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THE LAW The Tension of Change {See Cover} One midnight in the bitter year 1932, two journalists—one white, one Negro— walked south along Philadelphia’ “Broad Street in a sleely Grizsle_They were talk- ing of the Negro problem, the white man with a vehement impatience for Justice, his companion more calmly and out of ¢ deeper feeling for the scope and depth of the subject. Before parting, they stood a while under the marquee of the old Broad Street Station. Across the square under the arcade of city hall, dozens of men, wrapped in newspapers, slept. Panhandlers and a few night-shift apple-sellers stood on corners, A bus from upstate unloaded job-seekers; a bus for upstate loaded job- seekers. Soggy streetwalkers drifted to and froin a depressed market. The Negro con- cluded the conversation: “After all, the very most we can hope for is complete political, economic and social equality with the white man.” Then, gazing at the Ho- garthian scene, he added, not derisively bul with compassion: “And look at the white man.” In the bright, lush September of 1955, ina _day of confidence—as in a time of despair—the central problems of U.S. whites and Negroes again blended into ene; how to shape law, government, cus- toms, practices, schools, factories, unions and farms in Ways more consistent with man's nature and man’s hopes. How, with- in the enduring framework of U.S. society, to let one change cali forth another in some reasonably harmonious order. One of the most important changes on the U.S. scene in September 1955, as the nation’s children trooped back to school, was the astounding progress of racial de- segregation. In Kansas City, Mo. and Oklahoma City, in Oak Ridge, and Charles- ton, W. Va., white and Negro children for the first time sat together in classrooms. This simple fact, part of a vast and com- plex social revolution, resulted from a legal victory: the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions of May 17, 1954 and May 37, 1955, holding segregated schools contrary to the r4th Amendment. Far Conscience & Repute. The name indelibly stamped on this victory is that of Thurgood Marshall, 47, counsel for the National_Association_for_the Advance- ment of Colored People. He is at his sin- cerest and loudest (and that is very sin- cere and quite loud) in declaring that he is only one of the millions, white and Negro, whose courage, sweat, skill, imagi- nation and common sense made the vic- tory possible. Like all great victories, the school-desegregation decision opened up terrifying vistas of future obstacles and perils for all Americans. Most centrally and immediately, Marshall must deal with the future course of desegregation and the intertwined issues of the social revolution of which he is a leading figure. He cannot set the course, not even for the N.A.A.C.P. But what. he decides to do about a thou- TIME, SEPTEMBER 19, 1955 Leslie Bland ScHOOLMATES IX SAN AXTONIQ® . Together ond equal. sand practical legal questions will interact powerfully with the decisions and attitudes of other men of similar and quite different and opposite views. The resultant of these forces will determine the pace, the style and the success of an effort to remove from U.S. life a paralyzing sting in its conscience and the ugliest blot upon its good name in the world. Failure to achieve an orderly solution of the Negro problem would be—and this Thurgood Marshall feels deeply—much more than defeat for the Negro. It would be a failure at the very core of the Amer- ican genius—its capacity for constructing forms strong and shrewd enough to with- stand the tensions of change. From the nation’s start, its three chief resources have been its fabulous mines of law, poli- tics and social (including economic) organ- ization. The abundance of material things —the bales of cotton, bushels of corn, ingots of steel—is a byproduct of these three primary riches, not the take from a geographic roulette wheel or the hoard of materialist greed. Today’s drive of the U.S. Negro toward equality is as strong as any social tide in Asia or Africa or Europe. At the centers of those other drives for change stand agi- tators, conspirators. men of violence. The strength and flexibility of the U.S. Consti- tution make possible the fact that the man at the vortex of the Negro issue in the U.S. is a constitutional lawyer. The Sore Arm. His is a highly tech- nical calling. The Constitution itself is a complex work of statecralt, put together by some of the most sophisticated polit- ical scientists who ever lived. Along with the document there is the constitutional residue of 168 years (this Saturday) of intense legal, political and social history— a coral-like cathedral of precedent, com- promise, balance and bold interpretation. It takes scholars to move in this maze— and Thurgood Marshall is a sound, con- scientious, imaginative legal scholar, al- though by no means the best of his day. Technical ski! is not all a U.S. constite- tional lawyer needs, The job is to apply the Constitution to life, which will not sit still. For example, in the mid-zoth century it became a fact of life that millions of U.S. Negroes could not feel themselves clothed in the minimum dignity of men as long as they suffered under certain legal disabilities. And millions of Southern whites, with an intensity perhaps equal to that of the Negroes, resist the change the Negroes feei they must have. A constitu- tiona? lawyer involved in this conflict must understand men as well as the legal tech- nicalities through which their raw emo- tions may, without violence, be composed into a more or less successful image of justice, Thurgood Marshall's feeling of love and awe for the Constitution 1s exceeded only by his love and awe toward his clients: the Negroes, and especially the Negroes of the South_and the border states, who. facing threats of firing, or beating or even death, continue to sign the legal petitions and complaints that must be the starting point of Marshall's cases from the slum and the cotton feld to the high and tech- nical levels of the Supreme Court. Of these local N.A.A.C.P. leaders 10 the South, Marshall says: “There isn’t 2 threat known to men that they do not receive. They're never out from under pressure. I dof’t think I could take it for a week. The possibility of violent death for them and their families is something they’ve learned to live with like a man learns to sleep with a sore arm.” The Big Stretch, Marsh all the way from an understanding of this simple horror_to the labyrinthine. subtle- ties and the well-yoked ambiguities that mete form the mind of Mr: Justice Felix Frank- furter. He must stretch from his hatred of inequality to 2 eco nition that much of the opposition To Negro equality is just Jas honestly felt as his nin convictions. ("Some of my best friends are Dixiecrats —buot they're honest Dixiecrats.”} He must Sree all the way from an idealist’s demand for nothing less than justice (“On the racial issue, you can’t be a little bit wrong any more than you can be a litte bit pregnant or a little bit dead’) to a practical Jawyer’s acceptance of what he % Robert Fouga and Hazel Woodward, first- | graders in San Antonio's desegrezated Pauline Nelson elementary school. 23 |