Southern school news. (Nashville, Tenn.) 1954-1965, September 03, 1954, Image 9

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SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS —Sept. 3, 1954 —PAGE 9 Missouri SHIFTS IN THE NEGRO POPULATION OF THE U. S. 1940 TO 1950 IkiMOnillkiMi Oittribuhoft of Ntflro fopotolioo RertofU.5. rn r - ] 28.0% ^ 137.5% W 72.0% ■ ■ ^ TIm SArft to Urtoi Aroos Distribution of Nogro Population Rural Areas . 51.4% I in Urban Areas 48.6% 62.5% 1940 1950 SOME EXAMPLES OF THE SHIFT OUT OF THE SOUTH Source.- U. S. Census of 1950 ST. LOUIS, Mo. \TISSOURI is educating in its pub- -L’A lie schools some 63,000 Negro pu pils, slightly more than 9 per cent of all pupils. The problem of conforming to the United States Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation is, however, concentrated in a relatively few areas. St. Louis with 32,870 Negro pupils (approximately 33 per cent of the city’s school enrollment) and Kansas City with 10,357 (a ratio of 16 per cent) between them account for two-thirds of the state’s Negro school population. St. Louis county adds 3,500 more, six cotton belt counties in the south west comer of the state 8,800, and six smaller cities 2,300. Apart from these areas, the entire balance of the state counts only 5,300 Negro pupils. Forty per cent of the counties have none at all. As for school districts, Negroes are enrolled in only 216 or five per cent of the approximately 4,000 jurisdictions. In 1952-53, Misouri spent 162 mil lion dollars on its public schools, of which 65 per cent came from local taxation and 35 per cent from the state. The expenditure per pupil was $235, no breakdown being available as between Negro and white pupils. While the state spent more per pu pil than any Southern state except Kentucky, on a national comparison Missouri is not among the leaders in public school expenditures. In 1952, out of a total income of $6,259,000,000, Missouri citizens spent 2.5 per cent on public schools. Per capita, school expenditures amounted to $40 out of an average income of $1,583. To provide the local 65 per cent of school support, the local districts levy on the average $1 per $100 of property valuation for rural ele mentary schools and $2 per $100 for high school districts. Owing to dif ferences in valuation, the degree of local support varies widely. No an swer has yet been found to the prob lem posed by some districts using state aid as a means of avoiding then- fair share of school support. STATE FUNDS HELP The state’s contribution is fixed by the constitution at a minimum of one-fourth of its general revenue, which is raised mainly by a 2 per cent sales tax and a graduated in come tax. For many years, however, the General Assembly has appro priated one-third of the general rev enue to the schools. In recent years it has supplemented this with extra funds for particular purposes, such as bus transportation and aid in the construction of schools for newly consolidated districts. In theory, the state in exchange has power to in spect and supervise standards of in struction. In practice, the supervision is nominal. Virtually complete au thority rests, de facto, with the local school board members and their chosen school administrators. State policy with respect to segre gation is presently defined by a rul ing issued July 1 by Atty. Gen. John M. Dalton. He held that the Supreme Court decision had immediately voided all state constitutional and statutory requirements for segrega tion. Therefore local districts could integrate at once if they so chose. They could not, however, be required to do so, the attorney general held, and the state could take no positive action, until the Supreme Court’s ruling has been made final following hearings this fall. Mr. Dalton an nounced his intention to file a brief with the Court suggesting procedure for Missouri. Under this permissive authority, significant steps have been taken with respect to both higher educa tion and the elementary and second ary schools. Curators of the University of Mis souri announced July 17 that here- a fter qualified' applicants would be without regard to race in all the undergraduate divisions, in- C u *ke engineering and mining t ^°^ a - Graduate schools of e University had been open to Ne- Sroes since 1950. The decision to let pwn the bars in undergraduate di visions was made when the curators, nder guidance of Attorney General Dalton’s opinion, faced the question of what to do with a Negro’s appli cation for admission as an under graduate. The University has an en rollment of 8,000. It is too early to say how many Negroes may apply or be admitted this year. Following the pattern set at Co lumbia, two of the state’s five teach ers’ colleges, at Warrensburg in the central section and Springfield in the southwest, have announced, upon re ceiving applications from qualified Negroes, that no racial restrictions will be applied this year. The other teachers’ colleges are at Kirksville, in the northeast, Maryville, northwest, and Cape Girardeau, southeast. What will happen to Lincoln Uni versity, the state-supported institu tion for Negroes at Jefferson City, 32 miles from the University of Mis souri at Columbia, remains to be de termined. Lincoln University, with an average enrollment of 800, has al ready announced that its law school in St. Louis will not be closed until after the 1954-55 school year, though the school last year had only 18 stu dents. Lincoln University proper, 88 years old, announced August 2 that it will open its doors to white stu dents this fall—a gesture and little