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SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS—OCTOBER, 1962—PAGE 19
ia Several Systems Extend
Desegregation Programs
cases (Continued From Page 1)
S. C ^ September that their states would be
days t jjg n ew fronts in the fight for deseg-
drs re gation. Jack Greenberg, chief coun-
311 sel of the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, at an NAACP rally
er on Sept. 24 in Clarendon County, prom-
Wai ised more action in South Carolina. J.
ltrn d Arthus Brown of Charleston, State
yfort jjaACP president, told the group that
. eni " the organization would soon be “flood-
judi. j n g t k e state with additional lawsuits.”
ot J* Alabama received similar warnings
^ er *fy from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The president of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference said in Birm
ingham last month that his group was
going “all out” to get Negroes to apply
for the University of Alabama within
ays a year.
J Among the 285 tax-supported insti
tutions of higher learning in the region,
161 are known to be desegregated in
practice or principle. (Desegregation at
the college level is covered more fully
elsewhere in this issue.)
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Public School Desegregation
The new desegregation at the ele
mentary and high school levels gave the
17 Southern and border states, plus the
District of Columbia, 957 desegregated
school districts. The region has 6,361
public school districts, and 3,041 of
these have both Negro and white stu
dents enrolled.
Arkansas added two newly desegre
gated districts this fall, and six of the
10 previously desegregated admitted
more Negroes to schools with whites.
Gosnell and Mansfield opened their first
biracial schools. The state has 253
Negroes in desegregated schools this
year, compared with 152 last year.
In Delaware, a federal district iudge
ordered approximately half of the 45
plaintiffs in a school suit admitted to
the previously all-white school at Lin
coln. All 88 Delaware districts are con-
sidered desegregated under rulings in
previous litigation, and the judge told
school officials after the latest case
that administrative action might have
solved this and other recent desegrega
tion problems.
Increase in Florida
Florida's number of Negroes in bi
racial schools increased during Septem-
from about 1,100 to over 1,300.
tnree more schools were opened to
egroes in Dade County (Miami),
Putting 733 Negroes in mixed classes
j ^ schools. Broward County (Fort
auderdale) assigned more Negroes to
c , a ®® es w ith whites, reaching a total
o 03. Volusia County (Daytona Beach)
as five Negroes in formerly all-white
sc ools, having assigned two more
egroes in recent weeks. The county
a so accepted a Negro in Daytona Beach
J umor College.
^Additional assignments in Palm
ach County increased to approxi-
M e .F 60 the number of Negroes in
Co^t schools there. Hillsborough
high 1 y /^ arn P a ) desegregated its first
y school and now has about 73
schooL^ * n f ° Ur former] y all-white
seitf'
)r kBia-'
rote (
a SeP :
lumb'
hat*
whk-
recoij
at &
ch,
te is'
u. ntuc ky’s State Board of Educatio
lie c '? rrowe ‘d to 21 the number of pub
clarea °°^ districts that have not de
state v. po *’ c ’ es of desegregation. Th
p ra .. as f^6 districts desegregated i
cidedT or Policy. Board members de
rrient” ° continue using an “encourage
Punif a ?, Pr0ac ^ rather than emplo
a den^ 11 * 6 measure s. The board name
2l s r ment official to visit each of th
Pr 0?r f^f gate d districts as part of
h O'
>'
. coV?
le S*
llt*>
rni^a
w-bat
nd f
ed.’ .
iK
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°gram.
g . ^uisiana Trade Schools
been ( j.^ j0u l s l ar ia trade schools hav
to aceenf Cte ^ their governing boar
Prospect- an< ^ Process applications froi
race. T-/ Ve stu dents without regard 1
adopt er i f-L ~ tate Board of Educatio
av °id en t res °l u tion on Sept. 19 1
court r~’ lte ’ n Pt c ’ tat i° ns by a feder;
Ply to . 6 board’s directive would ap
Cr °Mev ad tr Sch °. ols at Lake Charle
Qpel 0ll ’ Natchitoches, Greenbur
° u sas and Shreveport.
v '°Usly or th Carolina districts pre
’tore Np ^IVegated have assigne
A 'he v j j ] r ° es to schools with white
R e a PProved the assignment <
° T PreH? , ld ren previously rejecte
now ? mantly white schools. TT
: ’ly a u as 68 Negroes in two form
b PrhZ hlte schoois.
