But there was one area where tokenism was not acceptable. Complete integration of the schools -- not merely the few black faces dotting the formerly-white classrooms -- was essential, the key to all future progress.

Most Northerners find it hard to understand why school integration is so urgent a need in the South. Liberals might rosily dream of the day when all little children could grow up together to love and understand each other at integrated schools; and their main objection to segregated schools seems to be that the children aren't growing up to love and understand. Blunter Northerners see no real danger in separate-but-equal schools; just like blacks marry blacks and whites marry whites, they say, people want to be with their own. Why force them together?

Northerners have the luxury of this speculation because they still believe -- somewhat subconsciously -- in the idea of Separate-But-Equal. Few whites can really believe that Southern hatred could extend so far as to deny little children a good education. A black man in the South, hearing that, would laugh. Because Separate-But-Equal is a farce.

You don't have to look too hard to see why. White schools in the South are no gems -- Alabama ranks 49th among the school systems of the country, and Mississippi proudly follows at number 50. But the eagerness of black children to get into the white schools suggests how bad the black schools must be. And the suggestion of how bad they must be is only a pale hint of how bad they are.

Black schools in Alabama and Mississippi, without exception, are ramshackle, decaying, understaffed and overcrowded. Alabama spends about $1500 per year for each white student in school. That's not much, but it's more than twice as much as the state pays for black students. Things are worse in Mississippi, where two years ago the state board of education coughed up a little less than $250 to pay for the education of each black student in the black schools.

And it's not hard to see the effects of Separate-But-Unequal schools. About one-half of all the Negro children who start school end up graduating from high school. Actually, that's not as great a loss as it may seem; because those who make it out of the twelfth grade have only the equivalent of a sixth grade Alabama education. A little less than two-thirds of black high school graduates are able to read. Many are turned down by the military because they fail the elementary math and reading tests.

The effect of this mass-production of uneducated black children is obvious. Children who can't read turn into adults who can't get jobs. Rednecks point to the black illiteracy statistics, to the numbers of blacks turned down by the military, and to the abysmal inability of black Southerners to get jobs, and use these as sociological proof of the cherished racist theories. "Them niggers will never be any good," they cheerily tell squirming visitors. "They's just so dumb that all they like to do is sit around an shoot pool. Damn federal government comes down here tellin' us the niggers are as good as us. All they gotta do is look at 'em to see they're no good."

Even the more liberal Southerners sometimes fall into the "Unqualified Nigras" trap. "I wouldn't mind hirin' some of the nigras," a lumber-yard owner said last summer, "but I just can't find any who know how to do the work. They just can't read and learn the job or work steady."

But in their secret moments, almost all of the Southerners seem to realize that the black schools have a fundamental relation with the continued black inferiority in the South. The rednecks who will not admit that Negroes are "just too dumb" because they've been at shoddy schools seem to sense that if the Negroes invade the white schools, a change will be imminent. And that is why school desegregation has become the last stand of the old white order.

The history of desegregating schools is short and it is unpleasant. For each progressive step, there seem to be two steps back. In 1954, after 60 years of Supreme Court decisions allowing the dual school systems in the South, Earl Warren's court finally made the break. Warren's decision had two memorable bits of language: the first, now reverently recited by civil rights lawyers, is that "separate schools are inherently in equal." That was good. But the other phrase almost negated the decision's value.

The South wouldn't have to merge its two school systems all at once, Warren said. Instead, it would have to take steps toward desegregation "with all deliberate speed." Negro parents, NAACP lawyers, and the few Northerners who were familiar with the situation soon learned to despise that phrase.

The beginning of integration after the '54 decision was deceptively easy. Black children, brave and resisting hostile taunts, went to white schools. For a year, Southern school districts seemed beaten. No one imagined that "all deliberate speed" could mean a very long time, and individual school boards from Arkansas to South Carolina quietly let Negroes into classes.

Things finally erupted in Clinton, Tennessee. After a Life photographer had done a story on "Peaceful Integration In Clinton," Clinton's parents struck back. Weeks of rioting and violence followed, and spread to other cities in the South. The most important result was that Southerners learned that President Eisenhower was less than eager to jump into their affairs. These things should be left to the states, Ike said; and the states were glad to have them. It wasn't until the notorious Little Rock showdown of the mid fifties that federal force was used at all, and for the rest of Eisenhower's administration it was used only reluctantly.

Things changed under Kennedy, but still there was little progress being made. Individual blacks made it into Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, but the majority of black children still grew up and were miseducated in black schools. It wasn't until 1962 that the next real step came: the advent of the wholesome-sounding Freedom Of Choice plan.

George Wallace, who had won his place in Alabamian hearts with his door-blocking stand at the University of Alabama, came out fuming when federal courts introduced the Freedom Of Choice plan. To outsiders, it didn't sound too threatening. It just said that any student could choose to go to any school he wanted; it seemed like basic American individual choice and everything good. But in the South, it posed an immediate danger: it meant that BLACK CHILDREN would be coming to the WHITE SCHOOLS. The white South had to act fast.