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PAGE 8—MARCH I960—SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS School Pattern Varies for Military Dependents, Survey Shows (Continued From Page 1) schools. In most instances the local sys tems receive government funds, “impact aid,” because of this additional enroll ment. Montgomery, for instance, received almost a half-million dollars in federal assistance (out of a total school budget of 5.9 million dollars) last year because of Maxwell and Gunter Air Force bases in the city. The Air University, doctrinal center of the Air Force, is located at Maxwell. Huntsville received a similar amount, but with a school budget only about half as large as Montgomery’s. Similar aid is provided five school systems in the Tri- Cities area of north Alabama (Florence- Sheffield-Tuscumbia) because of some 2,000 school children of TVA personnel. Several years ago the Montgomery city-county school system operated a school serving Maxwell AFB ex clusively. This was abandoned after the Defense Department proclaimed a po licy of non-segregation. Now military dependents attend schools in the Mont gomery city-county system, which is segregated. A survey by the Alabama Council on Human Relations maintains that school segregation is “purposefully maintained” in some areas of the state by a “gentle man’s agreement” between military au thorities and local school officials. The council report mentioned specifically Montgomery and Selma. Federal aid looms as an important is sue in the government’s announced plans to seek integration of Madison Pike School at Huntsville. The school was built on Redstone Arsenal land deeded to the city. The Justice Depart ment has said that this fact, plus the government’s contribution to the con struction of the school, the heavy Red stone enrollment in it and the annual aid received by the city, are compelling arguments for integrating the school. Huntsville school officials replied, when the controversy exploded late last year (Southern School News, Decem ber 1959), that the land had been deeded the city with “no strings attached,” that the city school board had paid more than half the construction costs of Madi son Pike and pays most of the operating costs. Huntsville School Supt. Raymond L. Christian pointed out not more than half of the school’s enrollment is made up of Redstone dependents. (The Ala bama Council puts the ratio higher— 865 of Madison Pike’s 1,064 students are children of “federally related parents,” the survey said.) Children of Negro servicemen at Red stone attend all-Negro schools in Hunts ville or in the Madison County system. The Justice Department has an nounced it will press integration plans for Madison Pike this year. Arkansas {~\nly at Little Rock Air Force Base has the factor of children of military personnel entered the desegregation sit uation in Arkansas. The Strategic Air Command facility is completely inte grated and is located at Jacksonville, 15 miles north of Little Rock and within the Pulaski County (Rural) School Dis trict. A Capehart housing development of 1,565 units on the base is integrated. To serve the children of those families, the county school district built two new schools with money furnished by the federal government. One is the County Training School (for Negroes) at McAlmont, seven miles from the air base. The other is the Little Rock Air Force Base Elementary School, on land contiguous to the base. When the air base school opened for the first time in September 1958, three Negro children of elementary school age lived in base housing. One Negro parent, Sgt. James R. Dallas, applied to have his six-year-old daughter admit ted to the base school. But the county school district follows a policy of seg regation and refused. The sergeant sent his complaint all the way to the White House. Stephen S. Jackson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for manpower, came to Little Rock and spent three days talking with district officials, to no avail. A year later, in September 1959, Jack- son and other Defense Department peo ple returned with plans to lease or buy the school from the county district or, if the district refused, to have the school and land condemned and annexed to the base so the Air Force could operate the school. The county district did not want to give up the school because the pupils attending it count toward the'money the district receives from the govern ment under the impact law. So the county district leased the school to the Air Force, then the Air Force hired the county district to operate it. Only children from the air base at tend the school and it has 828 white stu dents and 10 Negroes. The faculty and staff are the same as they were last year. Delaware ^he School at Dover Air Force Base, the one large military installation in Delaware, is completely integrated, in contrast to limited desegregation in adjacent school districts. The enrollment at the base school is 770 in grades one through eight, in cluding 41 Negroes. Ground was broken in February for a new school, which will house 12 grades and approximately 1,200 pupils. The base school falls geographically within the Caesar Rodney Special