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SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS—MARCH I960—PAGE 9
DELAWARE
Maintaining Segregation Not Purpose
Of Expansions, State Board Declares
Post Schools
(Continued From Page 8)
The school population is estimated at
7,200 white and 4,800 Negro.
Meadow Lane Elementary School,
with an estimated but varying enroll
ment of 600, has been specifically de
signated by the Wayne County school
board as the school to which only chil
dren of men stationed at Seymour
Johnson will go. The school was built
about two years ago with federal help.
A total of three Negro children at
tended the school at various times last
spring after the school board set it
aside for children of Air Force men.
This year, although school officials de
cline to give specific figures, the Negro
enrollment is estimated at three.
In Craven County (county seat: New
Bern), two schools—both elementary—
are desegregated.
The coastal county has 4,992 white
students, and 2,466 Negro students.
Both desegregated schools—to which
nine Negro students go—are in the
community of Havelock, near the
Cherry Point Marine (air) Base. Each
school has an enrollment of about 800
students.
These two eastern North Carolina
counties are the only places east of
Durham with desegregation. There has
been no violence in either county, and
no effort to desegregate other schools in
the same systems.
North Carolina also has limited de
segregation in Durham, Greensboro,
High Point, Winston-Salem and Char
lotte.
Oklahoma
/Xnly one military reservation in Ok-
'-'lahoma has an on-base school ac
credited by the State Department of Ed
ucation.
Post School at Ft. Sill, Army artil
lery training center near Lawton, is ad
ministered by the Lawton Board of Ed
ucation as an elementary school for
children of military personnel. Junior
and senior high students attend school
in Lawton.
State department records indicate the
base school has an enrollment of about
625 pupils but the breakdown of Ne
groes and white is not available.
Oklahoma also has four Air Force
bases and a Navy ammunition depot,
which has only a maintenance crew as
signed to it. All are located near com
munities with at least some degree of
desegregation. Thus, children of Negro
military personnel have their choice of
attending integrated schools or all-
Negro schools.
The Air Force bases are Altus, Clin-
ton-Sherman (near Bums Flat), Tinker
(at Midwest City), and Vance (near
Enid). The Navy ammunition depot is
near McAlester.
Altus and Enid operate Negro high
schools but Negro students are also ad
mitted to predominantly white schools.
Schools in the area of the Clinton-
Sherman base also are desegregated.
Midwest City has no Negro residents.
Neyro airmen living on the Tinker base
send their children to schools in Okla
homa City.
Sou'h Carolina
All but about 200 of an estimated
25,000 to 30,000 “federal” children in
South Carolina attend segregated state
schools.
The sole exception is an integrated on-
post school at Parris Island Marine
Base. Attendance at that elementary
school ranges between 170 and 200.
Elsewhere in the state, children of
service personnel, civilian workers, and
other federal employes attend school
under the prevailing pattern of segre
gated public education.
In some instances, such as at Shaw
Air Force Base near Sumter, Ft. Jack-
son near Columbia, and the Charleston
Naval Base, public school facilities have
been built or acquired in immediate
proximity to defense installations. In
other instances, “federal” children are
scattered among existing schools in a
pattern which reflects their residential
distribution.
Federal funds are provided to help
defray costs of operating schools attend
ed by children whose presence in the
school districts is due to federal con
nections, whether by civilian occupation
or military assignment. In School Dis
trict 2 of Richland County, adjacent to
the sizeable Army training center at Ft.
Jackson, federal aid for operations runs
to approximately $150 per child per
year for those whose parents live on
and work on the post. The amount is
about half that for those in the “live
off. work on” group.
Altogether, 30 of South Carolina’s 108
school districts provide schooling for
children of federally connected parents.
The principal installations are:
• The Savannah River Plant of the
Atomic Energy Commission, chiefly af
fecting Aiken, Barnwell, and Allendale
counties, although employes are widely
distributed in other counties in the mid
state and low-state.
• Parris Island Marine Base, Marine
Auxiliary Air Field, Naval Hospital, and
National Cemetery, all in Beaufort
County.
• Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, in
Horry County.
• Ft. Jackson, in Richland County.
• Shaw Air Force Base, in Sumter
County.
• Donaldson Air Force Base, in
Greenville County.
Tennessee
Qne of Tennessee’s three major mili
tary installations provides integrat
ed on-post schools. The other two de
pend entirely on public schools, all but
one of which are segregated.
