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PAGE 16—JANUARY 1958—SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS Bus Segregation, Gradual Plan Raised in Maryland BALTIMORE, Md. he issue of school bus segre gation is to be carried to the Maryland Board of Education in an appeal from a Charles County school policy that permits a Ne gro second-grader to attend a white school but bars him from the white school bus. (See “Legal Action.”) Lawyers for the National As sociation for the Advancement of Colored People are also challeng ing the gradual desegregation program in St. Mary’s County in a case that is expected to be heard by the state board along with the bus issue. Also this month, the U. S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the NAACP’s arguments against de segregation policies in Harford County, where school officials ob tained lower-court approval of plans to screen Negro transfers to white high schools during the transition period. (See “Legal Action.”) Preliminary school enrollment figures in Baltimore indicate that the ele mentary school population is nearly 50 per cent colored and that Negroes will be in the majority by next fall. En rollment figures for secondary schools and the system as a whole are not as yet available. (See “Under Survey.”) WOULD CLOSE SCHOOL An administrative school staff com mittee in Montgomery County has rec ommended to the county school board that the Negro junior high at the county seat be closed at the end of the current school year. The move would combine the Negro junior and senior high school programs at the existing all-Negro Carver High School and force at least 167 Negro students to enroll at integrated secondary schools. Montgomery County, which borders on Washington, presently has 1,245 Ne groes enrolled at 48 mixed schools in its third year of desegregation. The hearing scheduled for Jan. 16 before the Fourth Circuit Court in the case which originated as Stephen Moore Jr. v. Board of Education of Harford County is an appeal from a decision during the summer by Chief District Judge Roszel C. Thomsen. Judge Thomsen approved a gradual desegregation program in Harford County that called for completion of elementary school integration in 1958 and secondary schools thereafter. An unusual feature of the program was a provision that Negroes would be permitted to transfer to white high schools in advance of the desegregation timetable, if approval were obtained from a special screening committee. NAACP lawyers argued that the screening, applied to Negroes only, im posed a “clearly unconstitutional bur den” and said that Harford County, with only a 10 per cent Negro enroll ment, should desegregate all grades immediately. Notice of their appeal was filed last July 26. ALSO A CHALLENGE The St. Mary’s County hearing be fore the State Board of Education, expected to take place in the latter half of January, is also an NAACP challenge of gradual desegregation plans. St. Mary’s desegregated its ele mentary schools last fall, but has no mixed classes because none of the four Negro children whose admission to white schools had been approved actually entered white classes. Secondary grades were not desegre gated last fall, and when Negro sec ondary students applied to enter white schools, they were turned down. Two of those refused, Thomas Conrad Groves, age 13, and Joan Elaine Groves, age 14, are exhausting their administrative remedies by taking an appeal to the state board. Their lawyers have asked the board to consider: “1) Whether compelling the appel lants in this appeal to travel greater distances, solely because of their race, while denying them admission to the school nearest their homes, is unrea sonable discrimination against Negro children of school age. “2) Whether compelling the Negro children in this appeal to travel greater distances to school than the nearest school where their applications were made is not a violation of Maryland gujtl federal law> “3) Whether under the facts and cir cumstances of this case, the appellants should be admitted to the school nearest their home.” BUS CASE RAISED The Charles County case, expected to be heard by the state board along with the St. Mary’s issue, involves public school bus transportation, which has not previously been a subject of legal or administrative question in Maryland. In most of the counties that have mixed classes, school buses also have been desegregated. This has not been the case in Charles County, where nearly half (46.1 per cent) of the school popu lation is Negro and where desegrega tion so far is represented by the pres ence of four Negroes in one otherwise white elementary school at Indian Head. The appellant is a second-grader, Gilbert Hart Jr., who is represented by Tucker R. Dearing, a Baltimore Negro who frequently participates in Mary land school cases which are of concern to the NAACP. The young Hart boy could ride a Negro bus to the Indian Head school but seeks to ride in the bus that takes his white classmates. In explaining the case, Dearing said that it was difficult enough for children to make the adjustment to integrated schooling without being stigmatized at the outset by having to ride in a sep arate bus. The boy is now brought 1% miles to school by his parents. TEXT OF LETTER In his letter to the state board asking for a hearing, Dearing wrote: “Mr. Barnhart’s letter [C. Paul Barnhart, county superintendent of schools] of Oct. 21, 