School District, which opened its first grade to Negro pupils in September under a U.S. District Court order. When the base school was proposed, the Caesar Rodney board of education was offered two proposals by federal authorities. The first plan would have provided for the school facilities to be constructed off the air base, with fed eral funds providing 95 per cent of the construction cost. Under this plan, ac cording to federal policy, the school would have conformed to local civilian regulations—in this case, segregation. The alternate plan, adopted by Cae sar Rodney, provided for the school buildings to be erected on the base proper and owned by the federal gov ernment. While Caesar Rodney pro vides administration and secures teach ers, the full cost is borne by the U.S. Office of Health, Education and Wel fare. Only students who live in about 1,000 unsegregated Capehart housing units on the base are eligible to attend the base school. Caesar Rodney has but three Negro pupils in the first grade. An additional 207 Negro pupils in the Caesar Rodney district attend Star Hill, a Negro unit within the district. Dover is the other large school dis trict near the base and has two Negro pupils in the first grade. It desegregated its high school to academic pupils in 1954 and has seven Negroes at this level. An additional 408 Negro pupils in the Dover district attend Booker T. Wash ington school in Dover, which has an all-Negro enrollment. When the base school opened in September 1958, there were six Negro pupils enrolled with 135 whites. En rollment has since climbed to 729 whites and 41 Negroes. Florida 'J'he federal government operates inte grated schools for children of mili tary personnel on three bases in Florida. The on-base schools at Eglin Field near Panama City, MacDill Field at Tampa and Patrick Air Force Base on Cape Canaveral have been open three years. Military children from Homestead Air Force Base attend one of two integrated public schools in the state, operated by Dade County. The county desegregated the schools during the current school year. The Air Force and Navy operate about a dozen other major installations in the state. The children of personnel at these bases attend the segregated public schools nearby. Georgia ‘E't. Benning—a sprawling Army in fantry installation on the southern city limits of Columbus—has Georgia’s Schools for Military Will Get CRC Study GATLINBURG, Term. ntegrated schools for children of military personnel in the South will be one of the topics studied at the Civil Rights Commission’s second con ference on school desegregation at Gat- linburg this month. A commission spokesman said in Washington that the commission also will seek information on “grade-by- grade” desegregation, developments in areas that integrated within the past year, and how pupil placement plans are executed. School officials of southern and bor der states will be invited to participate in the conference March 21 and 22. The meeting will be a follow-up of a simi lar one the commission held in Nash ville, Tenn., last March. # # # only integrated school system. The school desegregated six and a half years ago, after more than 30 years of separate schools for whites and Negroes. Some 3,000 students attend kindergar ten through the eighth grade at the military post. All the teachers are white. After completing the eighth grade, pupils are transported to segregated schools in nearby Columbus. Although there is no official record of the proportion of Negroes and whites in the Ft. Benning schools, sound esti mates put the percentage of Negroes quite low. This can be attributed to two factors: (1) Less than 20 per cent of Army per sonnel are Negro, and (2) few Negro parents live on-post at Ft. Benning. Scarce housing at Ft. Benning is allocated on a basis of rank and time- in-grade, putting Negroes at a disadvan tage. Students who five off the military re servation attend segregated schools in the Muscogee County School District, which includes Columbus. The school district receives federal funds to cover both operational and building costs of these students. Last April, Ft. Benning started a movement to allow construction of a high school at the installation. It was stopped by officials of the Muscogee School District. The Ft. Benning commander, Maj. Gen. Paul L. Freeman Jr., requested the Muscogee School District to recommend construction of a high school on the post to the U. S. Dept, of Health, Education, and Welfare. Muscogee school officials advised the federal agency that it could still handle federally connected students in this area —cutting out any chance at this time for construction of the Ft. Benning high school. U. S. education authorities must be notified that local schools cannot handle federally connected pupils before they will begin planning toward such a school. There has been talk of a college—or a college branch—for Ft. Benning be cause of the segregation situation in Georgia. Although there has been no official confirmation of the proposal, it is generally known. Ft. McPherson in Atlanta, Ft. Gordon near Augusta and Camp Stewart near Hinesville, all Army installations, have no schools on the posts and the children