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Laying Down the Law. In what could become a key legal decision, Federal Judge Thomas J. Michie ruled last week that the Giles County, Va., school board violated the Constitution's 14th Amendment when it dismissed all seven members of the city's Negro teaching staff in integrating the city's schools last year.
Michie said the evaluation of the teach ers was "arbitrary," and that "bold assertions of incompetence are not substitutes for reasoned analysis of the individual situations." The seven have found other jobs, but Michie ordered that they be notified of any future openings in the Giles schools and either be hired or advised in writing of the reasons why they were not selected—and the court would review the reasons. The National Education Association has promised to help similarly dismissed teachers secure their rights in the courts.
A more practical preventive against such abuse may lie in testing whether U.S. Education Commissioner Francis Keppel has the power under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to withhold federal funds from school districts that discriminate against Negro teachers. One section of the act's Title VI specifically prevents him from trying to stop discriminatory employment practices, but Keppel nonetheless believes that discrimination against Negro teachers has a discriminatory effect on schoolchildren, and thus his office can require faculty as well as student integration as a qualification for federal aid.
"We must not deceive ourselves that the exclusion of Negroes is not noticed by children," says Keppel. "What can they assume but that Negroes are not deemed by the community as worthy of a place in mixed classrooms? What can the white child assume but that he is somehow special and exclusive, protected from some sort of contamination? How can the world of democracy have meaning to such children?"