1957, while stating that ‘public bus transportation is available for Gil bert Hart Jr.’ just as resolutely and unequivocally states that the trans portation is not integrated but segre gated. This issue is the one basic thing of my appeal of Aug. 2, 1957, which is now pending before the state board. “Since, therefore, our negotiations on the county level have failed to bring about a satisfactory adjustment of the matter, please have the appeal in the above styled case \Hart v. Barnhart1 set for a hearing before the State Board of Education at the earliest possible time.” The hearing for the St. Mary’s and Charles County cases had been set for Jan. 16, but the NAACP lawyers sought postponement when their Harford County case was set for the same day before the Fourth Circuit Court. The long process of obtaining a racial breakdown of Baltimore’s school popu lation was continuing in December, with school statisticians reaching the point at which they could strike a pre liminary total for elementary schools. The tentative figures: 51,968 white children, 50,975 Negro children. The Negro elementary total repre sents a rise from 47.033 in October 1956, or a gain of 3,942 in a year’s time. In the same period the number of white elementary pupils dropped by 1,784. The change is in fine with a trend that is expected to see Negro elementary pupils outnumber white ones by next fall. The population of Baltimore as a whole, according to the most recent estimate of the Health Department’s vital statisticians, has increased by 6,000 persons in the past year, rising from 974,000 to 980,000. If the educated guess is correct, all of the increase has been among Negro residents, who now represent 29 per cent of the city popu lation. The white population, which previously had been declining, is be lieved to have remained constant at 694,000 between November 1956 and November 1957. SUBURBS GAIN While the city’s white population has only been holding its own, the white population has been surging upwards in suburbanized Baltimore County, imme diately to the north. The shift is re flected in the school population, which showed an increase of 4,904 white pupils this past fall over the previous fall, while the number of Negro pupils rose by only 23 children. Negroes now rep resent 5.6 per cent of the 72,779 enroll ment, in contrast to 6 per cent in Sep tember 1956. Baltimore County ranks second among Maryland counties in the num ber of Negroes attending mixed classes, with 839 in 49 integrated schools, or 20.5 per cent of the Negro enrollment. In the previous school year less than 10 per cent of the Negro children were integrated. Nine schools remain all- Negro, and 37 are all-white. Since desegregation in the county has been on an optional basis—that is, Ne groes may remain in all-colored schools or enter designated white schools — there may be both segregation and in tegration in the same small community. Thus, in the town of Sparks there are 10 Negroes in the one-teacher Negro elementary school. At the same time, 57 Negro children attend the formerly all-white Sparks elementary school, along with 291 white pupils. MOST EXTENSIVE The 57 Negroes in a total school en rollment of 348 at Sparks represent the most extensive integration (16.4 per cent) among Baltimore County schools. The next highest is 38 Negroes in an enrollment of 256 (14.8 per cent) at the Halethorpe elementary school, and after that comes the 82 Negroes in a student body of 1,023 (8.0 per cent) at the Hereford Junior-Senior High School. Counting the three schools mentioned above, only seven of the 49 integrated schools in Baltimore County have more than 5 per cent Negro enrollment. At 25 of the schools the Negro children are less than 2 per cent of the enroll ment, and of these 25, the Negro enroll ment is less than 1 per cent in 14 instances. Gov. Frank G. Clement of Tennessee in an address to the annual meeting of the Baltimore Bar Association indicated that he personally favored segregation, “if it can be carried out with Christian principles and under the law of the land,” but he said that the major issue was the preservation of law and order and that “law and order in Tennessee will be upheld by Tennesseans.” Gov. Theodore R. McKeldin in an address in Montreal before the Ca nadian Council of Christians and Jews put the school trouble in Little Rock into a larger context by saying “the country still believes that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are in alienable rights, belonging to every man, regardless of the color of his skin. The fight is over the definition of these rights as regards a specific issue, namely, the practice of segregation in the schools.” Speaking at the “kick-off” luncheon of Baltimore’s fair-employment pro gram, John A. Roosevelt said, “The un fortunate episodes of the ‘Little Rocks’ did more damage to our prestige and way of life than we could build up with billions in grants-in-aid.” The son of the late President who now serves on the federal committee for fair em ployment in government contract work told his audience, “It is not only morally right, but it is good business to elim inate all the vestiges of discrimination.” Resistance to school desegregation was described from another platform in Baltimore as action that “may yet bring us once again to the edge of disaster.” The speaker was Dr. Robert K. Carr, Joel Parker professor of law and political science at Dartmouth Col lege, who said: “At the moment we cannot be certain that Faubusism may not yet do greater damage to Ameri can democracy at home and through out the world than ever did McCar- thyism.” Dr. Carr’s audience was 1,500 students at Morgan State College, a public Negro institution, observing Bill of Rights Day. Montgomery County had a preview of the next step in desegregation, now in its third school year with 1,245 Ne groes enrolled at 48 mixed schools. The school board’s committee on de segregation, composed of county edu cators, recommended in December that Lincoln Junior High at the county seat of Rockville be closed and that Carver Senior High become a junior-senior high school. The move would force at least 167 Negroes to transfer to nine and possibly 12 predominantly white secondary schools and close out the academic courses at Carver, now nearly 90 per cent vocational. Transfers out of the Lincoln and Carver schools have been encouraged hitherto but now have become manda tory, the professional staff committee believes, because the Lincoln school cannot remain open without extensive repairs. A complicating factor, raised by principals involved in the transfers, is the absence of shop and vocational programs in some of the schools to which Negroes would be sent. Two school board members ques tioned the advisability of closing Lin coln until there were more accommo dations elsewhere and were told that the school could not be used even one more year without costly improve ments. Another board member asked that Carver be made an integrated junior high, with all the Negro senior high students transferred to white and mixed schools, and was told that lack of space and program precluded this move. The school board accepted the committee’s recommendations as a progress report. The Council of Churches and Chris tian Education of Maryland and Dela ware has elected as its president the Rev. Arthur Jerome Payne of the Enon Baptist Church in Balitmore. Payne, elected by an assembly of dele gates representing 23 Protestant de nominations, is the first Negro to hold the high office. Eighteen ministers and staff members of 14 churches served by the Bethesda Council of Churches, in Montgomery County, have issued a “statement on race relations.” The statement said that the signers would “stand together . . . in support of the following simple con victions and purposes: “1) We believe the principle of en forced racial segregation is a contradic tion of our Christian faith. “2) We commit ourselves to uphold the enforcement of law and order in the community. “3) We pledge ourselves to resist any organization which incites race prejudice and undermines respect for laws.” The Baltimore Afro-American has reported no apparent alarming increase of pregnant, unwed girls in Baltimore schools. The Afro said that it had taken note of the reports of sharp increases in the number of girls under 16 being dismissed because of pregnancy in such places as New York and had queried school officials locally. The assistant superintendent in charge of secondary education was quoted as saying, far as I know there has been no in. crease in the Baltimore public schools.” Maryland’s most prominent segrega tionist, George Washington Williams, said just before Christmas that he might find it necessary to try again f or the Democratic senatorial nomination, in the absence of segregation sympa thizers among the current contenders for the seat now held by Sen. J. Glenn Beall, a Republican. “I may feel obligated to try again to fill the breach,” the Baltimore attorney said, “if some other person of like mind does not care to assume the onerous burden. We should not consider the present condition to be endemic.” Pointing to a crisis in the “dual sys tem” of American government, Wil liams said that the system includes the right to control school systems as well as local affairs, “without molestation by the federal government.” In the sena torial primary race of 1956 Williams re ceived 12,061 votes, while the two lead- i ing Democratic contenders drew 140,596 and 134,285. If Williams decides to run again, he will be opposed by George P. Mahoney, who came in second last time with 134,285 votes, and also by at least two other candidates, Dr. Clarence D. Long, economics professor at Johns Hookins University, and Mrs. Nellie Marie Marshall, a Baltimore orphans court judge. Other likely contenders include James Bruce, a former ambassador to Argentina; State Sen. John Grason Turnbull, and O. C. Miller, a Hyatts- ville newspaperman. i # # # Of the Top 10 News Stories in the South in 1957 ... Four Concerned School Segregation-Desegregation Nowhere save in SOUTHERN SCHOOL News could the reader get the full dispassionately written story of these events, set in the perspective of edu cational problems—complete, de tailed, summed-up in one place. (,!^? rd D n9 L t0 a ball °t b V news editors and United Press staff correspondents, they were • 1 rei t, R lL k r- and ,“ Seof L U, ?; tro °P s: < 3 ) trial of John Kasper; (6) Nashville school mg, (8) North Carolina school integration program. Always Get the Full Story in Southern School News Box 6156, Acklen Station, Nashville, Tenn. Special Rates to School Boards and Lay Groups If 5 or More Subscriptions Are Ordered Please send me. Name Address City —subscriptions at $ 1.50 each Zone State [ ease make checks payable to Southern Education Reporting Service} St lr-M ff M A- ■ • JS •*'"tr M — -v is a a. h A fir &■