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Inside: A Special Section, 4 Ten Years In Review
II
Factual
Southern
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Objective
VOL. 10, NO. II—SECTION A
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
_
* •*'
MAY, 1964
Public School Desegregation
School Districts
With Negroes
Total & Whites
Deseg.
Enrollment
White Negro
In Desegregated
Districts
White Negro
Negroes
In Schools
With Whites
No. % t
Alabama
.... 114
114
4
539,996**
287,414*
106,199**
70,896**
21
.007
Arkansas
415
228
13
328,023**
112,012**
66,752
18,643
366
.327
Florida
67
67
16
964,241*
237,871*
669,375
130,667
3,650
1.53
Georgia
197
181
4
689,323
337,534
95,731
77,599
177
.052
Louisiana
67
67
2
460,589**
301,433**
68,700
79,077
1,814
.602
Mississippi
150
150
0
304,226**
291,971**
0
0
0
0
North Carolina ....
.... 171
171
40
820,900*
347,063*
367,764*
133,164*
1,865
.537
South Carolina ....
.... 108
108
1
368,496*
258,955*
3,108
9,539
10
.004
Tennessee
.... 154
143
45
687,902*
164,940*
380,321
120,447
4,486
2.72
Texas
1,421
899
263
2,045,499
326,409*
1,300,000*
200,000*
18,000*
5.52
Virginia
.... 130
128
55
710,176
228,961
486,231
145,658
3,721
1.63
Delaware
District of Columbia
.2,994
2,256
443
7,919,371
2,894,563
3,544,181
985,690
34,110
1.18
. 86
86
86
78,730
18,066
68,321
13,976
10,209
56.5
1
1
1
19,803
117,915
19,803
117,915
98,813
83.8
. 204
165
163
611,126*
54,874*
492,701*
54,874*
29,855
54.4
. 24
23
23
540,667
160,946
535,691
160,946
76,906
47.8
.1,597
212*
203*
793,000*
95,000*
NA
90,000*
40,000*
42.1
.1,160
241
197
541,125*
43,875*
324,023*
35,596*
12,289*
28.0
. 55
44
44
417,595*
23,449*
417,595*
23,449*
13,659*
58.2
. 3,127
772
717
3,002,046
514,125
1,858,134 ft
496,756
281,731
54.8
.6,121
3,028
1,160
10,921,417
3,408,688
5,402,315 ft
1,482,446
315,841
9.3
•Estimated. ** 1962-63.
tt Missouri not included.
+ No. of Negroes in schools with whites, compared to total Negro enrollment.
Southern Education Reporting Service, May,
1964
ALABAMA
Desegregation Of All Schools
In State Considered By Court
MONTGOMERY
|Y egro plaintiffs and Justice
‘' Department attorneys asked
a three-judge federal court panel
® Montgomery April 23 to order
Jne State Board of Education to
^segregate local schools in all
systems of the state.
In their final rebuttal briefs, called
or by the court which heard the case
ee v. Macon) in February, attorneys
■°r the plaintiffs contended that by in-
ervening in Macon County, ordering
e transfer of the 12 Negro pupils
*n teachers at Tuskegee High, and
■ osing the school for economic reasons,
■ board had shown it controls all lo-
schools in the state,
he board rescinded its actions in
e ruary (SSN, March) after the State
', i J? reme Court ruled the board had no
= thonty {q w j lat it did. The board
... e< d hi its final brief that while it
° made a mistake it had retreated
could not therefore be enjoined to
Rfegate all school systems.
•; e 6 suit Was brought in the name of
!o - ^ e 8 ro pupils ordered admitted
■ast <T i0Usl y a U-white Tuskegee High
-heir ^ mber - •^ ter at blocking
a< hnission with state forces, Gov.
of Wallace withdrew in the face
int erf Urt , or< iers ordering him not to
^skegee, or in Huntsville,
and Mobile, where schools
^ This Issue
^ Reports
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S3? of Columbia 1-A
Ssa; l-j-
| Stu<i v 7_A
, ^Uisian^ 6-A
VtT<? Pl 2-A
Okl aho~ ar ° lina 6-A
c. ^Ronia , .