^Ith 42 fi °P er ied the new school ten
' c hooi s r r. STOes ’ n Predominantly whii
^ttevjij’ ,_ m P are d to 15 last year. Fay
Schools su c Negro children assigne
'Ppirnittee •' Vlt ’ 1 whites, and a spec!
'^Pplicatiop 0nS * der ' n ® an °fber tran:
f.“rcop High Plains School i
fciptpils a.- 1 " ^ as been closed and tl
a des ; n .a'Sned to two schools wif
^hensville and Bethel Hi:
The Indian school had been operated
jointly since 1924 by the North Carolina
county and Halifax County, Va.
At Wilmington, two Negroes entered
Wilmington Junior College for the first
time. The city schools also desegregated
for the first time this year, admitting
one Negro student to a previously all-
white school.
Extension in Tennessee
A Tennessee school district, Hum
phreys County, extended its court-
ordered desegregation program to in
clude all 12 grades and now has 78
Negroes attending biracial classes.
Chattanooga school officials reported an
additional Negro in biracial classes,
bringing to 45 the total number of
Negroes in biracial schools during the
first month of desegregation. The school
board in surrounding Hamilton County
said 14 Negro students are attending
two previously all-white schools.
Middle Tennessee State College, de
segregated by the policy of the State
Board of Education since 1957, ad
mitted its first Negro students in Sep
tember. Officials said only one college
under the board, Tennessee Polytechnic
Institute, opened with only whites en
rolled.
Federal courts have ordered two
Texas districts to desegregate. The or
der for Port Isabel in Cameron County
was expected to become effective im
mediately, but the order for A&M In
dependent School District at College
Station was made effective in Septem
ber, 1963. The Texas Education Agency
reported another West Texas district,
Seagraves in Gaines County, had abol
ished segregated schools in a referen
dum this fall.
Arlington State College became the
first unit of the Texas A&M College sys
tem to desegregate, admitting five
Negro undergraduates. Southern Meth
odist University, which has accepted
Negroes in its graduate divisions since
1958, registered its first Negro under
graduate.
Arlington State College became the
first unit of the Texas A&M College
system to desegregate, admitting five
Negro undergraduates. Southern Meth
odist University, which has accepted
Negroes in its graduate divisions since
1958, registered its first Negro under
graduate.
Virginia added its 39th desegregated
school district when York County de
segregated an elementary school by
court order. Ten districts in the state
have desegregated this fall.
Desegregation Opposed
Opposition to the desegregation at the
elementary and high school level ap
peared in several instances. Student
boycotts continued to affect enrollment
in the desegregated schools of New
Orleans, although the total enrollment
for the school system was above that
for last year. Since the opening day, the
number of pupils has advanced in the
20 desegregated public schools, but at
the end of the month these schools had
752 fewer than last year.
In Winston-Salem, N. C., the assign
ment of one six-year-old Negro to the
previously all-white North Elementary
School was followed by one-fourth of
the white students transferring to an
other school. The state’s Pupil Place
ment Act provides automatic reassign
ment of a child from a biracial school at
the request of parents. The loss of 60
pupils from North meant the reassign
ment of two teachers to Lowrance
School, where the pupils relocated.
Five Maryland counties, previously
desegregated in policy, assigned the
first Negroes to schools with whites this
fall. In one county, Wicomico, less than
half of the affected Negroes accepted
assignment to the formerly all-white
schools. Three Negro girls withdrew
from a newly desegregated high school
in Dorchester County and transferred
back to their former school. The girls
said the white students had given them
the “silent treatment” and avoided
them. The other three counties—Caro
line, Kent and Calvert—reported no
difficulties.
New desegregation by the two Ar
kansas districts caused them to lose
some of their football opponents. At
least one school declined to play Mans
field in football and two have refused
to play Gosnell.
Significant Court Decision
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
rejection of the minority race transfer
provision was considered significant be
cause of the plan’s widespread use in
other districts and states. The court
said:
“It is of no significance that all chil
dren, regardless of race, are first as
signed to the schools in their residential
zone and all are permitted to transfer
if the assignment requires the child to
' ‘They Just Ain’t No Pride-of-
Race No Mo’
—Dent, Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette
attend the school where his race is in
the minority, if the purpose and effect
of the arrangement is to retard integra
tion and retain the segregation of the
races. That this purpose and this effect
are inherent in the plan can hardly be
denied.”
