Board of Trade, Lions Club, American Legion and other civic groups. ¶ Georgia's Governor-elect Ernest Vandiver warned that he would close Atlanta schools if they were integrated by pending court cases, was met by Atlanta Mayor William Berry Hartsfield's demand that the city have the option between integration or no school.