T enj le J arol uia 8-A
7-A
I Snia 5 - A
' ^ v irgirua‘t A
Articles
Vitt n s UA
f, the South 2-A
'huy
ar s in Review
16 pages
also were desegregated for the first
time last fall. State troopers and, at one
time, Alabama National Guardsmen
were used in the other three cities as
well.
Desegregation in these cities was
finally achieved, but in Tuskegee all
white students withdrew, leaving the
high school to the 12 Negroes and a
white faculty of 13. It was this school
the state board ordered closed Jan. 30
(SSN, February, March).
Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. of
Montgomery, one of the three judges
weighing the omnibus suit which grew
out of the Macon controversy, agreed
that operation of the school was un
economic. But he ordered the 12 Ne
groes transferred to two other white
high schools in the county—six to
Shorter and six to Notasulga—in Feb
ruary.
All white students withdrew from
both these schools as well, most of
them joining former students of Tus
kegee High at the private Macon Acad
emy, opened last fall. There remained
only the six Negroes in the high
schools at Shorter and Notasulga.
The Notasulga high school was de
stroyed by fire in the early morning
hours of April 18. (See below.)
Plaintiffs and Justice Department at
torneys in the Macon suit asked, in ad
dition to a statewide desegregation or
der, that the state’s Pupil Placement
Law and grants-in-aid to students at
tending private school be declared un
constitutional. They further requested
the court to prevent state officials from
interfering with desegregation any
where in the state.
There was no indication when the
court would rule on the case. Besides
Johnson, the judges considering the
case are Richard T. Rives of Montgom
ery, member of the Fifth U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, and District Judge
H. H. Grooms of Birmingham.
In their rebuttal brief, plaintiffs con
tended that the state board’s contention
that it had no authority to intervene
in Macon, to order local schools closed
or to transfer pupils, was incorrect, as
was the State Supreme Court’s ruling
that the state board had no such legal
authority as it exercised.
Justice Department attorneys said in
their brief that “Alabama has a state
school system administered by both
state and local officials” and the state
board could thus be ordered to de
segregate all systems.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Fred Gray of
Montgomery contended that “the rigid
(See NEGROES, Page 3-A)
THE REGIOI
ment Figures
Show Little Change
T he percentage of Negroes attending schools with whites in the
Southern and border region stood at 9.3 per cent at the end of
the 1963-64 school year—the 10th since the 1954 ruling in the School
Segregation Cases by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Surveys by state agencies in Texas and West Virginia changed consid
erably the estimated figures for those states, but for a regional tabulation
the increase in Texas desegregation offset the decrease reported in West
Virginia.
The 17 Southern and border states, plus the District of Columbia
have 315,841 Negroes in biracial schools, out of a total Negro enrollment
of 3,408,688. The Southern School News survey in November, 1963,
had reported 318,039 Negroes in desegregated schools.
Separating the region into the South and border areas, the 11 Southern
states have 1.18 per cent of their Negroes in schools with whites, and the
border states, plus D.C., have 54.8 per cent.
As a result of the new survey of desegregated schools in Texas, the
estimate of Negroes attending classes with whites was raised from
14,000 to 18,000. (SSN, April). West Virginia no longer keeps racial
records but a special study indicated that only an estimated 13,659
Negroes are in biracial schools, compared with the previous estimate of
18,500 (SSN, January).
Arkansas also experienced a sizeable drop in its figures, decreasing from
1,084 Negroes in schools with whites to 366. The withdrawal of one white
student from an otherwise all-Negro school in Pulaski County caused the
change (SSN, March). More complete figures from Maryland showed a
decrease in desegregated Negro students from 77,816 to 76,906.
Since last November, the number of desegregated districts increased by
20 to a total of 1,160. The region has a total of 6,121 public-school districts
with 3,028 of these having both races enrolled and the other 3,093 being
either all-white or all-Negro. Nineteen of the additional desegregated dis
tricts were located in the recent Texas survey. One Tennessee district
desegregated this spring by federal court order.
(For comparative figures for the 10-year period of school desegregation,
see the special section, Ten Years in Review in this issue).
