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PAGE 2-B—MAY, 1964—SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS TEN YEARS IN REVIEW PUBLIC SCHOOLS Fewer Than Tenth of First-Graders in Nashville, Tenn., 1957 4s grade-a-year plan began. OUTSIDE THE SOUTH School-Race Problems Spread in Three Years P ublic schools outside the South began to experience segregation-desegregation prob lems in the last three school years of the 1954-64 decade. The school segregation opposed by Negroes in Northern and Western states differed from that in the Southern and border states, where complete segre gation had been required by law. Out side the South, the de facto segrega tion resulted from natural circum stances rather than state action. And the schools considered segregated might have a racial imbalance in enrollment instead of being all-Negro or all- white. In the South, one segregation issue was Negro opposition to being trans ported by bus from the nearest or neighborhood school. In the North and West, the Negroes frequently demanded that students be sent by bus from their neighborhood schools to other schools to create a better racial balance. New Rochelle Case One of the first major desegregation cases in the North occurred in early 1961 in New Rochelle, N.Y. U.S. Dis trict Judge Irving Kaufman ruled on Jan. 24, 1961, that the school board in the past had created a segregated (predominantly Negro) school by ger rymandering the school district lines and transferring white children out side the district. For this reason, the judge decided, the board had a con stitutional duty to end any racial im balance in the school. In 1962, the NAACP’s executive, secretary, Roy Wilkins, announced, “We have now turned our attention to the North.” NAACP branches across the nation surveyed their local school systems to uncover discrimination in the assignment of teachers and stu dents. Negroes petitioned school boards, staged boycotts and filed lawsuits in the Northern and Western states. School officials employed a variety of plans to cope with de facto segre gation and racial imbalance. Buses took students from their overcrowded schools to ones with empty classrooms. School district lines were redrawn to include a better balance of Negroes and whites. Princeton, N.J., gave its name to the plan in which two ad joining districts, one predominantly white and one predominantly Negro, could be combined. The students in the new single district would attend one school for the first three years, then transfer to the other school for the next three years. Other cities employed “open enrollment,” letting students choose any school in the city, provided room was available. Conflicting Court Rulings Rulings by state and federal courts provided conflicting opinions on whe ther the Brown decision in 1954 cov ered racial imbalance and de facto segregation. The first such case ex pected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court is one originating in Gary, Ind. Both federal district and circuit courts have upheld the “neighborhood school” principle, even though it results in ex treme racial imbalance. The segregation problems now pe culiar to the North and West could have some bearing on Southern schools in the future. As an NAACP official explained, “The South has now arrived at the stage where integration is rec ognized by law. Unless we fight in the North, the South is merely going to adopt the methods used by the North to perpetuate segregation.” Shifts in Population Had Major Influence P opulation shifts have had a major influence on the rate and pattern of school segregation- desegregation in the past decade. The major trends have been: • Migration of Southern Negroes to Northern and Western cities • Movement of rural population, white and Negro, to urban areas in the South. • The exodus of whites from urban to suburban areas. These trends help to explain why removing obstacles to the admission of Negroes to schools with whites has not always resulted in large-scale desegregation. Many desegregated schools have reversed their original racial predominance, with the incom ing minority race becoming the ma jority. Some schools have changed from an all-white to an all-Negro enrollment. That is, segregated schools have been desegregated, then have be come resegregated. Such changes have been particularly common in Northern and border state cities because of the whites’ city-to- suburbs flight, and the influx of Ne groes from the South. Washington and Baltimore offer examples. Both cities lost population between 1950 and 1960, but the Negro population increased 45 per cent in Baltimore and 47 per cent in Washington. Figures Reveal Correspondingly, figures reveal that in 1953, just prior to desegregation, Baltimore had 51,827 Negroes in all- Negro schools. In the current year there are 79,431 in all-Negro schools or schools with less than five per cent white enrollment. In Washington be tween 1954 and 1963, the enrollment of Negro children increased by more than 72 per cent, while the enrollment of white children declined almost 50 per cent. Negroes constitute 85.7 per cent of the city’s public school enroll ment. Resegregation has been related to another phenomenon that has received much attention