Support for the May 10 march and rally in Chicago for the Equal Rights Amendment, called by the National Organization for Women, was a major theme of the proceedings.

Eleanor Smeal, president of NOW, gave greetings to the conference and urged everyone to come to Chicago on May 10. Several ERA workshops featured NOW leaders such as Jane Wells-Schooley, vice-president, and other panelists who spoke on ERA and the Chicago action.

A resolution in support of ERA ratification was overwhelmingly passed, and the ERA appeared in Spanish and English in the front of the conference brochure.

Equally significant was the conference vote to go on record in opposition to the draft for both women and men.

The participants voiced support to the very struggles that the U.S. government wants to use young men and women as troops to crush. Loud applause greeted passage of a resolution calling for a halt to all U.S. military aid to the Salvadoran junta and for granting aid to Nicaragua with no strings attached.  
 
April 18, 1955
On April 11 the U.S. Supreme Court finally began to hear arguments on how and when its school desegregation ruling of almost a year ago should be put into effect. Lawyers for Negro children and their parents urged the court to make a ruling that would start desegregation rolling in the South at the beginning of next year’s school term or at the latest the school year after next.

Lawyers for the border states—those Southern states which were not boycotting the hearings—presented a line of argument which would make the Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954 ruling a dead letter as far as compulsory desegregation was concerned.

The announced purpose of these hearings—the implementation installment of the Court’s decision—was to decide ways, means and time limits of enforcing the earlier decision that school segregation was unconstitutional. Yet the attorneys-general and legal representatives of the Jim Crow school states didn’t argue about how or when desegregation should begin but tried to prove that desegregation was impractical, unhealthy, undesirable, impossible and dangerous.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home