more. The curators say they will study the advisability of eliminating all graduate courses and confining undergraduate work to arts and sci ences courses. But the final decision on whether Lincoln University sur vives will rest with the General As sembly. GRADUAL INTEGRATION At the high school and elementary school level, St. Louis and Kansas City have adopted similar plans for a stage-by-stage transition to an in tegrated system. St. Louis acted June 23 with an nouncement of its Board of Educa tion that the first stage would open in September, with unification of the two teachers’ colleges operated by the pubic school system, one white and one Negro. Special schools for handicapped children, which serve a city-wide constituency, will also be integrated when the schools open in September. The second stage will begin next Feb. 1, with the second semester of the school year. At that time the high schools, of which there are now 3 Negro and 8 white, will be integrated, affecting some 5,300 Negro students. The new high school district bounda ries will be made public by Novem ber 15, to allow plenty of time for dis cussion and explanation. By and large, the Board of Educa tion announced, students will be re quired to attend the high school in the district where they live, trans ferring where necessary. Exceptions will be allowed on request in two situations: (1) if the student’s local school is overcrowded; (2) if he can continue until graduation at his pres ent school without causing over crowding there. Teachers will retain their present assignment as far as possible, and their tenure and rights will be preserved without racial dis crimination, according to the Board’s formally declared policy. The third and final stage of inte gration is scheduled to be achieved at the start of the school year in September, 1955. This will include in tegration of the two technical high schools and—biggest task of all—of the elementary schools, which now have some 26,500 Negro pupils in 36 of a total of 121 schools. The new districts for the elementary schools are to be made public next Feb. 1. NO OPEN OPPOSITION The St. Louis board’s plans have been received by the community with no visible signs of organized or sig nificant opposition. In St. Louis county, with a popu lation of 400,000, more than a third of the Negro pupils are concentrated in the Negro community of Kinloch and presumably will continue to at tend that community’s schools. Webster Groves, which has the sec ond largest group of Negro pupils (710), had not taken action on inte gration at the time of this report. Two other suburbs plan to get started this fall. The Clayton school board, with only 19 Negro pupils in a total en rollment of 2,200, voted to close its Negro elementary school and to dis tribute its enrollment among the oth er schools. Kirkwood, with 447 Ne gro pupils, decided by a 3-2 vote of its school board to integrate the ele mentary schools at once and the jun ior and senior high schools next Jan uary, when a new building is sched uled to be completed. Kirkwood has been operating a Negro elementary school with an en rollment of 383. With the adoption of geographical districts for both white and Negro pupils, 75 Negro pupils will transfer to the nearest white school, and 63 white pupils will transfer to the Negro school. Thus there will be a substantial white minority in one school and a Negro minority in the other. ELECTION CALLED This plan was objected to by 34 white residents in a new subdivision which would send its children to the Negro school. They filed a petition proposing to transfer their subdi vision from Kirkwood to an adjacent school district which has no Negro pupils. Their spokesman argued that future development of subdivisions in the area would be impossible if children were required to attend non-segregated schools. A special election is to be held at which the transfer must be approved by a ma jority of the whole district. The school board opposes the separation. Kansas City, which has the state’s second largest concentration of Ne gro pupils, announced July 30 adop tion of a two-phase program of inte gration. Its Board of Education at the beginning of the summer had voted to conduct mixed classes at the sum mer session classes in two high schools and the junior college. For the regular term beginning in Sep tember, it voted to transfer Negro pupils from Lincoln junior college to the Kansas City junior college, and at the same time to integrate the two vocational high schools by transferring Negro pupils to the white school. The building thus va cated is to become a junior high school. Regular high schools and the ele mentary schools will be integrated in 1955, according to the board’s plan. Reason for the delay is to gain time for the solution of administrative problems, according to Superintend ent Mark W. Bills. He said that if integration became effective imme diately, 47 per cent of all Negro pu pils would have to transfer to another school. Missouri’s “South,” insofar as pub lic schools are concerned, comprises six counties in the “bootheel” and adjoining areas of southeast Missouri. Some 8,800 Negro pupils attend pub lic schools in these six counties. None of the counties has as heavy a con centration of Negro pupils as St. Louis. With their principal towns and the ratio of Negro pupils to the total, they are: Mississippi (Charleston) 23% Pemiscot (Hayti) 21.8% New Madrid (New Madrid) 17% Scott (Sikeston) 9% Butler (Poplar Bluff) 8% Stoddard (Bloomfield) 6.3% School districts in this area have been slow to take action on