The Press MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1967. States’ Rights—And Prejudices

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31340, 10 April 1967, Page 12

The Press MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1967. States’ Rights—And Prejudices

The Governor of Alabama (Mrs Lurleen Wallace) is determined to invoke the full powers of the state to resist Federal enforcement of integrated education in Alabama. A Federal court has ordered the desegregation of all Alabama schools by the start of the autumn term in September. At present only 2.4 per cent of the Negro pupils are in integrated schools, and only about half of the school administration districts have submitted plans for integration. Mrs Wallace’s plans to resist integration include a scheme to take over, with the approval of the state legislature, the schools threatened with integration.

Mrs Wallace’s passionate defence of "states’ “ rights ” strikes a responsive chord among her hearers, both in the legislature and among the white voters and parents of the South. Racial prejudice has scarcely diminished in the former slave states since emancipation. Indeed, among the lower socioeconomic classes of white workers who now face competition for jobs from Negroes, resentment of any attempt to improve the standing of Negroes is probably stronger than ever. In the land of the Ku Klux Klan the white liberal treads a dangerous path. The liberal in the United States often finds himself leading a schizophrenic existence: opposed to segregation, he is also, as often as not, an opponent of centralisation, a champion of states’ rights. And the right to administer education within its boundaries is one of these rights.

In any federal system conflict between the central government and the governments of its constituent states is inevitable. It is easy for the outsider to be critical of the oppression of human rights daily apparent in Alabama and other Southern states; but a way of life which has existed for a hundred years or more cannot be upset overnight. The civil rights movement which had its baptism of fire at Little Rock, and grew to maturity under the Kennedy Administration, has provoked the inevitable reaction—a stiffened resistance to Federal intervention. The “ New York Times ” last month drew attention to the proposal for a “constitutional con- “ vention The legislatures of 32 states, mostly in the south and west, have passed resolutions in recent months requesting Congress to call a convention under Article Vof the Federal Constitution. The declared purpose of such a convention would be to overturn the Supreme Court’s “reapportionment” decisions (requiring states to provide for one-man-one-vote elections to both houses in each state). If only two more states approve the resolutions, Congress will be required to call the convention which, according to the “ New York “ Times ”, could not be prevented from changing the Bill of Rights or drastically altering other provisions of the Constitution. The newspaper estimates that 26 of the 32 resolutions have been passed by “ malapportioned legislatures that have subsequently “been redistricted by court order”. The 26 legislatures may be, as the editorial suggests, “ unrepresentative, rural-dominated, rotten-borough legislatures of yesterday”; but they have already come very close to threatening the power of the Federal Government to conduct the legitimate business of the nation. Much more than the petty prejudices of Southerners is at stake in this issue of states’ rights.