Newspaper Page Text
SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS—NOVEMBER, 1964—PAGE 9
jjORTH CAROLINA
^AACP Asks
Repeal of Law
On Assignment
(Continued from Page 1)
! jad develop programs to counteract
I increased dropouts.”
In a model constitution, the NAACP
proposed the following statement on
education:
“The committee on education shall
(1) seek to eliminate segregation and
other discriminatory practices in pub
lic education; (2) study local educa
tional conditions affecting minority
groups; (3) investigate the public
school system and school zoning; (4)
end familiarize itself with textbook
material used in the schools and seek
to eliminate material therefrom which
is racially derogatory; (5) seek to
stimulate school attendance; (6) keep
informed of school conditions and strive
j to correct abuses where found; (7) aim
| to be a center of popular education on
the race question and on the work of
the NAACP.”
★ ★ ★
At least one Negro will be a mem
ber of the permanent staff of the North
Carolina Advancement School, sched
uled to open Nov. 8 in Winston-Salem.
Among the new permanent staff mem
bers announced for the school Oct. 29
by Dr. Gordon McAndrew, director, is
Alton White of Tampa, Fla. A former
football player at Florida A&M Uni
versity in Tallahassee, Fla., White later
was employed as a junior high physical
education teacher and football coach.
He will work as a resident counselor.
The school is designed to help stu
dents who have potential but are not
achieving to the limit of their abilities.
Students will be of junior high school
grades.
★ ★ ★
Gov. George Wallace of Alabama
told the Durham County Citizens’
Council Oct. 20 that his proposal to
make public schools a state responsi-
bility is not racial. He is seeking the
passage of an amendment to the U.S.
Constitution that would prevent the
federal government or federal courts
from having any jurisdiction over state
educational systems. He said:
All this does is say the people of
•forth Carolina are best qualified to
determine policy for local schools. This
B n °f a racial amendment.”
★ ★ ★
p.^° players from Stephens-Lee
7*®" School in Asheville will become
he first Negroes to play on the varsity
basketball team of a predominantly
white college when the cage season be-
Jd&s in December for Western Carolina
College.
Both Negro players, Henry Logan anc
Herbert Moore, are freshmen, and wer<
North Carolina Highlights
The North Carolina Conference of
Branches of the National Associa
tion for the Advancement of Colored
People demanded the repeal of the
state pupil assignment law and full
desegregation of schools.
Negroes in Person County filed
suit demanding the end of segrega
tion in Person County schools.
teammates in high school. Logan is in
college on an athletic scholarship, and
Moore is there on his own.
Western Carolina is rated a power
among small colleges in the National
Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.
Legal Action
Person County
Board Named
In Lawsuit
Parents of 10 Negro children filed
suit Oct. 5 against the Person County
Board of Education in the U.S. Middle
District Court in Greensboro, charging
the county with operating a segregated
school system. The case, designated
Clayton v. Person County Board of
Education, seeks an injunction against
the board and asks that it set up a
plan for ending segregation of schools
at all levels.
The plaintiffs charge that the school
system assigned one Negro to one of
Person County’s 12 predominantly
white schools during the 1963-64
school year and two during the 1964-
65 school year.
“Negroes have been and continue to
be initially assigned to schools attended
and staffed exclusively by Negroes,”
the complaint charged. “All the Person
County public schools are maintained
and administered by defendant on a
racially segregated basis.”
White children are assigned to white
schools, the plaintiffs charged, and
teachers are assigned on a racial basis.
Extra-curricular activities are segre
gated, Negroes complained. The peti
tion further charged that “school
budgets, disbursements of school funds
and new school constructions are made
on a racially segregated basis . . .”
★ ★ ★
The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Ap
peals in Richmond ordered the States
ville City School Board to admit two
Negro children to a predominantly
white high school in a ruling Oct. 5.
In this suit (Nesbitt v. Statesville
City Board of Education), the Negroes
are appealing an Aug. 2 ruling by U.S.
District Judge J. B. Craven that ap
proved a three-year plan for desegre-
tion of schools for Statesville. (SSN,
October.) Under this plan, junior high
schools would be desegregated in
1965-66.
The appellate court will hear the
case in Baltimore in November.
