Atlanta Daily World

Expert Sees Walls Crumbling Within Period Of Five Years

NORMAN, Okla. - (INS)-A southern educator has predicted the end of segregation throughout the south within the next five years.

The prediction was made at Norman at the opening session of the first Southwide Conference on Human Relations Education by Frederick B. Routh of Atlanta, assistant director of the Southern Regional Council.

BOTH RACES ATTEND

The conference which is being attended by some 100 white and Negro educators from 14 southern states, is sponsored jointly by the University of Oklahoma and the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'rith. The meeting, which was aided by a grant from the Ford Fund for the Republic, ended through today.

Routh, a former professor of human relations at the University of Miami, declared that within five years "school segregation walls will be breached even in the hard core states" of the South.

Routh said that four Southern states will complete school integration within two years and that four others will be well advanced toward full desegregation within that time.

Routh said integration is advancing most rapidly in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Texas and Arkansas. He called Tennessee, North Carolina Virginia and Florida "waiting states." He added that the "hard core" of resistance to integration consists of Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi.

Another speaker was Dr. Lawrence F. Kinney, professor of religion at Southwestern College at Memphis. He said that people of undeveloped areas throughout the world "are now on the move to improve their status." Kinney added that "the advance of American Negroes is part of this world movement and their integration is clearly the wave of the future."