Integration in Virginia

When Harry Ashmore, executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette described the collapse of "passive resistance" in Virginia as the fall of Richmond, he exaggerated. But if the opening of schools to Negro students in Norfolk and Arlington cannot be compared to Richmond or Appomattox, it can, hopefully perhaps, be termed a Gettysburg.

Governor J. Lindsley Almond, who had pledged himself to fight to the end within the limits of the law, conceded last week that the battle was lost. The laws which had empowered him to shut down any school ordered to integrate by district courts were struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court as a violation of the state constitutional provision requiring Virginia to preserve an efficient system of free public schools. Simultaneously, a federal court ruled that the massive resistance statutes violated the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This start toward peaceable integration in Virginia can only be praised. The attitude in Arlington County, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., or in Norfolk cannot, though, be compared to that in Little Rock or places in the "deep south," for the state of Jefferson and Lee has always retained some aura of respect for law. But the sequence of last month's events in Virginia may encourage the southern moderates who wish to comply with the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and who want to keep their schools open rather than battle at Armageddon. Moderates in Atlanta and Charleston and other centers can draw hope from the Virginia integration that the last-ditch, education-be-damned resistance of the Faubus camp may one day be overcome.

Not all of the developments in Virginia are so encouraging, however. For the Virginia legislature, urged on by Governor Almond, repealed the compulsory-attendance statute and earmarked three million dollars in scholarship aid for any parents who wished to transfer their students to private schools. Such a provision, though clearly different from Faubus' attempt to convert the public school system into a private school establishment, is nevertheless reproachable. The Arkansas scheme was struck down as a clear attempt to evade the desegregation of the Little Rock public schools; presumably the Supreme Court, in a broad interpretation, could rule similarly in the Virginia case.

Whether strictly constitutional or not, however, the Virginia scholarship program is deleterious not only from the viewpoint of the northern liberal but from that of the southern moderate as well. For it represents another weakening of public education as a whole, an official discouragement of the compulsory public school system. With one hand the state government supports a free school establishment, while with its other it is paying those citizens who do not wish to use it. Such provisions insult, if they do not impair, the rights of Negroes; they prolong hopes for avoiding ultimate integration in that state where it can be achieved with least agony, and they weaken the preservation of free public education throughout the south.