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SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS—AUGUST I960—PAGE 13
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(Continued From Page 12)
problems, Dr. Robert C. Lloyd, ad
ministrative assistant to school super
intendent, has said: “I don’t like it
pegged to race; it’s the background.
The job of doing something about this
increased number of children who
don’t bring such a good background to
the classrooms is the challenge of our
_ it
age.
Lloyd speaks from a background of
personal knowledge of changing neigh
borhoods, one aspect of which is the
fact that the white families who de
part for the distant suburbs are the
white families of means. A higher pro
portion of the city’s white population
thus becomes the families of less than
average income, which gives a bi-racial
coloration to the increase in “culturally
disadvantaged” school children.
CITED FIGURES
One man who thinks that the schools’
problems should have racial emphasis
is Dr. Matthew Tayback, he-'d of the
statistical division of the Baltimore
Health Department. After the close of
the school year Tayback cited illegiti
macy figures to some 230 Baltimore
elementary school principals and sup
ervisors, using the figures as a prime
indicator that the “educational system
can make no claims to be successful”
in solving the problem of “social dis
organization” among Negroes in Balti
more.
In effect answering those who blame
cultural, social and disciplinary prob
lems on southern migrants, Tayback
said that the illegitimacy rate among
Negro mothers born and raised in Bal
timore and Maryland was 40 per cent
last year, compared to 25 per cent
among those bom and raised in south
ern states.
Tavback told the school leaders that
the basic issue centers on the ability
cf the schools to show Negroes how
“to adapt themselves to family rela
tionships and a form of behavior that
is consistent with the needs of a mod
em, urban society.” The lack of social
stability, he said, “will confound and
defeat every effort that is made in the
educational environment to bring up
healthy youngsters.”
The Sun reported that some school
officials had privately expressed a non
official view that Tavback was placing
too much responsibility on the schools
to change deep-rooted cultural pat
terns.
NEW EFFORT
A new effort toward changing cul
tural patterns outside of the schools
has been launched by the Baltimore
Commission on Human Relations, a
municipal agency. The commission an
nounced in June that it would begin
studies of the problem of the southern
migrant. A spokesman explained:
“Both the mountaineers and the
southern Negroes are rural people with
little experience in urban living. Thev
Present new problems which cannot be
dealt with by existing city programs
and facilities. A new approach is neces-
possible the neighborhoods that are
trying to maintain stability. The first
act of Baltimore Neighborhoods was to
draft an anti-blockbusting ordinance,
which gained the support of the Balti
more Real Estate Board.
One of the last acts of the Baltimore
City Council before summer recess
was to pass the blockbusting bill. The
bill is, in effect, a code of ethical real
estate practices that, if effective, would
eliminate some and perhaps many of
the tactics used to induce rapid racial
turnover.
With a less rapid turnover in neigh
borhoods, there would also be a less
rapid turnover in the schools, although
the relationship does not always work
out exactly that way. Some neighbor
hood associations have found that white
families with children will stay in an
integrated neighborhood as long as the
neighborhood school remains predomi
nantly white. Once Negro pupils are
in the majority, the school situation
prompts some white families to sell out
and discourages others from moving in.
Judge Charles E. Moylan of the
Baltimore City Circuit Court in July
committed a Negro boy to the previ
ously all-white Maryland Training
School, finding that training schools for
delinquents are “part of the state’s
public education system” and hence
subject to the Supreme Court’s de
segregation rulings.
The case was one presented by at
torneys of the National Assn, for the
Advancement of Colored People after
the state at both the administrative
and legislative levels had refused to
desegregate its four training schools,
serving, respectively, white girls, Ne
gro girls, white boys and Negro boys.
“The proof is overwhelming that the
state established these public training
schools as schools,” Judge Moylan said
in his opinion, after citing the educa
tional programs conducted at the de
linquent centers. He pointed out that
the public educational system now ex
tends to a variety of classes for ab
normal children, including two schools
in Baltimore’s system that receive boys
who are too anti-social in their be
havior for regular classroom handling.
He found no legal distinction between
such schools and the training schools.
Moylan noted that a national survey
had shown that segregation in training
schools is the pattern in 14 southern
states and that non-segregated train
ing schools are the pattern in all but
four of the remaining 36 states. Mary
land had been one of these four states.
S!> ry. The object of our study is to find
the best means of reaching these peo
ple and helping to urbanize them.”
The Baltimore Urban Lea ?ue also
has a project, aimed at older city resi-
dents as well as newcomers, to
strengthen family stability.