FLORIDA
White Teachers’ Group
Removes Race Provision
HE
MIAMI
Florida Education Asso-
x ciation, professional organiza
tion of white teachers and school
administrators, voted April 25 to
remove its policy of racial segre
gation. The action came at the
annual FEA convention in Miami
Beach.
By more than the necessary two-
thirds vote, 4,000 FEA delegates re
moved the word “white” from the
charter and left membership open to
all qualified personnel regardless of
race.
The FEA. is the first state teacher
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
LBJ Agreeable To Modifications
WASHINGTON
P resident Johnson has dropped
his firm insistence on Senate
passage of the civil-rights bill in
exactly the form approved by the
House of Representatives.
Word that the White House now ex
pects some modifications of the measure
reached the Senate April 30 and drew
varied reactions from spokesmen for
the opposing sides in the civil-rights
filibuster.
Sen. Allen J. Ellender (D-La.) con
strued the President’s stand as “a
change of heart over this obnoxious and
pernicious measure.” He credited the
eight weeks of Senate debate with
bringing out the change, and said he
hoped the debate would continue.
Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D.Minn.),
leading spokesman for the bill’s pro
ponents, said the President “wants a
civil-rights biff with the coverage and
the enforceability that are in the House
bill, but he expects the Senate to work
its will, and that does not preclude
amendments.”
Humphrey predicted that the South
ern filibuster would eventually be
broken and that the bill would be
passed, perhaps by early summer.
In developments dealing with the
school desegregation section of the
measure:
• Sens. Paul A. Douglas (D-Ill.) and
John Sherman Cooper (R-Ky.) took
the Senate floor April 3 for a detailed
defense of Title IV, the school section.
Douglas said that at the present rate
it would take 1,000 years to complete
desegregation of the schools in the Deep
South.
“It is long past time for the Congress
to use its great authority to ensure that
in this time, the rights of all our chil
dren are vindicated,” Douglas said.
Cooper told the Senate that “the in
feriority of Negro education, a proven
result of segregated schools, cannot be
allowed to continue, for eduaction is
vital to our national security and our
economy.”
• Sen. Russell on April 14 challenged
proponents of the civil-rights bill to
show their “sincerity” by proposing an
amendment to permit the Attorney
General to eliminate racial imbalance
in big-city schools.
Noting that the House-passed version
rules out such authority, Russell said:
“If this bill is not shot through by hy
pocrisy and demagoguery, they can of
fer these amendments and vote them
up and down.”
• Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), who
previously had been regarded as a pos
sible supporter of the civil-rights bill,
said April 25 that the measure was
“seriously defective and potentially
dangerous.” He concentrated his criti
cism on Title VI, which provides for
withholding federal funds from dis-
(See JOHNSON, Page 2-A)
organization in the Deep South to take
such action.
Balloting was secret on voting ma
chines borrowed from the Dade County
registrar, and totals were not an
nounced. FEA officials said, however,
there was little organized opposition.
The proposal was made by the Dade
(Miami) Classroom Teachers Associa
tion which removed racial barriers
last year. The CTA said it was ready
to withdraw from the parent organi
zation if the proposal had been re
jected.
Pinellas County teachers also have
taken steps to remove racial barriers
locally, and they supported Dade’s
campaign.
FEA’S action is expected to spur sim
ilar moves in county teacher organiza
tions since its new president, Dade
County’s Supt. Joe
Hall, has worked
with the CTA to
bring about full
desegregation.
The FEA debate
hinged largely on
legal points. Ed
Henderson, exec
utive secretary,
pointed out that
FEA has been of
ficially recognized
Mfltl by the legislature
as the teachers’ professional spokesman
and is charged by law with setting
standards.
Unless FEA was opened to all quali
fied persons, he said, its position might
be subject to court challenge.
FEA’s counterpart for Negro teach
ers, the Florida State Teachers Asso
ciation, held its meeting simultaneously
a few miles away in Miami. Members
said it probably would be the last an
nual meeting for the group.
Dr. Gilbert Porter, FSTA executive
(See TEACHERS, Page 3-A)
