Atlanta Daily World

Dixie Groups Organize For Last Ditch School Fight

RICHMOND, Va.—(ANP)—White groups in every southern state were rushing plans last week to preserve the South's traditional pattern of racial segregation in the public schools for the 1955-56 term.

In some cases, rebels were openly defiant of the court order of May 31.

With less than a month before the fall term will begin, leaders of the die-hard segregationists were searching for any means of circumventing the court order. The rebellious groups included affiliates of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, Citizens Councils the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty and other organizations.

GOING AHEAD

While almost all local school boards are going ahead with plans for the usual segregated schools for 1955-56, the NAACP is presenting petitions to the boards calling for immediate steps toward desegregation.

A conflict, therefore is developing and the NAACP has already served notice that it will go to court to compel action against a board which makes no efforts to begin desegregation.

The segregationists ran into a stone wall last week when a Texas United States District judge, former Cong. R. Ewing Thomason, voided all sections of the Texas constitution and statutes requiring racial segregation in school systems.

As a result a number of Texas schools voted recently to begin integration this fall.

Mississippi whites who are dead set against integrated schools are being called to a state meeting at Jackson on August 16 to organize for a last ditch fight to keep segregated public schools.

BROAD POWERS

Georgia under the leadership of its attorney general, Eugene Cook, is laying plans for arguments and money to finance a mass of litigation on school segregation.

Alabama and several other southern states hope to circumvent the court's desegregation order by giving the local school boards broad powers to determine what schools children shall attend.

With plans shaping up on both sides for and against segregation, it seems certain now that 1955 will be a year of the beginning of a long tug of war in the courts in a mass of litigations which will leave segregation in public education a relic of the past.

Proponents of integration feel confident that they will win. With them it is only a matter of time. At least that is the conclusion that this writer has found among NAACP leaders and members and while liberals in Virginia who support them.