Virginia’s attorney general, Robert
Y. Button, called the ruling “one of the
most far-reaching decisions entered by
a court involving segregation in schools
since Brown versus Board of Educa
tion.”
In Nashville earlier this year, Jack
Greenberg of the NAACP Legal De
fense and Educational Fund said that
if the court knocked out this provision,
it would be a significant breakthrough
in the school desegregation effort.
# # #
Oklahoma
(Continued from Page 17)
merce, he said, although the organiza
tion itself is taking no official part. He
said members of the informal group are
long-time businessmen who have seen
the Negro residential area move north
ward from Northeast 7th St.
What They Say
Officials, Educators
Disagree with Stand
Taken in Mississippi
Oklahoma government leaders and
educators were generally critical of
actions of officials in the desegregation
crisis at the Uni
versity of Missis
sippi.
Raymond Gary
who was govemoi
of Oklahoma
when its public
schools began de-
segregat-
ing in 1955, term
ed the action of
Mississippi Gov
Ross Barnett, “a
great disservice to
our nation.”
“It wasn’t a question as to the gov
ernor’s personal feelings in the matter
of integration,” Gary declared. “It was
a question of whether he was going to
obey the law of the land.”
He cited the co-operation of univer
sity and college presidents and govern
ment leaders in Oklahoma when the
state complied with the U. S. Supreme
Court rulings. He said everyone in an
official position helped work things out
so that the transition was made slowly
and without incident.
Deplores Politics
Dr. George L. Cross, University of
Oklahoma president, said the Missis
sippi situation could have been handled
by the university president without
trouble if the “political powers” had
stayed out of it.
“I think the situation in Mississippi
is tragic,” Cross said. “The university
and the state will bear the scars of this
incident for many, many years. It’s a
great tragedy for this to happen at a
very good and fine university.”
James E. Stewart, executive board
member of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People,
insisted that, if the Mississippi governor
would take a firm stand backing up the
federal court decision, the students
would follow him. He said this has hap
pened “in every other state.”
He disputed what he called state
ments by Barnett and associates that
deep-seated prejudice is traditional in
Mississippi. He said Mississippi is the
only state that has sent two Negro
senators to Washington. # # #
KENTUCKY
Rash of School Litigation
Breaks Out During Month
LOUISVILLE
rash of legal action on school-
desegregation — three suits
filed, three others in preparation,
and an attorney general’s opinion
—erupted in Kentucky in Sep
tember.
There was no clearcut explanation
for the almost simultaneous moves,
which resulted in the biggest court
docket of classroom-discrimination
cases in the state for several years.
Various sources questioned by South
ern School News mentioned several
possible contributing factors, including:
• Negroes were “tired of waiting” and
their patience was “wearing thin.”
• The increased national and regional
desegregation activity was spreading to
Kentucky.
•The two-year-old State Commission
on Human Rights has been increasingly
active in the areas of pupil and faculty
racial discrimination.
• The court order under which 11
Negro children in Madison County were
enrolled Sept. 4 at a new school planned
for whites only sparked similar efforts
elsewhere. (SSN, Sept.)
• Recent actions by the State Board of
Education have encouraged efforts to
end segregation.
Punitive Measures
On the other hand, however, con
cerning the latter point, there was some
speculation that the current resort to
the courts could have stemmed from
disappointment among Negro leader
ship in the State Board of Education’s
continued failure to adopt punitive
measures against school districts still
practicing segregation.
Targets of the new suits are the
school boards in Jessamine County,
Mayfield, and Frankfort. The Frankfort
situation led to the attorney general’s
opinion.
In preparation at month’s end were
suits against the school boards of
Bowling Green, and Warren and Old
ham counties. The attorney in these
three cases is James A. Crumlin of
Louisville, an NAACP leader who also
filed the Jessamine County action.
Still pending was another case, a
suit seeking desegregation of elemen
tary and junior-high grades in Rich
mond (SSN, August).
Attorney General’s Opinion
An attorney general’s opinion that
compulsory school-attendance laws
cannot be used to force Negro children
to attend a segregated school after they
have been turned away from a white
school was one result of new desegre
gation efforts in Frankfort.
The state’s capital was also the
scene of peaceful demonstrations
against school desegregation and its
board of education was the target of a
suit filed in Federal District Court
there.