. As far as their problem of numbers
jf concerned, and the resegregation
that has become a part of it, the schools
®re dependent on the efforts of neigh-
°rhoods to maintain stability. Balti-
•nore’s “changing neighborhoods” have
teen the subject of much official and
Unofficial concern, most of which was
reported at length in the August 1959
!ssue of Southern School News.
SITUATION same
Since that time the situation remains
u ch the same: Negro residential ex-
ansion continues on many fronts and
te families flee beyond city lines,
®*Pite the efforts of neighborhood as-
la ^ ons to allay panic and promote
ep tance of integrated living.
haH ^ 6W ne *ghborhood associations have
moderate success not only in en-
uraging white families to stay in a
n ra cial area but also in bringing in
hoiT i' V ^V*’ e families after Negroes had
j las g “ t in their neighborhoods. But it
yet to be demonstrated that as-
ratp 3 1 ( >nS Can r ^° more than slow the
su l . 0 c hange if the neighborhoods are
fleeted to external pressures.
^ rom the general pressure of
sure ° ” OUs * n § needs, the external pres-
nc , icr ftroublesome to Baltimore
“blM/i S are f* 1056 created by the
tics t 'dusters ’ who use various tac-
a re ° if.r° mo t G a white flight from an
into tn lle stee ring all Negro prospects
^that area. (See SSN, August 1959).
o f., test developments are these:
O ffsm-' lm0re Neighborhoods, Inc., an
ComrrVtt ° f tlle Greater Baltimore
active *• 66 business leaders, became
Pose k* 11 s Pring, its primary pur
ging to support in every way
Surprise, disillusionment and some en
couraging experiences marked the first
year of teaching by a native Mississip
pi in an integrated Baltimore high
school. Sought out for an interview by
a Southern School News correspondent,
Thomas S. Morgan Jr., who completed
his Jackson (Miss.) public schooling in
1953, said his initial encounter with the
problems of integration had proved in
teresting, but not altogether in the ways
that he had anticipated.
Coming to Baltimore after two years
of graduate work in history at Duke
University, Morgan says he was im
mediately surprised to discover, through
casual white remarks about Negroes,
that “Baltimore was much more south
ern” than he previously had supposed.
He had expected more adult and student
acceptance of integration than he has
subsequently found to exist.
Morgan was assigned as a history
teacher to a recently built high school
serving western and southwestern Balti
more. The co-educational student body
is drawn mainly from lower middle class
neighborhoods, some of which are
undergoing a racial change of occu
pancy. In its first three years the school
has seen the following shift in enroll
ment:
School Year
1957- 58
1958- 59
1959- 60
White Negro
1,071 310
1,127 529
1,083 615
Morgan’s five classes (155 students in
all) varied greatly in racial composition.
Two were predominantly Negro; a third
class of all girls were about evenly
divided between whites and Negroes;
and two “high sections” were almost
entirely white.
He says he was quite “excited” over
the integration factor when he first
began, and “wondered how the Negroes
would react.” An earnest young bache
lor of athletic proportions, he says he
had the feeling he would “bend over
backward” in his handling of Negro
students. Nothing at all was said to him
by school officials on the subject of how
to approach an integrated situation.
Morgan says that he has since learned
that “color doesn’t influence a teacher
one way or another,” and that “the in
tegration factor is not something you
think of every day.” While he had won
dered about teaching the slavery phase
of American history to a bi-racial class,
he finds that “most Negro students con
sider it so far remote that it doesn’t
touch them personally.”
Insisting himself on alphabetical seat
ing to avoid any sign of favoritism,
Morgan says that “natural segregation”
occurs whenever students take places
on their own in classrooms, cafeteria,
auditorium or outside the building. The
only complaint about his alphabetical
seating came from one white boy who
objected to sitting next to a Negro girl,
although he did not mind sitting next to
a Negro boy. A transfer was quietly
arranged.
The self-segregation had not been ex
pected by Morgan before he had the
opportunity to observe Baltimore in
tegration first-hand. He finds less ac
ceptance of the change among students
than he had supposed, and more white
hostility. The hostility, he explains, is
not overt—no fights or openly rude re
marks—but is expressed in subtleties to
which he as a teacher is sensitive. Many
of the white students, he believes, resent
the growing proportion of Negroes, which
makes their school the most heavily
integrated senior high in the city. And
resentment of the school’s being “taken
over” reflects, in turn, resentment of the
Negro movement into nearby neighbor
hoods.
SHATTERING ILLUSION
Another aspect of Morgan’s disap
pointment, amounting to a shattering of
a pre-Baltimore illusion, is his finding
that most of his Negro students have
little apparent interest in academic
achievement and in becoming assimi
lated.
