But It Won’t Stay Buried

The last time I saw Harry Ashmore was in October of 1954, at Asheville, N.C., where the National Conference of Editorial Writers was in session. He was in an upstairs room at the Grove Park Inn, happily engaged in lickering up the banquet speaker, and we after-youed on the bourbon bottle for a few minutes before the evening’s sonorities got under way.

That was the autumn after the high co’t had spoken from Sinai in the spring, and had found in the Fourteenth Amendment certain prohibitions upon state powers that no judicial body ever had found there before. But Southern schools still were segregated, save in renegade Baltimore and in the District, and the Court had put off implementation of its decree until the spring of 1955. We of the South were living then in a sort of post-operative shock; nobody was very mad about anything. It wasn’t until the following summer that the anesthesia wore off.

JJ

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James Jackson Kilpatrick

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The last time I saw Harry Ashmore was in October of 1954, at Asheville, N.C., where the National Conference of Editorial Writers was in session. He was in an upstairs room at the Grove Park Inn, happily engaged in lickering up the banquet speaker, and we after-youed on the bourbon bottle for a few minutes before the evening’s sonorities got under way.

That was the autumn after the high co’t had spoken from Sinai in the spring, and had found in the Fourteenth Amendment certain prohibitions upon state powers that no judicial body ever had found there before. But Southern schools still were segregated, save in renegade Baltimore and in the District, and the Court had put off implementation of its decree until the spring of 1955. We of the South were living then in a sort of post-operative shock; nobody was very mad about anything. It wasn’t until the following summer that the anesthesia wore off.