recently—de facto seg regation. Such segregation is usually due to a neighborhood school policy and residential patterns in urban areas. Northern integration groups have been attacking de facto segregation through Negroes in Schools with Whites (Continued from Page 1-B) rulings in the School Segregation Cases and admitted large numbers of Negroes to schools with whites. Other districts desegregated on a token basis— ad mitting a small number of Negroes to biracial schools as an indication of good faith, but resisting anything more. The third approach to the decisions— defiance—usually consisted of officials employing every means available to prevent Negroes from entering the public schools with whites. In Ala bama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia, state officials attempted unsuccessfully to interpose state au thority between federal court orders and the school districts concerned. Prince Edward County, Va., one of the defendants in the original School Segregation Cases, closed its public schools in 1959 to avoid a desegrega tion order. Most school districts desegregating during 1954-64 acted voluntarily. Of the desegregated districts, about 86 per cent dropped their discriminatory prac tices voluntarily—taking into account, of course, the original court decisions. The others complied only upon orders by the courts. The pace and status of school deseg regation may be measured by at least three different methods. One method compares the number of desegregated school districts with the number of districts having both Negroes and whites enrolled in the schools. Another counts the number of Negro students enrolled in the desegregated districts. Or desegregation may be measured by the number of Negro students actually attending schools with whites, and measuring this figure against the total Negro enrollment. Each method pro vides a different picture of desegrega tion, and each has its advantages and disadvantages as a representative mea sure. When the Supreme Court delivered its first decision 10 years ago, the 17 states, with the District of Columbia, had over 10,000 school districts. These varied in size from one district cov ering the attendance area for a single, one-room school, to that consisting of a combined city-county school system. Consolidation cut the figure to slightly over 6,100 by the end of the 10-year period. Only half of these districts have both Negro and white children of school age residing within them, and the other 3,000 districts are either all-white or all-Negro. Beginning with 159 desegregated districts in the first year of the decade, the region had reached 1,160 desegre gated districts by the end of the 10th year. This represented about 19 per cent of the total of 6,121 school dis tricts and 38 per cent of the 3,028 districts having both races enrolled. Counting the total enrollments in the desegregated districts provides a greater percentage of desegregation. The region has approximately 11 million white students and about three-and- one-half million Negro students in the public elementary and high schools. TEACHERS Some School Systems Desegregate Teachers rpEACHER DESEGREGATION, al- though not a specific issue in the original School Segregation Cases, has been initiated in four Southern states and all of the border states and the District of Columbia. Segregation of teachers and admin istrative personnel continues in seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Florida, Tennes see, Texas and Virginia have a few school systems in which students are being taught by members of another race. The border states have begun teacher desegregation on a much larger scale, especially in the larger cities. The early stages of school desegre gation caused a sizable number of teachers to lose their jobs in four states—Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia—as the districts began combining their dual school systems. In other instances, the number of Negro teachers has increased since desegregation. Negro Teachers Lose Jobs In September, 1961, the Missouri Advisory Committee to the U.S. Com mission on Civil Rights estimated that 125 to 150 Negro teachers in the state had lost their employment because of initial desegregation, mostly in rural communities. St. Louis and Kansas City have hired an increasing number of Negro teachers, some of them hav ing been dismissed elsewhere because of desegregation. Oklahoma reported the largest number of Negro teachers legal action, boycotts and other pub lic protests. Ten years after the Supreme Court’s decision public attention is focused on de facto segregation in Northern and Western cities as well as on the pace of desegregation in the Southern states. New York, with 1,087,931 Negroes in 1960, remains the city with the largest Negro population. Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Washington were the other cities with the largest Negro population. However, from a percentage standpoint, Southern and border cities have the heaviest con centrations of Negroes. Among the top 25 cities in total population, Washing ton (53.9), Atlanta (38.3), New Orleans (37.2), Memphis (37.0) and Baltimore (34.8) have the highest percentage of Negroes. As late as 1900 about 90 per cent of the Negro population lived in the South. By 1960 little more than 60 per cent remained in the region. During the decade 1950-1960, an estimated 1,500,000 Negroes migrated from the South to urban areas in the North, (See POPULATION, Page 3-B) who lost their jobs because of deseg regation—396. A number of teaching jobs in Texas were abolished by desegregation but the rising enrollment in the public schools has resulted in increasing em ployment for teachers of both races. A survey in West Virginia four years ago found that 58 Negro teachers had been displaced because of desegrega tion. Kentucky has had considerable de segregation of teachers. In 1963-64, the state had 507 Negroes teaching in de segregated schools, and about 995 were in all-Negro schools. The State Com mission on Human Rights reported in 1962 that biracial faculties were in creasing but that the employment out look for Negro teachers was not bright. Many superintendents, even those sat isfied with Negroes on biracial facul ties, said they did not plan to hire more Negro teachers, the commission reported. Issue in Suits Teacher desegregation has become a major issue in school suits filed in recent years. Federal judges have ordered teachers assigned on a non- discriminatory basis in two districts in Florida, four in Kentucky, and one in Oklahoma. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans has upheld the order for Duval County, Fla., to end segregation of teachers, ruling that the issue comes under the Brown decision of 1954. The first case on teacher desegrega tion to go before the U.S. Supreme Court is that from Atlanta, Ga. In that case, the lower courts have with held ruling directly on the issue but have retained jurisdiction. Hearings on the Atlanta case have been held and the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case within the next few weeks. Almost 50 per cent of the whites ay over 43 per cent of the Negroes attend schools in districts that have started desegregation. In recent years, statistics have beet available on the number of Negroes actually attending schools with whites. As the current school year ends—the 10th since 1954—315,841 Negroes attend desegregated schools, representing per cent of the total Negro enrollment for the region. These figures provide a clearer picture when broken down separately for the 11 Southern states and for the border area. Wide Difference The border area, with a total of 514,125 Negro students enrolled, has put 54.8 per cent of them in desegre gated schools. In the South, which has five-and-a-half times as many Negro students as the border area, only ug per cent are in mixed classrooms. , School districts desegregated are the only figures that have been main tained throughout the entire 10-year period. The trend toward consolidation of school districts has impaired the consistency of this figure. In the 1958- 59 school year, for example, the total of desegregated districts dropped from the previous year, yet more districts had desegregated. The total of 1,160 desegregated districts also includes 91 that are desegregated in policy but have no Negroes attending schools with whites. Although the figures on the number of Negro students enrolled in the de segregated districts may be large, the percentage of these students actually in mixed schools is much smaller. Twenty-one per cent of the Negro students in the desegregated districts attend the same schools with whites, and the other 79 per cent remain in all-Negro schools. The figures on the number of Ne groes in schools with whites do not reflect the all-white schools and dis tricts that would desegregate, or have desegregated, but are not counted be cause they have no Negro students. And this figure does not take into account the districts where Negroes and whites might remain in separate * schools for reasons not associated with state action or compulsion. Three-Year Surge Utilizing all three methods of sta tistics, a fairly accurate picture of j* 18 school desegregation pace can be de termined. The first three school years after the 1954 decision provided the region with a surge of desegregation By the end of the 1956-57 year, the region had 683 desegregated districts-” in practice or policy—and, accor - to estimates, about five per cen the region’s Negro students were biracial schools. Almost all of the desegregation ac tivity for these initial three y ea occurred in the border area, while the South, Texas was the only state experience any considerable a ®° of desegregation. The pace of . regation remained slow for the six school years, from 1957-58 t r 1962-63. In this six-year penoh- Negroes attending schools with w increased at a rate of about one ^ of one per cent a year, reaching^ even eight per cent total by Jr ^ of the ninth school year up Desegregation activityJSchool considerably during the 1963 , ,J oU t year. Two of the last three ^ states desegregated at the riem ^e. and high school level for the g oU th The actions in Alabama an Qt j v Carolina left Mississippi as state not having any biraciai te< j The region added 181 t ^ e ^ e ^ eg roe s districts and the number o by in schools with whites incre over one per cent. s b * • Pi 4 i t 4 Opening Exercises Desegregation day in at Maury High Norfolk, Va., 1959.