“I had thought,” Morgan explains,
“that integration would provide a big
opportunity for Negro boys and girls
to have the advantages offered by a
white school and that they would want
to pick up all they could of the white
culture and win respect for themselves.
But it doesn’t work that way, generally
speaking.”
“To be fair about it,” Morgan adds,
“there is not much academic achieve
ment among the white students, either.
And by tending to segregate themselves,
the white students do not help to make
the Negro adjustment any easier. Yet it
is a little disappointing that the Ne
groes do not make more of their oppor
tunity.
“Down in Mississippi whenever inte
gration in Baltimore is mentioned, peo
ple always say that the situation is dif
ferent, because ‘up there they have a
higher type of Negro.’ I had thought
this to be true, but I find that some of
our Negro students are still as coarse
as any in the South. They do not seem
to realize or care that they are spoiling
their chance to become accepted, be
cause the white students object to their
mannerism more than anything else.”
Hastening to correct any impression
that he is speaking of all or a majority
of Negro students, Morgan says that
some are “very sharp indeed” in the
classroom and that the smartest student
by far in one of his classes was a Negro.
“White students show no resentment
when Negroes get better grades,” Mor
gan notes, and “this shows a large degree
of acceptance of integration.”
NO DATING
Sex is no problem, Morgan says. From
where he sits he catches some signs of
flirtation, mostly between Negro girls
and white boys, but from his talks with
students he feels sure that “virtually
no dating” across racial lines takes
place. School dances are attended by
both whites and Negroes, with no stags
permitted, and the couples are solely
of one race or the other.
Where Morgan finds real acceptance
of integration is among the teachers.
Eight on the school faculty of 85 are
Negroes, and he says that they are ex
cellent: “some of the best anywhere.”
In their relationships in and out of
school the teachers, according to Mor
gan, have the rapport and mutual re
spect that is so often lacking in the class
rooms among the students.
Is he discouraged after a year of inte
gration? On the contrary, Morgan says:
“I’m very much still interested. What
seems to be needed, though, is for all
students to develop more brotherliness
and more feeling for each other. If bar
riers exist, it is the students who are
holding them there.
“For democracy to work, there must
be more harmony in every-day situa
tions. The opportunities have been ex
tended by law, now the rest is up to the
students. If the hostility and resentment
were erased, a more pleasant atmosphere
would be created, and a more meaning
ful educational program would evolve.”
# # #
OKLAHOMA
Group Campaigns to Keep
Tulsa School Integrated
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla.
A community project—aimed
at keeping an integrated
school from becoming segre
gated—reached a critical stage in
Tulsa in July.
Members of Neighbors Unlim
ited circulated fact sheets as part
of an intensive campaign to sta
bilize the residential area around
John Burroughs Elementary
School. Leaders expressed cau
tious optimism that the Negro-
white enrollment ratio will
change but little when the fall
term opens. (See “Community
Action.”)
Court denial of transfer re
quests by about a dozen Seminole
County Negro pupils left a rural
separate school facing a drastic
drop in membership and possible
extinction. (See “School Boards
and Schoolmen.”)
Appointment of a 1940 graduate
as new president of Langston
University eased alumni fears
that the state’s only Negro college,
frequently under fire for high
per-capita costs, might be closed.
(See “In the Colleges.”)
A rash of real estate signs stand as
road markers of the future of Bur
roughs as an integrated school in Tul
sa’s northwest residential section this
summer. Unlike conventional signposts,
however, they do not tell too clearly
yet the course Burroughs will take—
whether it will continue as an inte
grated school with white pupils in the
majority or whether it will gradually
become another all-Negro school.
It appeared in July the answer will
rest in good measure upon the ef
fectiveness of the work of Neighbors
Unlimited during the past year or so.
The bi-racial organization, unique at
least in Oklahoma, has sought to build
good will, mutual concern and under
standing between white and Negro
residents of the Burroughs attendance
area. Its objective is to “create and
cultivate attitudes and values which
will make our neighborhood school ac
ceptable and desirable to all races of
people.”
FRANKLY ADMITS
In short, it frankly admits, “we do
not want John Burroughs to become an
other segregated school.” Such has
been the pattern in Oklahoma City.
There a junior high and two grade
schools, formerly all-white buildings
which became integrated, will have all-
Negro facilities and student bodies this
fall.
The proportion of Negroes among the
approximately 750 pupils of the Bur
roughs school had risen to 62 per cent
by the end of the 1959-60 year. This
was precisely the ratio of Negro and
white children of elementary age re
vealed in the area by the annual school
census in April.
