INTEGRATION RULING

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27632, 13 April 1955, Page 13

INTEGRATION RULING

Court Argument Begins In U.S. (Rec. 9 p.m.) WASHINGTON. April 11. Lawyers for negro groups told the United States Supreme Court today that Southern States sought an “interminable” continuation of racial segregation in public schools. They made the statement in briefs as the Court opened hearings on how and when separate school systems for white and negro children should be abolished. The Court ordered the arguments last year when it ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Attorneys-General for the States Iff Kansas and Delaware began today’s arguments with reports on how integration has progressed in their States. Lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People contended that none of the States had produced any positive plan to carry out the Court’s decision. The arguments, they said, “seem to be directed against ending racial segregation in our time, rather than towards desegregation within a reasonable time.”

Negro groups particularly attacked a Florida plan, under which individual negro children would ask district courts to admit them to non-segrega-ted schools if they could convince the Court there was no reasonable ground for delay. The groups asserted that the plan was not one for granting rights but for denying them, just as long as could possibly be done without a direct overruling of the Supreme Court’s decision. Representatives of the Southern States will present their arguments tomorrow and on Wednesday. They generally maintain that immediate integration might provoke violence. Delaware’s Attorney-General (Mr * Joseph Craven) urged the Supreme Court to order gradual integration of Negro and white students in public schools with no final target date. Mr Craven said he did not believe the Court possessed the “wisdom” to set a specific date for the end of segregation. He added that people were “divided and troubled” over the situation in Delaware, scene of an anti-integration school strike last year. The Attorney-General of Kansas (Mr Harold Fatzer) said Kansas would have a unified school system by September. The State was proceeding towards integrated schools in “good faith and with dispatch,’’ and needed no followup orders by the Court, he added.