In the center of all the excitement in New Orleans last week, School Superintendent James F. Redmond appeared in court to face a lawsuit. He had refused to release the names of children in integrated schools. Why? Redmond's answers were polite, professional. His lawyer was not satisfied. Said he: "Isn't it a fact, Dr. Redmond, that you told me you'd be hanged and quartered before you would hand over the names of those little girls?", Answered Redmond with a smile: "Yes, I suppose it is."
Quiet resolution in the face of extraordinary pressure has come to be the mark of Superintendent Redmond, 45, who in the past four months has been vilified and "fired" by the state legislature, enjoined by the federal courts, sued by one of his bosses, insulted by the citizens of his city, and threatened by a nightly barrage of anonymous hate calls. He has calmly gone on running the embattled schools of New Orleans (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) without state funds. This month he himself has not been paid. But when some New Orleans parents last week started a "dollars for Redmond" drive to pay his salary and raised $175 by noon the first day, he asked them to stop.
Only Up. Redmond came to New Orleans in 1953, the choice of a school board that searched the U.S. for two years. He found an administrative system so muddled that even a business man ager was lacking. Despite mounting enrollments (from 65,000 then to 94,000 now), only three new schools had been completed since 1938. "There was no place to go but up," he says.
Redmond put together a tight organization, built 34 new schools, devised a system for constantly revising the curriculum. Against hot opposition, he started the Benjamin Franklin High School for bright youngsters, which graduated its first class last year ("It was in orbit before Sputnik"). His proudest memory of the first day of integration three weeks ago, when truancy was rife, is that "my Franklin kids stuck with it."
Redmond has stuck with it himself.
Mobs chanted outside his office not long ago, and a secretary rushed in with a rumor that in ten minutes the building would go up in smoke. Grinned Redmond: "What color?" At the two nearly deserted schools that took in token Negroes (three in one; one in the other), he keeps idle teachers at work every day planning and preparing lessons.
Maybe Out. Last year a management consultant's report expressed amazement that New Orleans could keep a man of Redmond's ability for the salary it paid him ($23,500). Kansas-born, Roman Catholic Jim Redmond has been a rising light in U.S. public education since 1940, when he became assistant to Kansas City Superintendent Herold Hunt, who later moved to Chicago, taking Redmond with him. Both men won renown for cleaning up Chicago's graft-ridden public schools. When Hunt became an education professor at Harvard in 1953, Redmond went to New Orleans.
Realist Redmond knows that he may be the first to go after the integration turmoil passes. Much of his job involves dealing with the state legislature, which has already fired him. "If I can't perform that part of my job," says he, "we'll have to move on."