the Su preme Court opinion. The school board of Poplar Bluff (pop. 15,000) announced in July that it would con tinue to operate its Negro elemen tary and high school, enrollment 353, on a segregated basis this year, since the teachers were already under con tract. No action was taken setting a date for the end of segregation. Clarkton (pop. 1,000), which is in Dunklin county in the “bootheel,” made a try at integration which failed. When the schools opened late in July, the Board of Education an nounced that 12 Negro children who in past years had been transported to a segregated school at nearby Mal den would be accepted in Clarkton’s elementary schools. Two weeks later, on August 2, the board held another meeting attended by 250 parents of white children who had protested. The board, declaring that the district “is not ready for integration,” re versed itself and announced that Ne gro children would again be sent to Maldin. Board President Charles E. James and Superintendent R. H. Hensen explained the Supreme Court decision and told the parents, according to the Associated Press, they would have to accept it “sooner or later.” SIX OTHER CITIES Six cities in other sections of the state account for 2,300 additional Ne gro pupils, with relatively low con centrations in each case. With the city population and the number of Ne gro pupils in each, these cities are: Mexico (11,600), 312. Columbia (32,000), 501. St. Joseph (78,000), 432. Springfield (72,000), 342. Hannibal (20,000), 304. Sedalia (20,000), 413. Mexico’s Board of Education voted unanimously August 6 to end segre gation this fall in the three top grades of the high school. The committee which suggested this step after a study of the problem also recom mended no integration of other grades at this time. Mexico is in north central Missouri, 115 miles west of St. Louis. St. Joseph, in the northwest section upriver from Kansas City, abolished segregation in the summer sessions of its elementary and high schools, and the junior college. Superintend ent George Blackwell was instructed by the Board of Education to study integration in the regular term. Hannibal, Mark Twain’s home town on the Mississippi 100 miles above St. Louis, announced July 21 that segregation would be retained for the current school year because of over crowding and because contracts with the 14 Negro teachers in the Negro elementary and high school had al ready been signed. Springfield, western capital of the Ozarks, has taken no action on the public school system although cura tors of Southwest Missouri State College there announced the end of racial restrictions on admission. Seventy miles southwest of Spring- field at Neosho, the civil war capital of Confederate Missouri, the school board voted to close its Lincoln school this fall and to absorb at once 22 Negroes in elementary grades and 3 in the high school. Neosho has a population of 6,000. Scattered action has been taken elsewhere. A large consolidated dis trict at Clarksville, a few miles down the Mississippi from Hannibal, an nounced the end of segregation in both high schools and elementary schools with the start of the new term Sept. 7. Heretofore 22 Negro high school pupils had been trans ported to Louisiana, 10 miles north. Louisiana is continuing to operate its segregation for its own students this year. The Clarksville district, how ever, estimated it would save $8,600 by integrating its high school pupils alone. It will also close its Negro ele mentary schools. At three elementary schools operated by the district, the ratio of Negro to total pupils under integration will be 16 per cent, 19 per cent and 10 per cent. In the junior and senior high schools it will be 12 per cent. Lexington, a town of 5,000 on the Missouri river 35 miles east of Kan sas City, decided not to integrate this year, and to continue operating a separate Negro school. In the north central section, two towns which had been sending Ne groes to a separate high school at Moberly decided to keep them home this year. For Macon (pop. 4,000) this will mean integrating 16 high school pupils, for Madison (pop. 571), four elementary and two high school pu pils. In the same general area, Fulton (pop. 10,000) will end high school segregation this fall but will retain its separate Negro elementary school for another year. The decision involves keeping in Fulton 50 Negroes who had been transported to Jefferson City, 32 miles away. Queried as to their preferences, 37 out of 42 Ne gro pupils voted to go to school at home. As for Jefferson City itself, the state capital (pop. 25,000), the Board of Education voted July 16 to end segregation but fixed no time. Presi dent E. H. Mueller said action will not be taken until information has been received on the procedure de sired by the Supreme Court. The capital city has 120 Negroes in a sep arate elementary school, and its older Negro children attend the high school maintained by Lincoln University. Plans for a new high school building are being held up until the final de cision on segregation is made. St. Charles (pop. 14,000), imme diately west of St. Louis on the Mis souri, decided to end segregation this fall in the elementary schools, while postponing the junior and senior high school adjustment until September 1955, when a new junior high school building will be completed. The town has been operating a combined ele mentary and high school for Negroes, which was attended by 80 non-resi dents sent in from other communi ties. The non-residents have been notified that they will not be accepted under the integrated system.