Ft. Campbell, located astride the
Tennessee-Kentucky line near Clarks
ville in Middle Tennessee, operates
three schools for 2,380 children in
grades one through nine whose parents
live on post. Under federal control,
classes there are conducted without ref
erence to race.
Children in grades 10 through 12 who
live within the fort area are transport
ed by bus to two high schools in Clarks
ville—about 150 of them to all-white
Clarksville High School and the remain
der to all-Negro Burt High School. Tu
ition is paid by the government.
Children of Campbell personnel who
live off-post attend public schools in
their residential zones and school boards
are reimbursed by the government an
nually according to a per-capita plan.
An estimated 1,000 children from Ft.
Campbell families are enrolled in seg
regated Montgomery County schools.
(Some are enrolled in adjacent Chris
tian County, Ky., where a desegregation
move is under way.)
About 700 children of personnel sta
tioned or employed at Sewart Air Force
Base near Smyrna, also in Middle Ten
nessee, are enrolled in Rutherford
County schools and some in adjacent
Davidson and other counties. In the ab
sence of schools on the base, the govern
ment pays the public schools about
$137 a year for each pupil who lives on
the base and some $75 annually for each
child of Air Force personnel living off
the reservation, an officer said.
A group of Negro parents stationed
at Sewart were responsible last fall for
court-ordered desegregation of one
Rutherford County school located adja
cent to the air base—Coleman Elemen
tary School. Virtually all of Coleman’s
568 enrollees this year have been chil
dren of Air Force personnel, of whom
14 are Negroes.
Although the plaintiffs included all
Rutherford County schools in their
federal court suit for desegregation,
none except Coleman is attended by
both races so far. The relatively few
Sewart children not enrolled at Cole
man are transported to nearby Mur
freesboro or live in other districts.
In Shelby County (Memphis), where
all public schools are segregated, an es
timated 3,000 children of personnel at
Millington Naval Air Station and sev
eral smaller military installations attend
county public schools. A school official
said most of them are white and are en
rolled in three or four white schools,
although there are “a few” Negroes
from military families in the Negro
schools.
Memphis State University, attended
by Negroes for the first time during the
current term, has operated an exten
sion branch at the naval station on a
nonsegregated basis, but no school fa
cilities are provided by the Navy itself.
Federal funds are paid for schooling of
Millington children on a per-pupil basis
as they are at Sewart and Campbell.
Texas
r J'o A large extent, children of mili
tary personnel in Texas can attend
integrated schools.
School patrons in the military have
led in seeking to end segregation, and
occasionally serve as plaintiffs. This now
is the case in Fort Worth (Flax v. Potts)
and Friendship School, near Lubbock
(Simmons v. Edwards), where parents
involved are Negro non-commissioned
personnel of the Air Force.
There is no doubt that integration of
the Armed Forces has been a factor in
ending segregation at some Texas school
districts, with or without lawsuits. This
likely was a strong influence at Killeen,
near Ft. Hood, and Wichita Falls, where
integration has largely been limited to
children of Sheppard Air Force per
sonnel.
San Antonio, a long-time military
center, integrated fully and early after
the U.S. Supreme Court declared segre
gation unconstitutional. So did Corpus
Christi, site of a large Naval Air Station,
and El Paso, another military center.
Some military establishments are lo-
DOVER, Del.
xpansion of existing Negro
schools doesn’t mean that
the policy is designed to “per
petuate segregation,” the State
Board of Education said in deny
ing a charge by a Negro group.
(See “School Boards and School
men.”)
cated in Texas areas where segregation
remains the rule.
Contrary to one report from Wash
ington, there is no school on Dyess Air
Force Base. Abilene Independent School
District operates an elementary school
for white students near the base’s inte
grated housing area, but this is not on
the base itself. All other children from
families living on Dyess attend other
segregated schools in Abilene.
V irginia
J^ourteen OF Virginia’s 19 desegre
gated schools are located in com
munities that have large numbers of
children who five on military installa
tions or whose parents work for the
federal government. There’s no indica
tion, however, that the presence of so
many federally connected children had
anything to do with desegregation in
the three localities involved.
Arlington County and Alexandria in
northern Virginia and Norfolk on the
east coast are in the middle of two of
the nation’s most vital defense areas.
