As the school doors swing open throughout most of the nation this week, the South and its 50 million people face a year of enormous significance. 1969 is the most crucial year for school integration since the Supreme Court 15 years ago ordered that the system of dual schools for whites and blacks be dismantled. In 1968-69, only 20% of the Negro children in the South attended integrated schools; this fall, the percentage will nearly double. Moreover, the Government also inherited from the Johnson Administration plans to press —and press hard—upon those Southern education districts that had not yet begun realistic desegregation. School separatism seemed finally doomed, to the despair of diehard segregationists and the joy of civil rights advocates.
Now there is confusion over whether these expectations will be fulfilled quickly. Although Richard Nixon has been silent lately on this issue, the two Cabinet officers who share jurisdiction over school integration—Attorney General John Mitchell and Secretary Robert Finch of Health, Education and Welfare —have made some alarming and ambiguous moves. Their effect is to raise the question: Is the Administration pulling back from the scheduled pace of desegregation? The rhetoric, to be sure, remains pro-civil rights, and in some respects the Administration has been both progressive and innovative. Finch, earlier thought of as the Cabinet liberal, may yet prove correct when he promises that the Administration will maintain pro-integration pressure. For now, however, the signs point to submission to a Southern political strategy that demands placating whites at the expense of immediate integration.
Request for a Delay. Last week this fear, widely held by liberals and moderates, led to an embarrassing family dispute within the Administration. Some 40 attorneys working in the Civil Rights Division of Mitchell's Justice Department gathered in the apartment of one of their number. They met in an unprecedented act of rebellion to discuss a petition of protest to Attorney General Mitchell. The day before, the Justice Department had gone into federal court to retreat from the Government's previous insistence that 33 recalcitrant Mississippi school districts meet this year's deadline for desegregation—after a federal district court in Jackson, Miss., had requested that HEW draw up a plan for each district, to be put into effect this month. Finch asked that the move be delayed until December, contending that the plans had been hastily drawn and unclear, and Justice supported him. Three days after the rebels met, the court granted the Administration's request for a delay.
Ironically, the procedure by which the courts could call on HEW for expert help had been regarded as a significant development in the drive for integration. By taking cases in groups, this approach would save time. Since the programs would be created by the Office of Education's personnel, they obviously would be in compliance with federal regulations. Finch and Mitchell seemed to be blunting a new and apparently important weapon. Word passed within the Justice Department that they had acted out of political pressure from Southern leaders. That feeling arose because Mitchell, as Nixon's campaign manager, advocated the appeal for Southern votes that helped elect Nixon.