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PAGE 10—APRIL. 1962—SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS
SPECIAL REPORT
Negroes Charge Discrimination
In 28 Localities Outside South
JVf EGROES HAVE charged that 28
- L ’ communities outside the
Southern and border states use
discriminatory practices in their
public schools.
Lawsuits have been filed against 14
school districts, and formal protests
have been made to school boards in at
least 14 others. The complaints oppose
1) allegedly deliberate segregation
maintained through gerrymandered dis
tricts and racial assignments, and 2) un
intentional segregation resulting from
ordinary zoning of one-race residential
areas.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
in 1954 that compulsory school segre
gation is unconstitutional, school deseg
regation activity has been concentrated
in the South, with only occasional action
in a few Northern communities. The in
crease of Negro protests in non-South-
em states early this year marked the
beginning of a new attack on segrega
tion across the country.
These new protests also indicate the
differences in the school desegregation
problem in the South and outside the
South. Schools in the South were seg
regated by law. Negroes filing court
suits to gain entrance to all-white
schools often have stressed that the
Negro students wanted to attend an all-
white school because it was the nearest
school to their residences.
Policies, Rather Than Law
Outside the South, segregation has
not been required by law, although it
has resulted in some instances from
official policy. The “segregation” under
attack in these states is not always the
complete separation of the races. The
protests in non-Southern states are
against policies that produce predomi
nantly Negro or predominantly white
schools. The suits—in contrast to those
filed in the South—attack the neighbor
hood school policy on the ground that
it causes segregation. Negro aims have
been achieved in several instances with
out legal action when public authorities
voluntarily have changed the protested
policies.
In February, the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People
initiated a survey of school segregation
by its more than 500 chapters outside
the South. The NAACP’s 1961 conven
tion in Philadelphia had called on its
branches “to insure the end of all seg
regated public education in fact or by
law.” The resolution stated:
“Northern school segregation has be
come an increasingly acute problem,
particularly with the increased concen
tration of the Negro population outside
the South.”
Seven Objectives
Seven objectives were proposed in
the NAACP statement: assigning teach
ers without regard to race, providing
enriched curricula and adequate edu
cational equipment, ending the “neigh
borhood school” concept when used to
maintain segregated schools, desegre
gating schools through permissive zon
ing, encouraging open enrollment pro
grams, selecting new school sites to
insure biracial schools, and learning the
attitudes of public officials concerned
with schools.
According to Miss June Shagaloff, the
NAACP’s education specialist, lawsuits
sponsored by NAACP units have been
filed in Pasadena, Calif.; Centreville and
Chicago, Ill.; Kansas City, Kan.; New
ark and Orange, N.J.; Amity ville,
Protests and Suits
Protests and suits against segre
gation in non-Southern states are
fisted by city, with a k indicating
where a court suit has been filed.
California
★ Pasadena
Connecticut
Stamford
Illinois
★ Centreville Maywood
★ Chicago Mount Vernon
Fairmont Park Robbins
Joliet
Kansas
★ Kansas City
Michigan
★ Detroit
New Jersey
★ Englewood k Newark
Jersey City -^Orange
Montclair Plainfield
Morristown
New York
'k Amityville k New Rochelle
k Hempstead k New York
★ Manhasset Nyack
Ohio
Cleveland
Pennsylvania
Chester k Philadelphia
Coatesville
Hempstead and Manhasset, N.Y.; and
Philadelphia, Pa. Complaints on the
Hempstead and the Orange cases also
were filed with the New York and New
Jersey state commissioners of educa
tion, respectively.
School officials were charged with
practicing discrimination in other suits
in Detroit, Mich.; Englewood, N.J.; and
New York City. A federal court suit
against the New Rochelle, N.Y., school
board ended in late 1961 with the U.S.
Supreme Court refusing to review dis
trict and appellate court rulings that
Negroes be allowed to transfer to
schools outside their district.
Petition Presented
Petitions for policy changes have been
presented to school officials in Stam
ford, Conn.; Fairmont Park, Joliet,
Maywood, Mount Vernon and Robbins,
Ill.; Detroit, Mich.; Englewood, Jersey
City, Montclair, Morristown and Plain-
field, N.J.; Amityville, Manhasset and
Nyack, N.Y.; Cleveland, Ohio; and
Chester and Coatesville, Pa. In some
communities, a petition has been filed
by one group and a suit by another.
The NAACP plans a series of regional
conferences this spring to plan its ex
tended action program in the Midwest
and West Coast states.
Federal court decisions in the New
Rochelle, N.Y., case established princi
ples for the issues on which most of
the Northern and Western suits are
based. U.S. District Judge Irving R.
Kaufman held that although New Ro
chelle had biracial schools, the system’s
policy still was not in keeping with the
Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision.
Kaufman ruled in his decision that
the New Rochelle school board had
gerrymandered school district lines and
adopted a strict no-transfer policy to
keep Lincoln School predominantly
Negro and to protect the racial balance
in the city’s other schools.