Scores of military posts are in those
two sections. In addition, the parents of
several thousand northern Virginia
children work in federal facilities in
Washington, just across the Potomac
River.
Almost half of Arlington County’s
23,500 school children come under the
“federal impact” program in which the
federal government allocates money to
localities to help educate children of
government employes. Stratford Junior
High, one of Arlington’s three desegre
gated schools, has a large number of
these youngsters (possibly half the
student body), but the proportion in
the other two desegregated schools is
smaller, according to Supt. Ray E.
Reid.
Some of the children in Arlington
schools come from nearby Ft. Myer,
where there is a federally operated,
integrated elementary school.
Alexandria has hundreds of chil
dren whose parents work at the Penta
gon or who are stationed at Ft. Bel-
voir or other federal installations.
Supt. T. C. Williams said he had no
figures available as to which schools
the children attend, so he did not know
the number in the city’s four desegre
gated schools.
Of Norfolk’s approximately 50,000
school children, about 19,000 are fed
erally connected. None of the 21 Ne
gro children attending formerly all-
white schools is from any of the fed
eral installations, according to Supt.
J. J. Brewbaker. Some of the federal
children come from integrated federal
housing facilities.
Since all three of Norfolk’s formerly
white senior high schools are inte
grated, along with three junior highs
and one elementary, thousands of the
federally connected youths are in
schools attended by both whites and
Negroes. The Norfolk school with per
haps the largest proportion of federal
children is James Madison Elementary,
which is not integrated.
Children from perhaps 40 different
federal installations attend schools in
Norfolk County, according to Supt.
Edwin E. Chittum. About 9,600 of the
county’s 22,000 children are in this
category. The county has no desegre
gated schools. The percentage of fed
eral pupils in the county’s various
schools ranges from about 34 to 44 per
cent.
About 1.100 of the 9 600 are “ships’
children,” meaning that their fathers
are assigned to ships that have Norfolk
as their home port.
The state, through local public school
boards, formerly operated elementary
schools at Quantico, Ft. Belvoir. Ft.
Monroe and Langley Field Air Force
Base. But the state withdrew when
the schools were integrated—the Quan
tico school in 1951 and the other three
in 1954.
West Virginia
HThere are no major military installa-
tions in West Virginia. # # #
A former member of the Dela
ware Supreme Court took issue
with Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of
Virginia, who said in a speech in
Delaware that the U.S. Supreme
Court decision on desegregation
represented judicial legislation.
(See “What They Say.”)
An appeal to the U.S. Court of Ap
peals in Philadelphia on Delaware’s
grade-a-year desegregation plan was
postponed when Louis L. Redding, at
torney for the appellants, became ill.
(See “Legal Action.”)
The National Assn, for the Advance
ment of White People, a Delaware
corporation, lost its charter for failing
to pay $67.50 in state taxes. (See “Le
gal Action.”)
Delaware’s State Board of Educa
tion denied charges by the Delaware
Congress of Parent-Teacher Assns. that
expansion of existing Negro schools
tends to perpetuate segregation.
Mrs. Katherine Prettyman of Mil-
ton, state president, made the charge
on behalf of the executive body of the
association, which is composed ex
clusively of Negro school P-TA’s. Mrs.
Prettyman said that . . we look with
disfavor upon all school building pro
grams that tend to perpetuate segrega
tion.”
The criticism obviously was directed
against Senate Bill 305, introduced last
September by eight Kent and Sussex
County senators to provide construc
tion funds for 35 schools, including 18
Negro schools.
The total construction cost is esti
mated at $10,581,387, with $4,617,152 for
Negro schools. The state would pay the
full cost, without tax assistance from
the local districts.
“We view with alarm pending legis
lation supporting extensive building
programs which tend to herd Negro
children in a given locality,” the as
sociation said.
“We feel that Delaware cannot afford
the luxury of expanding schools to
accommodate children moved from
their residential districts for the pur
pose of maintaining a separate culture.
We urge therefore that careful con
sideration be given to the rights of all
children as Delaware plans for the fu
ture,” the statement concluded.
The resolution, discussed at the Feb
ruary meeting of the state board,
aroused the ire of Ralph Grapperhaus,
a board member from Sussex County.
“Are we doing such a good job of
improving the schools that the Ne
groes don’t want to go to white
schools?” he asked.
“I was going to ask them (the asso
ciation) that, but notice that they
didn’t send a representative to this
meeting,” he added.
