50

252

MAY IT PLEASE THE COURT

Warren: Well, as to these specific children, have they been assigned to any school?

Butler: It is my information, Mr. Chief Justice, that they have now . . . (Warren: they have not been?) Yes sir, they have now been assigned to the all-Negro school, the new high school there, Horace Mann.

Warren: Well, isn't that, isn't that action toward segregating them again?

Butler: Oh, yes, sir, it is.

Narrator: Butler restated his appeal for delay.

Butler: It is impossible for the school board of Little Rock to operate a school program for the two thousand students at Central High School on an integrated basis at this time, and that unless the plan of desegregation is postponed for a reasonable length of time, that irreparable harm will be inflicted upon the students of both Negro and white race. Now the broad issue, of course, in this case is simply this: Can a court of equity postpone the enforcement of the plaintiffs' constitutional rights if the immediate enforcement thereof will deprive others -- many others, as a matter of fact -- of their constitutional rights to an education in a free public school?

In Little Rock as well as throughout the South, and in other places where this problem has arisen, the great mass of people are not law violators as such. They are not people who form mobs, they are not people who defy the law, but we submit, and this school board determined, that they were entitled to know what the law was. And as long as editorialists, popular editorialists in our community, were saying that this was not the law of the land, and that there were ways to get around it, and one court was saying one thing, and another court was saying another, and there were laws on the state statute books of Arkansas as well as other states throughout the South, diametrically opposed, as some people argued, some of them could be reconciled, some of them could not, with the decision in the Brown case, but it left the people of our community, as well as the people of many communities, in actual doubt as to what the law was.

Narrator: Justice Felix Frankfurter had little sympathy.

Frankfurter: The governor's calling out troops isn't the same thing as the uncertainty of what the law is. That has nothing to do with the uncertainty of the law. That's the action of the governor under what he thought was his refusal to abide by the law.