Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 16—DECEMBER 1957—SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS
Study Made
ST. LOUIS, MO.
C lark School at 1020 North
Union Boulevard was desegre
gated in September, 1955, along
with 122 other elementary schools
of the St. Louis public school sys
tem. It is regarded by local educa
tors as a good example of how de
segregation has worked out and
how some of the problems inci
dent to it were met.
Under the board of education’s
plan to implement the U. S. Su
preme Court’s ruling on schools,
desegregation in the elementary
system came six months after that
of general high schools.
St. Louis public school records no
longer distinguish between children as
to race, but a study for Southern
School News indicates that the division
at Clark was about half and half when
integration began in September 1955 and
is now about 80-20 in favor of Negro
pupils. Before then, the school was all-
white.
IN FRINGE AREA
Clark, a solidly-built brick structure
put up about 50 years ago, has a white
principal and a faculty nearly equal as
to white and Negro teachers, operating
under supervision of a Negro director
of elementary education and a Negro
administrative staff. It has an integrated
parent-teacher organization. It is in a
fringe area.
The pupil population of about 1,000,
kindergarten through eighth grade, is
drawn from an area of about 30 blocks.
The neighborhood is almost solidly Ne
gro east of Union Boulevard. West of
Union is an area of handsome, old-fash
ioned residences where white and Negro
citizens have organized to try to main
tain a neighborhood that is at once in
tegrated and stabilized. Clark gets the
bulk of its pupils from the solidly Negro
area, which is overcrowded and run
down. It gets practically none from cer
tain exclusive all-white residential
streets that lie within its district.
In an effort to learn how things were
going in the third year of the integration
program, Southern School News inter
viewed James A. Scott, a Negro, the di
rector of elementary education for 20
schools including Clark, and Frank G.
Sibley, Clark principal. Other persons
who gave their views included George
L. Arms, white chairman of the Clark
School Service (parents and teachers)
Organization.
VETERAN OF SYSTEM
Scott is a veteran of 35 years in the
St. Louis school system. He is one of five
directors of elementary education, each
with responsibility for about 20 schools
and 15,000 to 16,000 children.
Scott worked on the redistricting of
the city which was done as a prelimi
nary to desegregation, drawing up ele
mentary school boundary lines and
making assignment of pupils “to provide
the best use of the facilities of a given
school by the students living in the area
of that school.” This was carried out by
the use of IBM cards with no data as to
racial identity.
In Scott’s view, integration is work
ing well in St. Louis and much of the
District of Columbia
(Continued From Page 15)
pose of shifting Mr. White from his pres
ent position to the new position is to
avoid confirmation by the Senate.”
Now, however, Justice Department
sources state White’s appointment for
mally will be submitted to the Senate.
It must, therefore, come before the Sen
ate Judiciary Committee headed by Sen.
James O. Eastland (D-Miss.).
COMMISSION FORMED
The Civil Rights Commission was
formed by President Eisenhower on
Nov. 7 with former Supreme Court Jus
tice Stanley F. Reed as chairman. Cre
ated by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the
six-member Commission will make a
two-year investigation of alleged civil
rights violations and an appraisal of civ
il rights legislation.
It will meet for the first time with
President Eisenhower Dec. 9. The ap
pointments still must be confirmed by
the Senate where Chairman James O.
Eastland of the Judiciary Committee
could bottle them up for a time as he
did the civil rights bill last session.
However, little opposition is expected.
Initial reaction to the appointments was
general approval from both northern
and southern leaders, indicating that the
President had succeeded in his stated
wish that the fact-finding commission
be a “spectrum of American opinion.”
Representing both the North and the
of Desegregated St. Louis School Shows Problems
credit for this must go to thorough and
careful prior planning. He emphasized
the leadership of Superintendent of In
struction Philip J. Hickey and the board
of education in laying down firm prin
ciples, the full and favorable publicity
given by St. Louis newspapers, and the
support by church leaders and other
civic groups. Integration steps were an
nounced a year in advance, he said, and
that made it possible for “irreconcil-
ables” to move out. He noted that white
and Negro teachers had been on a de
segregated basis for years, working to
gether on textbook committees, and at
tending meetings together.
WORKED TOGETHER’
“We were used to working together
and knew one another pretty well, and
were already integrated in our profes
sional activities,” Scott said, adding: “If
a school system is well organized and
putting on a good education program,
including human relations, it can stand
the strain of integration very well. The
St. Louis system showed it was pretty
sound.”