FITS PROGRAM
Roy Wentz, a New Castle County
board member, noted that the state
board had not sponsored nor approved
the Senate bill.
“I don’t think we’re perpetuating
segregation—one of our considerations
in approving construction at Negro
schools has been whether a school
could fit into a desegregated program,”
he said.
“In a few years from now the build
ings can be used as desegregated
buildings,” he said.
Dr. George R. Miller Jr., state sup
erintendent of public instruction,
agreed with Wentz.
“And it should be remembered that
the people in these communities have
asked for these facilities,” he added.
The state board took no action on
another protest against further con
struction of Negro schools from the
Delaware State Conference of Branches
of the National Assn, for the Advance
ment of Colored People.
A letter written to the board op
posed SB305, saying that it “will
solidify the segregated pattern in these
districts, perpetuate the dual system of
education and greatly confuse the
‘deliberate’ progress being made in the
state.”
SIMILAR LETTER
A similar letter of protest was sent
to the Education Committee of the
120th General Assembly, requesting a
public hearing “as early as your cal
endar can possibly permit.”
The Assembly, with the state facing
a financial crisis, has not yet approved
a school construction bill, nor has the
state board submitted other than
emergency building requests.
For construction of white schools,
the state pays 60 per cent while the
remaining 40 per cent is raised by lo
cal district taxation.
A charge by Virginia Gov. J. Lind
say Almond that the U.S. Supreme
Court school desegregation decision
represented judicial legislation was la
beled as “strident notes in a fading
chorus” by James M. Tunnell Jr., for
mer associate justice of the State Su
preme Court.
Tunnell, who represents most of the
downstate districts in Delaware’s de
segregation suits, addressed the annual
Brotherhood Week dinner of the Dela
ware Region of the National Confer
ence of Christians and Jews.
A week earlier Gov. Almond was a
guest speaker of the State Chamber of
Commerce.
Almond noted that “Virginia’s un
swerving loyalty to and never reced
ing faith in the Constitution arrays
her as an implacable foe of the course
of judicial legislation and sociological
peregrinations shackled upon the peo
ple by the unwarranted flights of per
sonal fancy and excursions of arrogated
power on the part of the Supreme
Court of the United States.”
“We see,” he continued, “a rising
tide of evidence, emanating from
sources of highest constitutional erudi
tion, and spreading across the nation,
demanding a return to the sanity and
safety of constitutional government.
The states individually caught in the
vise of inordinate judicial power are
reduced to impotency of action. The
responsibility rests heavily upon the
shoulders of the Congress to restore to
the people a government of ‘law and
not of men,’ a union indissoluble com
posed of states indestructible.”
Almond stated that under the Vir
ginia program “no child of whatever
color is compelled to attend a racially
mixed school.”
“The overwhelming majority of the
people of Virginia do not approve of
the mixing of the races in their public
school system. Certainly I do not.”
TUNNELL’S REPLY
Tunnell has been endorsed by one
group as the Democratic candidate for
governor but has stated he will not
seek the nomination. He devoted much
of his talk to Almond’s remarks.
He said that the many people who
disagree with the Supreme Court de
cision-adding that he was not one of
these—“would do well to say simply
they disagree, rather than resort to
diatribe.”
“If people generally considered the
court’s findings even erroneous, not to
mention fanciful, there would be a
move to repeal or revise the Four
teenth Amendment, which nobody ser
iously suggests for obvious reasons.
“We must recognize that the great
criterion by which laws ultimately
stand or fall in this government is the
approval of the people as a whole.
“. . . especially in the cases where
the court speaks unanimously, as it has
repeatedly done in the desegregation
cases, one should hesitate to dub its
findings ‘unwarranted flights of fancy.’ ”
Because of the illness of Louis L.
Redding, counsel for the appellants,
the desegregation case scheduled for
argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals
in Philadelphia on Feb. 15 was post
poned.
Redding, representing seven Negro
litigants who sued for admission to
white schools in 1956, filed an appeal
against a district court decision that
approved a grade-a-year desegregation
plan for Delaware schools.
A new date for argument has not
been set, according to Atty. Gen.
Januar D. Bove Jr., who represents the
State Board of Education.
This would make the second appear
ance of the Delaware case in the Court
of Appeals. In 1958 the question was
(See DELAWARE, Page 15)