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University Daily Kansan Friday, March 27, 1964
High Court Sets New Inquiry Into Desegregation
WASHINGTON —(UPI)— The Supreme Court has set Monday and Tuesday of next week for a broad new inquiry into racial desegregation of public schools.
Two cases will be up for scrutiny.
One is the 13-year-old lawsuit from Prince Edward County, Va., where local authorities closed the schools in 1959 rather than allow Negro children to attend classes with white children.
THE OTHER, from Atlanta, Ga., deals with a 12-year, stair-step desegregation plan which has been working through pupil transfers. Birmingham and Mobile, Ala., and Savannah, Ga., have adopted the same idea.
This will be the court's first major plunge into the race problem in schools since its momentous desegregation ruling of 1954 and its 1955 sequel. The policy has been to let the Federal District Courts handle the aftermath.
Now, 10 years later, the justices
have been forced to take another look.
The two cases illustrate the forces of resistance that have brought the problem to the court's door again—(1) gradualism and (2) downright refusal to integrate.
THE NINE justices made it known twice last term that they are less than satisfied with the way school desegregation is going. They upset a plan used in Knoxville, Tenn., and Davidson County, a part of greater Nashville, which permitted students to transfer from schools where their race was a minority.
In a case dealing with public parks and playgrounds, the court unexpectedly went out of its way to rap "indefinite delay in elimination of racial barriers in schools."
On one other occasion in the past 10 years the court spoke out forcefully. That was following the 1957 disturbances at Little Rock, Ark., which were quelled only
after President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in U.S. troops to stand behind a federal court order to desegregate Central High School.
In an unusual opinion signed by all the justices, the court in 1958 reiterated its 1954 holdings: "The 14th Amendment forbids states to use their governmental powers to bar children on racial grounds from attending schools where there is state participation through any arrangement, management, funds or property."
REFERRING TO the anti-integration tactics of Gov. Orval Faubus and the Arkansas Legislature, the court added that the rights of Negro children could not be "nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers, nbr nullified by them through evasive schemes for segregation whether attempted 'ingeniously or ingenuously.'"
This quotation is the key to the Atlanta case now before the court. The legal defense fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) maintains that the city's stair-step plan is nothing more than an evasive scheme to retain a segregated system rather than a means of eliminating it.
Under the plan, Atlanta's 11th and 12th grades were desegregated in 1961, the 10th in 1962 and the 9th in the current school year. Transfer of Negro pupils in these grades has resulted in 145 of 58,600 Negro pupils attending school with 58,000 white students.
Unlike the Tennessee cases last year, race is not a specified factor in the transfer. Children have in the past had to satisfy 17 pupil placement qualifications. One, for example, was "the psychological qualification of the pupil for the type of teaching and associations involved."
THE FOURTH Federal Circuit Court struck down "personality interviews" and certain scholastic requirements, and Atlanta authorities told the Supreme Court that even more tests have since been eliminated.
"Any child may attend the school nearest his home merely by saying it is his desire to do so," the brief said.
It explained that Atlanta "has traditionally not had a rigid system of zones"
line is reached the city will still have a bi-racial system. The association seeks a shortening of the time span and an order for "a unitary non-racial system."
The NAACP still contends that Atlanta is pursuing "token" desegregation; that when the end of the
The association also objects to the continued segregation of teachers, but the city said the Fifth Circuit Court properly postponed this issue.
IN DECIDING the case the Supreme Court will hark back to its 1955 holding that desegregation must be accomplished "with all deliberate speed."
$61 Million in Red
Soviet Debt May Wreck U.N.
What does this phrase mean? Lower courts have applied it with sharply differing results, depending on time, place and circumstances.
When You're in Doubt—Try It Out,
Kansan Classifieds.
By Bruce W. Munn
UNITED NATIONS, N.Y.—(UPI)
Russia is again threatening to
wreck the United Nations.
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The Soviet Union owes the United Nations—in its own name—$52,623,137 for the peace-keeping operations in the Congo and in the Middle East. With the accounts of Byelorussia and the Ukraine, which are parts of the Soviet Union, added in Moscow's total debt for peace is $61,073,934. The 11 Soviet bloc countries, including Cuba, owe $70,805,169 for the peace-keeping operations
Now Moscow says that any attempt to use U.N. charter procedures designed to make delinquents pay up is the action "of those who do not care for the United Nations and who do not take into account the prospectives (sic) of its breakup as the result of such actions."
Article 19 at the first meeting of the next assembly session, now expected to open Nov. 10.
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AT FIRST GLANCE, the constitutional position, appears simple.
Fear that such action would lead Russia to withdraw from the organization has given other members pause, and there is serious doubt whether the assembly would endorse strict application of Article 19.
The United States has served notice it will insist on application of
The World Court reinforced Article 19 two years ago in an advisory opinion that peace-keeping costs are assessable against all members in the same manner as the regular operating budget of the world organization.
Article 19 of the charter provides that a member in arrears the equivalent of its assessments for the preceding two full years "shall have no vote" in the General Assembly. The wording is mandatory.
THE MIDDLE EAST U.N. Force (UNEF) was established by the General Assembly; the Congo operation was initiated by the council. But the assembly set up financial arrangements for both.
But the Russians also have a legal leg, however shaky, under them. They contend that since the charter gave responsibility for the maintenance of peace to the Security Council, only that 11-nation group—in which the Soviet Union has a veto—can initiate peace-keeping actions and the means of financing them.
Last week, Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson of the United States and Sir Patrick Dean of Britain put a new plan before Soviet Ambassador Nikolai T. Fedorenko.
ITS FIRST REQUIREMENT is that all members would pay up enough to get beneath the two-year cut-off mark. This would cost Russia about $9 million for itself alone.
It provides that all future peacekeeping operations would first be submitted to the council—as Russia insists—but with the assembly having the say in their financing—as the West says is legal.
It would establish a committee of the five permanent council members, five developed and five under-developed countries to work out an assessment scale for peace-keeping operations.
All the West has heard in reply, a spokesman said, is what they have read in the newspapers. That was a Soviet government statement that any attempt to force it to pay up is an unfriendly act "and we may be obliged to reconsider our attitude towards the U.N. activities."
Russia tried to break up the U.N. in 1950, when it walked out until Red China is admitted. It walked back seven months later after the Korean War started.
It tried again in 1960, demanding a "troika" administration to replace Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. It backed down in the election of U Thant as Hammarskjöld's successor.
It tried a third time two years ago
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when it sought to cut off any further money for the Congo operation, a move that mustered only the 11 Soviet bloc votes.
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