Scott said the Negro teachers sent to
Clark had all been above average in
ability, and very much interested in
their work. The school has two extra
teachers, one for remedial reading, the
other for physical education. A school
like Clark, it was said, will get many
children who have recently come to St.
Louis from southern states, and have not
had a good educational background.
MUST BE ADAPTABLE
“Where a school is organized to meet
the needs of the children,” he said, “—if
it is well organized for that — it can
stand a change in population and still
maintain effectiveness of instruction, but
you must adapt your instruction to a
changing population. You have a change
in cultural background that requires
adaptation.”
The special teacher of remedial read
ing spends her entire time taking chil
dren who are not up to the mark and
helping them catch up. Clark also has
the “Room of 35” in which children who
have been, as Scott puts it, “education
ally disadvantaged,” can stay for six
months or a year. Such rooms have two
teachers instead of one. No more than
35 children are permitted. The children
are fourth or fifth graders deficient in
such basic subjects as reading, the lan
guage arts, composition, spelling and
arithmetic. They are returned eventually
to regular classes.
Scott said that disparities caused by
differences in background and achieve
ment level were citywide and not con
fined to elementary schools. In January
a “three-track” plan of education based
on achievement—not on I.Q.—will be
put into effect in the city’s nine general
high schools. Students are to be divided
into superior, average and below aver
age groups, with a “challenging” cur
riculum for the top level students. The
various groups will not be segregated
from one another in classrooms. School
officials say the plan has been in prep
aration since 1951 and is not related to
racial integration of schools.
Scott said Negroes comprised 34 per
cent of the St. Louis public school popu
lation in 1954 and the percentage now
had risen to about 40 per cent. His view
was that integration offered no prob
lems within schools that could not be
surmounted by good instruction and
good discipline. He seemed much more
concerned about the problem of main
taining stabilized neighborhoods, and
the need for additional school buildings
to take care of a growing population.
“One problem they have had to fight
in the Clark district,” he said, “is that
those are large houses, and as these
[white] people move out you have a
tendency for two families to move in,
and a strong tendency toward slum con
ditions develops. That’s when it is im
portant that you have zoning, and that
the city comes in and enforces zoning
. . . You get about double the number
of children.”
He said the situation at Clark had
been helped by the work of the West
End Community Conference, an inter
racial neighborhood association which
strives, among other things, for enforce
ment of zoning. He said also that St.
Louis police had “cooperated without
being in any way obtrusive” in discour
aging troublesome incidents around
Clark when pupils were going to and
from school.
CITES DISCIPLINE
“I think Clark School has been a place
where the problem of discipline has
been handled very well,” Scott sand.
“There is no problem within the school.
The trouble is when pupils are going
to and from school—the tendency of
local gangster problems spilling over
into schools. . .
“The discipline at Clark is not rigid
or harsh, but it is firm. Where a case
comes up, where it is firmly handled,
you eliminate the likelihood of its re
curring.”
There is apparently a smooth and
friendly working relationship between
Scott and Frank G. Sibley, who has
been principal of Clark School for six
years.
Sibley said that when Clark first was
desegregated in the fall of 1955 about
half the pupils were white. In June 1956
the pupils were 60 per cent Negro, in
June 1957, 65 to 70 per cent, and now
about 80 per cent. He said the trend
was “to an all-Negro school—it looks
almost unmistakably as if it will end
up that way.” By that he did not mean
100 per cent but “predominantly” Ne
gro. There would still be token integra
tion. His observation was that when a
school became as much as 40 per cent
Negro in population, there occurred, for
various reasons, a rapid transition to all-
Negro or nearly so.
FIRST YEAR ‘RUGGED’
“Things were rugged the first year,”
Sibley recalled. “It was new for every
body and a lot of children were new
to our methods and standards. We had
to clear out a lot of youngsters who
were potential trouble-makers, princi
pally Negroes. (This amounted to about
2 per cent of pupils.) It seemed the
white students accepted integration bet
ter than the colored. Those cleared out
were either suspended or reassigned.
“The second year it was better, and
this year we are doing fine.”
The type of trouble encountered in
cluded sidewalk brawls, obscenity, dis
respect for teachers and persons in au
thority. In some instances children who
were involved in these difficulties prob
ably had been doing it elsewhere, before
integration, and had gotten by with it,
Sibley said. There were only a few
white versus Negro incidents. The Ne
gro children who were openly belliger
ent were small in number.