“. . . I see no basis to draw a distinc
tion, legal or moral, between segrega
tion established by the formality of a
dual system of education, as in Brown,
and that created by gerrymandering of
school district lines . . . ,” Judge Kauf
man found.
The district court opinion, which the
U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals
upheld and the U.S. Supreme Court
declined to review, made these two ma
jor points:
• If school authorities deliberately
created segregated schools in the past,
they have the constitutional duty to
end any present racial imbalance in
the school population, even if the racial
character is reflected by the residential
pattern.
• If school authorities deliberately
instituted policies in the past to control
the racial balance of a school, a school
with an enrollment 94 per cent Negro
is a “segregated” one and the Constitu
tion requires a good faith effort to bal
ance the racial population.
Dismissed Board’s Position
Judge Kaufman dismissed the school
board’s argument for the neighborhood
school policy as it applied to this case,
stating:
“The neighborhood school policy cer
tainly is not sacrosanct. It is valid only
insofar as it is operated within the con
fines established by the Constitution. It
cannot be used as an instrument to
confine Negroes within an area arti
ficially dehneated in the first instance
by official acts.”
In a footnote to his decision, Kaufman
stated that his decision did not purport
to determine whether segregation re
sulting only from “fortuitous residen
tial patterns ... is violative of the Con
stitution.”
Metropolitan New York
Becomes Major Target
The New York metropolitan area has
become a major target in the expanded
campaign against segregation. Here the
issue primarily is segregation arising
from the ethnic composition of the
neighborhood.
De facto segregation, as it is called,
appeared as a public issue in New York
City as early as 1954, and the Board of
Education ordered the charge investi
gated. A study found in 1955 that seg
regation in fact existed and that the
predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican
schools were inferior to white schools.
The board has adopted several pro
grams to improve the schools and to
change the racial balance. A central
zoning unit, headed by a Negro assist
ant superintendent, considers the racial
factor in determining school boundaries.
Negroes and Puerto Ricans in over
crowded and inferior schools are per
mitted to transfer outside their district
to designated schools not operating at
full capacity.
Higher Horizons, a pilot project, seeks
to raise the educational and cultural
levels of underprivileged students. Ef
forts have been made to improve com
munity relations, and the Board of Ed
ucation has created a Bureau of Human
Relations.
Schools Boycotted
However, initiating these policies has
not prevented further protests about
conditions in the schools. Groups of
parents in Brooklyn and Harlem this
school year withheld their children
from schools they considered segregated
and inferior. The boycotts ended only
after school officials agreed to transfer
the Negro children to under-utilized
schools in other parts of the city.
A suit filed in U.S. District Court in
the name of 15-year-old Sheldon Recot
accused the New York City Board of
Education of having a “racial quota”
high school policy. The petition filed
during January stated that 90 per cent
of the city’s colored pupils were as
signed to 20 per cent of the city’s high
schools.
The protest about segregation of
schools in Amityville, N.Y., arose in
1955, when the Board of Education se
lected sites for two elementary schools.
The Central Long Island NAACP
branch urged the school board to build
a single elementary school to serve two
residential areas, arguing that it would
prevent the creation of segregated
schools. The school board answered that
there was no site large enough for a
single school.
An appeal by the NAACP to the New
York state commissioner of education
failed to stop construction of the two
schools, but the grade assignments were
changed. Students from the virtually
all-Negro school transfer to the school
in the adjacent white school zone for
grades four and five. The NAACP filed
suit on March 21 on behalf of 22 Negro
children, petitioning for a desegregation
plan for the Amityville system.
Whites Object to the Bus Plan
Parents parade before the city hall in New York to protest the program
transferring slum-area Negroes and Puerto Ricans to Queens schools.
One Solution to Northern Segregation
A group of New York City Negro children board a bus to leave behind
their overcrowded neighborhood school and attend under-utilized fa
cilities in the borough of Queens.
Types of Segregation:
i De Facto ’ and ‘De Jure ’
I n discussions of school segre
gation outside the South, the
terms de jure and de facto fre
quently recur. They are used to
distinguish between types of seg
regation.
Black’s Law Dictionary, Fourth Edi
tion, 1951, page 479, gives the strict
legal definition of the terms:
“DE FACTO. In fact, in deed, actual
ly. This phrase is used to characterize
... a past action, or a state of affairs
which must be accepted for all prac
tical purposes, but is illegal or illegiti
mate. In this sense, it is the contrary
of de jure, which means rightful, le
gitimate, just, or constitutional.”
However, these definitions are by no
means universally accepted in describ
ing school segregation. The shades of
meaning given to the terms and the
nature of the two forms of segregation
they are used to describe are illustrated
in the quotations that follow:
Taylor et al v. the Board of Educa
tion of New Rochelle et al, opinion by
U.S. District Judge Irving R. Kaufman,
Jan. 24, 1961:
“. . . It is of no moment whether the
segregation is labelled by the defend
ant as de jure or de facto, as long as
the board, by its conduct, is responsible
for its maintenance. 12 ”
Footnote 12. “It is submitted that if
these terms must be used, ‘de jure’
should refer to segregation created or
maintained by official act, regardless of
its form. ‘De facto’ should be limited to
segregation resulting from fortuitous
residential patterns. This decision does
not purport to determine whether ‘de
facto’ segregation, in this sense, is vio
lative of the Constitution.”