of military personnel attend segregated public schools in the towns. Robins Air Force Base near Macon also has no on-post schools. The 1,500 children of military personnel are en rolled in public schools at Warner Robins. A small number of the children, whose parents live in Macon and com mute to the base, attend segregated classes in Macon. Kentucky J^ort Knox, the largest Army installa tion in Kentucky, has a military strength of approximately 35,000 and sprawls over the three counties of Bullitt, Hardin, and Meade, with its center about 40 miles from Louisville. Some 9,100 soldiers and dependents live “off-base” in these counties and Louis ville (Jefferson County). The public school systems in all four counties and in the independent dis tricts of Louisville and Elizabethtown (nearest town to Fort Knox) began de segregation programs in 1956. The “permissive” aspects of these programs still account for several small all-white or all-Negro elementary schools. De segregation is general in the high schools and most of the elementary schools. At Fort Knox, as officials there put it, “everything is integrated.” The seven integrated schools on the base now have an enrollment of 4,391. The Army no longer keeps records by race, so no one knows how many Ne gro dependents and soldiers may be liv ing off-base. But some are among the relatively small number of Negroes fisted in recent public school records— 14 Negroes and 471 whites at Meade County High School, for instance, 46 Negroes and 2,851 whites in the elem entary and high schools of Bullitt County, 68 Negroes and 2,208 whites in the elementary and high schools of Hardin County, 46 Negroes and 426 whites in Elizabethtown High School, and others among the thousands of Ne groes and whites in the desegregated schools of Louisville and Jefferson County. Fort Knox officials admitted “early difficulties” in integration, but said those days were “long gone.” Louisiana ^hildren of military men assigned to Louisiana bases attend schools out side of the base boundaries and, as other children in the state, are all in segregated schools. Officials of the school systems most affected by the location of military sta tions within their parishes (counties) said there has never been a question raised as to the separate facilities. In 1957-58, according to the latest statewide compilation of figures from the 67 segregated school systems of Louisiana, the federal government con tributed $1,178,000 for capital outlay and $830,000 for operation costs in nine parishes where military bases have an impact on school population. Vernon Parish, location of the now deactivated Ft. Polk, received $748,025 of the capital outlay funds and with it contributed to the building of one Ne gro elementary school and one white elementary school. Bossier Parish, location of Barksdale Air Force Base, has received 1.5 million dollars since federal aid under the mili tary impact program began. Its schools are segregated and military personnel children are bussed to schools around the parish. Of the total of 12,700 chil dren in the Bossier system, some 3,000 are children of military men or civilian employes of the base. Rapides Parish, site of England Air Force Base, has completed a white elementary school built largely with federal funds. Located near the base, it has no Negro students. Another major military installation in Louisiana is located in Calcasieu Parish (Lake Charles). Among 26,429 students in the school system, 2,172 are service- connected at Chennault Air Force Base. Federal funds were used to build a white high school. New Orleans is the headquarters of the Eighth Naval District but the chil dren of service personnel are scattered thinly throughout the segregated school system. Maryland JYJaryland has eight military bases and nearly all have been factors in school desegregation. The first court petition against school segregation in any Maryland county originated in Cecil County, after seven children of Negro personnel at Bain- bridge Naval Training Center were de nied admission in 1954 to a county- operated school on the base. This case became moot when county officials completed a new county-owned Bain- bridge Elementary School outside the base and opened it in 1955 to both white and Negro children. Nearby Harford County has both the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood and Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Ne gro personnel at these bases have par ticipated in several suits against the county. Following the first petition, the county began desegregation by open ing the lower grades of two schools near the Edgewood installation to Ne groes. Asked at a subsequent court hear ing why the county had begun this way. County School Supt. Charles W. Willis replied: “The people were used to living together and working together in the Army. The feeling was that we could start in these areas easier than any place else.” The Defense Department’s order in 1955 to end segregated schooling on military bases had an immediate effect on three counties. One of them, Prince George’s (near Washington, D.C.), re sponded by admitting Negroes to the federally owned, county-operated base school at Andrews Field. The