Whether the ratio will hold true in
September, neither school administra
tors nor officials of Neighbors Unlimi
ted know.
“There are a lot of variable factors,”
the Rev. Orra G. Compton, co-chair
man of the group’s education commit
tee, pointed out. These include, he said,
the amount of moving into and out of
the district by both white and Negro
families, the demand for transfers and
the possibility that pupils who trans
ferred out last year may return to
Burroughs. Four of the 90 white pupils
who left when the school board’s trans
fer policy became operable at Bur
roughs for the first time in October
1959 returned before the end of the
school year, the Rev. Mr. Compton re
ported.
PERMITS TRANSFER
The policy, adopted by the board
when schools were first desegregated
in Tulsa, permits any pupil whose race
is in the minority at his school to
transfer to a building where his is the
majority race. Eleven schools—two sec
ondary, three junior high, and six ele
mentary—were integrated last year.
Burroughs started the 1959-60 year
with a 52 per cent white majority. This
meant the Negro enrollment had
jumped from 37 to 48 per cent since the
previous year.
After the break-even point was
reached in October, the proportion of
Negro pupils rose quickly. White par
ents who had been waiting for the op
portunity transferred their children to
other schools. By January the percent
age of Negroes had soared to 59. Yet
the rest of the school year saw a gain
of only three per cent.
The departure of 90 white children
was just about what Neighbors Un
limited predicted on the basis of an
extensive telephone survey it con
ducted in the summer of 1959.
CALLED EVERYBODY
“We called everybody in the com
munity,” recalled the Rev. Mr. Comp
ton, minister of St. Luke’s Methodist
Church, located just south of the Bur
roughs school. “We didn’t urge anybody
not to move. We just told them we
were staying so they would know they
wouldn’t be alone if they did. We didn’t
ask for any commitments, but we got
a lot of them.”
Callers logged carefully every family
contacted, found only 56 planned to
move away from the Burroughs area,
taking with them about 75 children.
Hearing this, school officials were
elated; they had feared a loss of at
least 200 white pupils from Burroughs
when the transfer policy went into ef
fect.
Neighbors Unlimited was encouraged
by the comparatively low attrition for
several reasons. In the first place, Bur
roughs, a sprawling plant covering a
whole city block, lies in a transient
area characterized by high mobility of
both white and Negro families. Homes
in the area range from the modest
houses in a sort of “buffer zone” that
exists for several blocks east of Cin
cinnati Avenue to the $30,000 and $40,-
000 fine, old structures atop exclusive
Reservoir Hill to the west. Along the
quiet, tree-lined streets between there
is considerable variation, too, with
homes ranging in value from $8,000 to
as much as $25,000.
BY-PASS AREA
With the new economic independence
they enjoy, many Negro families—
especially those of professional men—
are by-passing the area around Emer
son Elementary School, which has a 30
per cent Negro enrollment, to get into
the Burroughs district because it rep
resents more of an improvement. For
example, a Negro lawyer and his fam
ily now occupy a $30,000 home on Bos
ton Avenue, just down the street from
St. Luke’s Methodist Church.
The relatively small number of
transfers was encouraging, too, because
of the panic caused by news stories re
porting the policy was now in effect.
In quoting school officials as saying
the transfers were to be held until
the end of the first quarter so the
situation could be assessed, the stories
implied a deadline, the Rev. Mr. Comp
ton believes.
Parents who had been rather vocal
about wanting to get their children out
of Burroughs rushed to submit trans
fer applications. But Dr. Charles Ma
son, superintendent of schools, quelled
some of the panic by giving assurance
through the school bulletin that trans
fers would be honored at any time.
Transfer requests began to level off.
Then the education committee of
Neighbors Unlimited went to work to
size up the situation and see what it
could do to help stabilize the neigh
borhood. It held several conferences
with top school administrative officials
after a series of committee meetings
and joint sessions with representatives
of the National Conference of Chris
tians and Jews.
Soon after the transfer policy went
into effect at Burroughs the committee
laid before the administrators some
long-range measures it felt would help
reverse the usual trend—a white exo
dus from a community into which Ne
groes are moving.
INTEGRATING FACULTIES
One called for establishment of a
city-wide plan of integrating faculties.
It suggested a start could be made by
assigning Negroes as “traveling” teach
ers for art, music, and band classes
and in non-teaching staff positions. Al
though the school administration re
jected the proposal, the N. U. group is
still pushing hard for the idea. It wants
to avoid putting pressure on one or
two heavily integrated schools by as
signing Negro teachers there.
However, another long-range goal
(See OKLAHOMA, Page 16)