INCIDENTS RECALLED
In the matter of discipline, Sibley said
it was imperative that the person in au
thority be absolutely fair and impartial,
and that he also be decisive. Last year
a white boy of rural background was
brought in to the principal’s office by
two Negro school safety patrol boys. The
white boy had made a contemptuous
reference to the Negro race. Sibley sent
the boy home immediately, without re
turning to class, and had him trans
ferred out of Clark that day.
Three Negro boys were sent home and
transferred at the time when publicity
about integration violence in Little Rock
was at its height. They had brought
knives to school and had threatened two
white boys by holding the knives at
their throats. Sibley lectured them and
got them out without delay. Possession
of knives is a violation of “Policies on
School Behavior,” a set of rules which
Sibley established at the outset. Pupils
are schooled carefully on these rules,
and the rules are enforced.
Last month a white safety patrol boy
reported two Negroes for a rule viola
tion. Sibley feared the Negroes might
retaliate, and he warned them that they
would be held responsible if anything
of the sort happened. The patrol boy
was beaten. The two Negroes did not
take part in the beating, but were stand
ing by. They were sent home, and fur
ther disciplinary action was taken.
‘SPANKING PRIVILEGES’
As a means of keeping order, Sibley
sometimes requests parents of trouble
some children to grant written permis
sion for corporal punishment. He now
has 25 signed “spanking privilege” cer
tificates on file. This punishment has
been used only three or four times, and
consists of three or four licks with a
belt in presence of a teacher witness.
No parents thus far have refused to give
the permission when it is sought. The
certificates are regarded as having a
salutary deterrent effect.
Sibley attributed the improvement
that has been brought about at Clark
to the efforts of an excellent faculty and
to a general improvement in school mo
rale and in the attitudes and work habits
of pupils.
Factors in the transformation were a
program of student assemblies, the
establishment of a school newspaper,
The Clark Star, the organizing of ath
letic teams, extension of the school’s
playground to triple its former size, and
organized athletics under supervision of
Louis Evans, Negro physical education
instructor.
Sibley said the integrated faculty,
with 14 white and 17 Negro teachers,
was working out well. When integra
tion began, Clark had one Negro teach
er. Attrition of white teachers has aver
aged about four a semester, and now
only six are left of the original white
group. However, Sibley said these were
all excellent and would stay. For a while
all replacements were selected Negr,
teachers. After the desired average ^
achieved, white replacements tended to
be inexperienced young teachers j^
beginning their careers. There has
no instance of an experienced whitj
teacher requesting assignment to '
Academic-wise, Sibley said the school
had shown improvement since the earl -
days. He said: “In the first semester 0 f
integration we failed about 30 per cent >
A lot of it was poor background and
some of it was poor work habits. As.
whole, we are now much better.”
IQ RATINGS
The eight-high or graduating class at
Clark school has 34 pupils of whom 29
are Negroes, four are white and one is
Chinese. The intelligence rating of the
pupils ranges from 50 to 118, the high-
est being that of a Negro girl. Four
of the group rate above 110 (superior);
13 rate from 90 to 110 (normal); fi ve
rate 78 to 90 (dull normal) and 12 fa]]
below 78, a mentally deficient category
that under ideal circumstances is sup.
posed to receive special schooling.
Ratings of the five non-Negro pupils
were as follows: 112, 105, 95, 74 and 54.
The eight-high class is not considered
typical of the intelligence picture at
Clark, however. A better example, per
haps, is the five-high class, which has
42 pupils ranging from 66 to 123 in in-
telligence ratings. Here a white girl has
the highest score. Five pupils are over
110, 26 are in the normal bracket, seven
are dull normal and only four are below ;
78.
Sibley said that Scott had backed him
to the hilt on actions he had taken, and
that Scott’s administrative staff had af-
forded an advantageous relationship in
that Negro parents had the assurance
that actions taken at Clark would be
reviewed by members of their own race
HEADS ADULT GROUP
George L. Arms, director of Educa
tional Television Station KETC on the
Washington University campus, has
been chairman of the Clark School ,
Service Organization since September
1956. In his first address to parents and
teachers last year, Arms said: “We are
accepting this as an integrated school,
and we are going to stop talking about
it.” He said the primary interest would
be the children. i
Arms and his wife, who heads the
West End Community Conference, have
two daughters nine and 10 years old at- ]
tending Clark School. Arms said the
school has a “crackerjack faculty with i
no soft spots, and high morale among
teachers.” He said an important point i
was that Sibley, the principal, had the 1
full and enthusiastic cooperation of the
school’s caretaking staff, which keeps c
the building meticulously clean and
promptly repairs any damage.
