Making Best Use of the New Laws: The NAACP and the Fight for Civil Rights in the South, 1965-1975 (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) (Report‪)‬

ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 3, 1970, THREE BUSES CARRYING BLACK schoolchildren arrived at Lamar High School in Lamar, South Carolina, a small town in the eastern part of the state. The buses were transporting some of the 514 children who were integrating the school in accordance with a recent federal court order. Shortly after 8:00 A.M., the buses entered the school grounds and were promptly attacked by an angry mob of white adults carrying bricks, ax handles, and heavy chains. The black children were trapped inside, and many were injured by bricks and flying glass. Bullets were fired into one bus, and two were tipped over only moments after the children had dashed into the school. It was a terrifying ordeal that the youngsters never forgot. "Within seconds," recalled bus-rider David Lunn, "every window in the bus was broken out and glass was in my face and ears." "The crowd was shouting 'get them niggers' and 'run, n****r, run,'" added another student. "The policemen didn't seem very interested in what was going on." (1) The Lamar violence received extensive press coverage and was widely condemned by both local and national political leaders. South Carolina governor Robert E. McNair termed the episode "unspeakable," while Vice President Spiro T. Agnew declared that the Nixon administration would not "tolerate violence or unlawful interference in efforts to desegregate." (2) The case highlighted how black and white southerners were still fighting over racial issues well after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and the passage of federal equal rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. Like Darlington County, where Lamar is located, most southern school districts carried out substantial integration only after 1969, when the federal courts finally brought to an end the stalling tactics that many school boards had used for well over a decade. In January 1969, 68 percent of black children in the South still attended all-black schools, and close to 79 percent were enrolled in schools that were at least 80 percent black. (3)