Events followed this sequence:
The school board on August 13
adopted a plan calling for desegregat
ing the first grade this year and one
or more grades each succeeding year
until all elementary grades are deseg
regated. Frankfort High School was
desegregated without trouble in 1956.
But the city’s six elementary schools,
including the all-Negro Mayo-Under
wood in north Frankfort, had remained
segregated.
On Sept. 5, about 30 Negro pupils ac
companied by parents tried to enroll at
two white schools near their homes in
south Frankfort. Four first-graders
were accepted, but the others in grades
two through eight were referred back
to Mayo-Underwood.
Negroes March
On Sept. 10, about 25 Negro pupils
and 10 adults marched around the
state capitol and downtown Frankfort
protesting segregation. That night, the
school board met with a Negro delega
tion, but refused to broaden its first-
grade-only plan for this year.
Some Negro parents kept their chil
dren out of school and threatened con
tinued use of this tactic. School Super
intendent F. D. Wilkinson responded
with routine letters notifying the par
ents of the state’s compulsory school-
attendance laws. Attorneys for the par
ents advised that the children return
to school because, as one explained,
“keeping them out would hurt the
children” by hindering their educa
tion.
Before they returned to classes,
however, State Supt. of Public Instruc-
Kentucky Highlights
What could become the biggest
court docket of school-desegregation
cases in the state’s history was in
the making as three suits were filed
and three others were being pre
pared.
The state attorney general issued
an opinion that Negro parents can
not be prosecuted for withholding
their children from an inferior seg
regated school after being rejected
at a nearby white school.
The State Board of Education
again heard proposals for possible
punitive action against segregated
school districts but for the time be
ing will continue to encourage 21
balking districts to develop deseg
regation plans.
tion Wendell Butler, at the request of
the Commission on Human Rights,
asked Attorney General John Breckin
ridge if parents
could be prose
cuted in such a
case.
Breckinridge re
plied with a
lengthy review of
the case, and con
cluded: “There
appears to be no
adequate basis for
prosecution in
these cases . . .
The parents have
sent their children to schools, but the
children were refused admission.”
Among cases cited by Breckinridge
was Dobbins v. Commonwealth (Vir
ginia, 1957) in which the father of a
Negro girl rejected by a white school
had been convicted for keeping her out
of class. The Virginia Supreme Court,
however, reversed the conviction on the
ground that a parent could not be
forced to send his child to an inferior
school. In his opinion, Breckinridge said
that Mayo-Underwood “is in poor
physical condition.”
On Sept. 21, the suit (Mack v. Frank
fort Board of Education) was filed ask
ing Federal District Court to end all
segregation in Frankfort’s public
schools. It also asked that teachers and
other personnel be assigned on a non-
racial basis. Former state head of the
NAACP, J. Earl Dearing, was among
the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Jessamine Suit
A suit filed Sept. 19 in federal court
at Lexington against the Jessamine
County Board of Education seeks to
desegregate the student body, the
faculty and other school employees.
The action was prepared by a Louisville
attorney, James A. Crumlin, for 31
Negro pupils, through their parents or
next of kin. It asked a permanent in
junction enjoining the board from
maintaining a racially segregated sys
tem in all grades.
The board’s present policy, according
to the suit (Mason et al v. Jessamine
County Board of Education et al),
“constitutes a denial of the rights of
these plaintiffs and other Negroes sim
ilarly situated of equal protection under
the 14th Amendment of the United
States Constitution and the laws of the
United States enacted pursuant there
to.”
The suit asked the court to order the
defendants—school board members and
Supt. Roland Roberts—to present a
complete plan for the reorganization of
the entire school system into a “unitary
nonracial system.”
The plaintiffs contend that Negro pu
pils “are assigned to and must attend”
either Rosenwald Elementary School or
Rosenwald High School, “which are set
aside and maintained for the exclusive
attendance of Negro pupils.”
Four Couples Sue
The Mayfield Board of Education was
named defendant in a school desegrega
tion suit filed in a U. S. District Court
in Paducah by four Negro couples on
behalf of their children. The petitioners
asked that the board be required to
open elementary schools to all children
regardless of race, and that school
officials be restrained permanently
from maintaining separate elementary
schools for white and Negro children.
Only the elementary schools were
cited in the suit as Mayfield High
School has been desegregated since
1956-7.
(See KENTUCKY, Page 20)
BRECKINRIDGE