This is the second in a series. The next installment will have anecdotes about Klan meetings, Wallace rallies, and other Southern phenomena.

In one of its three stories with an Alabama dateline last month, the New York Times reported the death of a Negro in Prichard. The article said:

The body of a 34-year-old Negro man was found hanging by the heels Saturday outside an abandoned school house. The police identified the victim as E. C. Deloach, a fork lift operator on the Mobile docks.

Deloach's body, clad only in shorts and with slight cuts about the head and abdomen, was found hanging by a telephone cable from an eave of the Joshua Barney School, one of several Negro schools closed in the Mobile area this year when Federal courts ordered a speed-up in integration.

Seven firebombings have been reported in the area in the last three weeks and there has been one clash between a Negro and a white at one of the newly integrated schools.

"There are no racial implications involved," said Detective Lieutenant R. L. Heathcoe.

That kind of violence may be exceptional. But the tension it reveals is not. The Southern school system -- whose violent convulsions marked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in 1954 -- is bracing for a new showdown. And although Northerners find it hard to understand, this showdown will be far more important than any that have gone before. More than the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision or the spotty efforts to wipe out segregated schools that followed, the 1968 fight to give black children a decent education will determine the Negro's future in the South.

But, as Negro leaders in the South know all too well, this is a showdown that will pass virtually unnoticed in the North. Things have changed a lot since 1954. Then Northern families could see clearly-cut right and wrong. It wasn't hard to sense that the timid black children were right, and that the thick-necked Southern police were wrong.

Going Underground

Things have changed since then. White suburbanites, feeling the push of black families moving into their neighborhoods, wary of the threatening black men they see rioting in the cities, are now less eager to ram integration down the Southern gullet. George Wallace has found a constituency in the North that Strom Thurmond or Orval Faubus would never have won in 1954.

Even before the white backlash set in, a number of other factors had conspired to make the Southern "racial situation" less visible than it had been in the '50's. After the civil rights acts passed in the early '60's, most Northern whites breathed a sigh of moral relief. Most of the tangible evidences of bigotry were gone: federal inspectors found few "Colored" drinking fountains left. The "White Only" posters were reluctantly removed from the train stations and busses; the black names made their way onto the voting lists; and whites and blacks settled down to the teeth-gritting reality of living together.

But most Southern Negroes soon realized that these tentative victories were in reality a setback. The evening TV news report had been one of the civil rights movement's primary weapons, but now much of its punch was gone. There were no more marches, few boycotts, little redneck backlash. The white Northern conscience turned to other things. Students began to work against the war; white liberals set to work in the ghettos. With no tangible goblins to fight, the Southern Negroes struggled for ways to keep the nation's support mobilized.

Southern whites too were quick to see what was happening. In many small towns, the seemingly cheery acquiescence to Northern laws was in reality a cagey poker-face cover for continued Southern resistance. Bitter experience with the Northern press had convinced the whites that the best way to clamp down on Negro progress was to clamp down on Negro progress was to keep the press away; and the best way to do that was to avoid trouble. So the "White Only" signs disappeared, and so did the press.

In some areas, the token integration that the civil rights laws left was enough. Negroes were content to be able to vote, even if their vote was accepted reluctantly. They were willing, for a while, to ride the busses, even though hostile stares greeted them. Jobs given reluctantly were a little better than none at all. Half a share of American Life would not be satisfactory as a permanent solution, but perhaps it would do for several years.

Blacks Marry Blacks