There is considerable doubt in the
minds of Arms and like-minded persons s
in the neighborhood concerning the ulh- 1
mate fate of Clark school. Arms ex- ‘
pressed hope that a stabilized and ink" ■
grated situation could be achieved, bo®
in the school and in the district it serves- >
He pointed out that construction of sev
eral new primary units, to be read,
next fall, might draw off several hi®
dred Negro children and bring the Clar"
enrollment closer to an even balance- „
# * 4 ,
South, the commission includes three
Democrats, two Republicans and one in
dependent. It includes one Negro and
one Catholic priest. Appointees were
drawn from the fields of law, education
and government.
MEMBERS LISTED
Besides Reed, members are:
John A. Hannah, 55, president of
Michigan State University since 1941,
named vice-chairman of the commis
sion. A native of Michigan and a Re
publican, he served as Assistant Secre
tary of Defense for manpower and per
sonnel in 1953-54.
John S. Battle, 67, governor of Vir
ginia from 1950-54. Although opposed
to racial integration, Battle remained
with the national Democratic party in
1952 and 1956 when some other Virginia
Democrats left it. He helped work out
a civil rights platform compromise at
the 1956 Democratic national conven
tion that prevented a southern walkout.
The Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, 40,
president of the University of Notre
Dame for the last five years and a mem
ber of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1945.
A political independent, Father Hes
burgh is a native of Syracuse, N.Y.
TEXAN NAMED
Robert G. Storey, 63, dean of Southern
Methodist University’s law school for
10 years and president of the American
Bar Association in 1952-53. A Democrat,
he is a native of Texas.
J. Ernest Wilkins, 63, Assistant Sec
retary of Labor for international labor
WILLIAM P. ROGERS
Chief U.S. Legal Officer
affairs and the highest placed Negro in
the executive branch of the government.
A Republican and native Missourian, he
was practicing law in Chicago when he
was named to the sub-cabinet position
in 1954.
Commission Chairman Reed, 72, re
tired from the Supreme Court last Feb
ruary after 19 years on the bench. Reed
was a member of the unanimous court
which in 1954 held that enforced school
segregation is unconstitutional.
NEW ATTORNEY GENERAL
The resignation of Atty. Gen. Herbert
Brownell Jr. promptly elevated Deputy
Atty. Gen. William P. Rogers into the
Justice Department’s No. 1 spot. Both
men had held their respective legal posts
since the beginning of the first Eisen
hower Administration in 1953. Brown
ell’s resignation is the third from the
cabinet in the President’s second term.
Brownell said he had planned to re
sign earlier but “the Little Rock matter
intervened, requiring urgent legal ac
tion in the federal courts” so he re
mained on. With the government’s case
now “clearly defined,” Brownell said it
was an “apppropriate time” for him to
fulfill his desire to resume private law
practice.
Rogers, a native New Yorker like his
predecessor, is probably Vice President
Nixon’s closest advisor. When President
Eisenhower suffered a heart attack two
years ago, it was in Rogers’ home that
Nixon secluded himself.
Although the newly designated attor
ney general is more prone to express his
views privately than publicly, he is said
to be a strong supporter of the Supreme
Court’s school desegregation decision.
He worked intimately with Brownell on
the Little Rock and other desegregation
cases.
In a commencement speech here last
July, he said the Supreme Court’s school
desegregation decision reaffirmed the
principle that discrimination based on
race or color is “foreign to our system of
The White House was picketed N« v -
by a handful of supporters of
Kasper. The pickets were outnumb er *“
by police and federal agents who *■
them under surveillance.
A larger turnout was expected
Floyd Fleming of the Seaboard
Citizens Council who said many m
organization were unable to get off
work. “We were expecting a couple
carloads from Clinton, Tenn., but so®
thing must have held them up,” he 531
h®
Industry is using “race-hate as a 33
, , T7 Car#
ion-busting weapon,” James B. C 3 *^
president of the International
Electrical Workers (IUE) and an A*
CIO vice president, charged here-
His accusations were made ®
speech read for him by an aide a '
41st annual Howard University S 4 ® ^
of Religion convocation. Carey w
Europe at that time. ,
Carey’s charges came along
new study by Benjamin D. Segal, dn^jj
tor of the Trade Union Program ° n
Liberties and Rights. Segal’s study^ $
eludes that “unionism is on the ra ^
the South today,” that employ erS j ia te
taking the lead and exploiting race
in anti-union appeals.
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