other two counties—Anne Arundel and St. Mary’s—gave up school quarters on military property rather than integrate because their desegregation programs had not yet been established. The cutback in classrooms serving Ft. Meade in Anne Arundel County brought a protest from white parents at the base, who urged integration to regain classroom space in military buildings. Maj. Mario E. Smith, then president of the Meade Heights P-TA, wrote to county officials on behalf of his organization. Shortly after the ma jor’s letter, written in November 1955, the county school system resumed op erations at the base on an integrated basis in advance of desegregation else where in the county. St. Mary’s County, on the other hand, permanently closed out the two class rooms it had operated at Patuxent Naval Air Station to house the over flow from a nearby Negro school. This caused severe overcrowding at the Ne gro school, which stimulated Negro parents and the NAACP to seek court action on county-wide desegregation. The one instance of integration in St. Mary’s occurred in 1958-59 at Great Mills High School, which serves the Patuxent base. The other two military bases in Maryland are the Army’s biological warfare center near Frederick and a naval powder factory and research center at Indianhead in Charles County. The only integration in the latter county is found at the Indianhead Ele mentary School. The presence of a large body of scientific personnel at Ft. Detrick is believed to have provided impetus for the desegregation of schools in Fred erick. All Maryland schools serving chil dren of military personnel are now in tegrated in principle and all but those outside the Patuxent air installation in St. Mary’s County are integrated in fact. Only two schools are actually federal property—those at Andrews Field and Ft. Meade. Mississippi ^hildren of military personnel sta tioned in Mississippi attend segre gated public schools near the armed forces stations. White children attend white schools and Negro children attend Negro schools in their respective sections. State Supt. of Education J. M. Tubb said he feels that the matter is being handled agreeably to all concerned. In certain impacted areas of Missis sippi that have training bases—Biloxi, Columbus and Greenville—federal funds are granted the state as tuition for chil dren of military personnel. Missouri J^arge military bases in Missouri in clude Ft. Leonard Wood, an Army installation in the south central part of the state; Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base south of Kansas City; and White- man Air Force Base near Sedalia, in west central Missouri. In St. Louis, Kansas City and elsewhere in the state the Armed Services have installations and detachments of varying size. A spokesman for Ft. Leonard Wood, which has some 30,000 military person nel and 1,800 civilians, said children of personnel attached to the base were mostly enrolled in the schools of nearby Waynesville. The Waynesville system operates two elementary schools on the military reservation, and a high school is being built. The two schools have both white and Negro children. The Waynesville schools have been integ rated for several years, the spokesman said. Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base also has no government-operated schools for children of military personnel but relies on off-base civilian school systems at Kansas City, Independence, Grandview. Belton and other communities. There are about 5,000 children, white and Ne gro. Schools of the Kansas City area were among the first to desegregate after the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1954. At Whiteman Air Force Base near Sedalia, in west central Missouri, there are 488 families living on the base, and a number living off base at Sedalia, Knob Noster and Warrensburg. Elem entary schools of Knob Noster and Warrensburg were desegregated in 1955. Sedalia integrated its high school in 1954 but has been slower to integrate elementary schools. The Knob Noster school district op erates an elementary school on the base, kindergarten through sixth grade, and accommodates other children of the base in town. Children of both races attend the same school. Some children of Air Force personnel attend an integrated parochial school in Sedalia. St. Louis has a sizable military pop ulation working at various command headquarters, record centers, map cen ters and the like. This is true to a lesser degree for Kansas City. Personnel live in various communities and their children attend school in in tegrated school districts. In many cases, however, Negro children of Armed Forces personnel on duty in the major cities may attend all-Negro or predom inantly Negro schools because of resi dential segregation. North Carolina j^ORTH Carolina has desegregation in two school systems primarily be cause of their nearness to military bases. They are in Craven County, site of Cherry Point Marine Base, and Wayne County, site of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Desegregation began last March in Wayne County (county seat: Golds boro), an eastern North Carolina coun ty where the population is about 40 per cent Negro. (See POST SCHOOLS, Page 9)