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
Report, 1961, Book 2, Education, Chap
ter 7—Segregation North and West, pp.
99-100:
“With rare exceptions such segrega
tion as there has been in the North and
West has been a matter of practice
without explicit legal sanction. In some
instances, nonetheless, official action
has contributed to or caused segrega
tion. Where this is true, a denial of
equal protection may exist. . . .
“Segregation in the public schools of
the urban North and West results to a
large extent from the familiar system
of neighborhood schools in combination
with residential concentrations of mi
nority groups. These “ghettos” were
not explicitly created by law. They
arose largely because of the inability
of minority-group members to find
housing elsewhere. That is why the re
sulting segregation in schools is gener
ally called de facto, to distinguish it
from de jure, segregation.”
“Race Relations and American Law,”
by Jack Greenberg, Columbia Univer
sity Press, 1959, Chapter VII—Educa
tion, pg. 249:
“The real, pressing racial problem in
Northern education is becoming that
of what must be called de facto seg-
The Hempstead, Long Island, public
school board in 1951 received an
NAACP complaint against deliberate
segregation. Hempstead Negroes
charged that the board gerrymandered
the zone fines of an all-Negro elemen
tary school to exclude whites. On a
subsequent complaint to the state com
missioner of education, the board was
ordered to redraw the zones lines.
This year, a suit styled Branch et alv.
the Board of Education et al contested
a million-dollar bond issue to enlarge
two elementary schools, which had en
rollments about three-fourths Negro.
Dr. W. Amos Kincaid, the Hempstead
(See SEGREGATION, Page 11)
regation. As a practical matter, we may
subsume much of the Northern de jure
segregation inquiry under this heading,
for administrators may be reluctant to
admit using a racial standard even if
they do, claiming that all-Negro or all- I
white schools have been created by I
housing, despite fair zoning and assign,
ment standards. Sometimes this asser
tion cloaks purposeful separation;
sometimes it is true; often it is impos
sible to tell. It is also sometimes said
that separate Negro schools are main
tained because Negroes want them.
Whatever the truth is, in many places
an all-Negro area is so vast that some :
segregation in fact will be unavoid
able.”
New York Times story on New York
City’s Negroes, by Leonard Buder,
March 13, 1962, page one:
“Although the city and state have
passed laws that prohibit most forms
of racial and religious discrimination,
the Negro here fives in a largely seg
regated society. It is a de facto rather
than a de jure segregated society—that
is, it exists in fact, although not in
law.”
“Slums and Suburbs,” by Dr. James
B. Conant, McGraw-Hill Book Co. Inc,
1961, Chapter 1—City Slums and Negro
Education, pg. 28:
“In short, if one group of children is
separated from another group because
of the neighborhood in which they live, 1
the fact of this separation is, of and by
itself, no evidence of an inequality in
education. Whether in fact the facilities
and instruction are equal in a 100 per
cent white school, a mixed school, and
a 100 per cent Negro school in a large j
city is to be determined by examining
the schools, not by appeal to phrases
such as de facto segregation with the ,
implication that it is to be condemned
by all right-thinking people who con
demn de jure segregation.”
Statement of the American Jewish
Congress on “School Segregation
Northern Style,” submitted to the
House Committee on Education ami
Labor, by Will Maslow, executive di
rector and general counsel of AJC, 0,1
March 29, 1962:
“Negroes in our Northern metropo'
lises are herder together in black ghet-
toes. Negroes in these ghettoes attend
the schools located in their neighbor
hoods. The result is that such schools
have a predominantly Negro enroll
ment. For all practical purposes, these
schools may be said to be segregated’
although the segregation is de fact 0 ’
rather than stemming from governmen
policy. In addition, some local schoo
boards have by one device or another
contrived to bring about or maintain 2
segregated system.”
Miss June Shagaloff, special assists 1
for education, National Association »®
the Advancement of Colored Peopl f
reported to the NAACP annual nice 1 '
ing on Jan. 2, 1962: .
“There are still communities outsi 2
the South which continue to maint^*:
public schools deliberately segregate^
through gerrymandering or other a (
ministrative devices. . . . _.
“Far more complex are the P ro ^
posed by public schools which arc
fact segregated. In the large ,
cities, de facto segregation exists l aI “j
ly as the result of extensive segreg®
housing.” ,
“The Negro In America,” by E'f^
Dunkar, Look Magazine, April 1®- *
page 27:
“The all-Negro ghetto . . ■ 1S
countless others that surround the af
ters of the nation’s cities. From if
stem all-Negro schools, all-Negro
pitals and all-Negro churches, if ^
North, that makes for a segregating^
fact that rivals the segregation deb 0 *
by law in the South.” #