Schoolmen
Educator Predicts Better
Race Relations in School
®*ter race relations will be one of
0 strong currents of change” in
*^1 problems, Dr. John H. Fischer,
Resident of Teachers College, Colum-
Sb Universit y- told the North Carolina
School Board Association Oct. 22
^~apel Hill. Of the changes, he said:
' J ne is the growing effort to improve
“ons between the races and to
of {U Ze practice the opportunities
e §ro Americans. The second is the
a insistence of teachers upon
insistence of teachers
jyser role in school affairs.”
lc ~**^ e r said promoters of anti-
jy^Sation school boycotts are the new
^““sts in education. He explained:
tiojii 6tl ^ ears a §° the diehard segrega
te were the chief troublemakers.
absurd but tragic efforts to
T *be advancement of humanity in
fy ^ted States, they imposed dread-
rdens on school systems, teach-
^ on children.
fujjy k! worst °f that period hope-
behind us, in the past year the
bu 0tlt j S bave been threatened with a
br s Wave of extremism. The promo
te^ , Sc hool boycotts professed Con
or human values, but when they
defied the law, discredited moderation
and used their ends to justify their
means, they joined the segregationists
in a form of absolutism which cannot
be condoned.
“In the name of justice and equality
such actions undermine the child’s re
spect for the very school which is his
surest hope for attaining equal op
portunity.”
★ ★ ★
The issue of the story, “Little Black
Sambo,” flared up for one day in the
Winston-Salem-Forsyth County school
system, then died out Oct. 22 as a re
sult of a television interview.
Dr. F. W. Jackson, a Negro serving
as co-chairman of the mayor’s Good
will Committee and an official of the
local branch of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored Peo
ple, stirred up the issue when a tele
vision reporter asked him about the
reported banning of the story in
Lincoln, Neb.
Jackson said he did not know enough
to comment at first, read the story, then
asked Ned R. Smith, associate superin-
V1RG1N1A
Virgina Education Association
Urges Repeal of Tuition Grants
(Continued from Page 8)
school in the city. He said racial
discrimination has been abolished,
adding: “We don’t intend to promote
mass integration.”
Sobeloff and four other judges hear
ing the case took under advisement
the question of the Richmond plan’s
legality.
In the Colleges
VPI Officials Deny
Segregation Charge
Of Syracuse Students
The Syracuse University student
newspaper reported Oct. 29 that the
school’s student senate had authorized
a letter to the president of Virginia
Polytechnic Institute, protesting what
the senate said were segregation prac
tices at VPI.
Mississippi
(Continued from Page 7)
classes in all Catholic schools in the
state would become biracial this fall.
The number of Negroes enrolled had
not been announced at the end of Oc
tober.
In the Colleges
Brown University
Professor Scores
Tougaloo Program
A Brown University history professor
has described Brown’s program to aid
predominantly Negro Tougaloo College
near Jackson as “immoral and a big
mistake.”
Dr. Forrest McDonald said he be
lieves it is a “grossly immoral thing”
for people from one section of the coun
try to go to another area and tell them
how to solve their local problems.
The widely publicized project, an
nounced in May, is designed to assist
Tougaloo to improve its educational
program.
McDonald, a native of Orange, Texas,
and a graduate of the University of
Texas, made his remarks during a de
bate in Providence, R. L, on the civil
rights positions of the two major presi
dential candidates.
“Universities make a big mistake in
getting involved in civil rights pro
grams,” he said. “This university right
here—Brown University—is making a
big mistake in its Tougaloo project.”
His criticism was greeted with hisses
from several persons from the audience
and an isolated, loud “boo.”
“It’s a big mistake to get involved,”
McDonald said, “because the only thing
you’re going to do is to raise their hopes
to achieve things they cannot do in this
society. The disparity between aspira
tion and ability to achieve practically
amounts to a national disease.”
tendent of schools, to consider removing
the story from school library shelves.
Banning books is not a good thing,
Jackson said, as he suggested “caution.”
He commented, “Little Black Sambo”
could give children a wrong picture of
the Negro (although the story is writ
ten about a boy in India). He said:
“The country and the city are in a
transitional period. Anything that is
more or less stereotyped and depicts
any ethnic group in any one category
so vehemently is not good for chil
dren.”
At that time Smith said, “I think both
of us agreed that neither of us had
enough information to do anything
about it right then.”
The senate rejected a motion to sug
gest a boycott of the Syracuse-VPI
football game to be played at Syracuse
Nov. 14, according to the student
paper, the Daily Orange.
The paper said the motion to send
the letter of protest was carried by a
vote of 73-69 at a senate meeting
Wednesday night, Oct. 28. The motion
was made by Kathleen Kapsol, a
senior from Hicksville, Va., who was
quoted as saying that although VPI
was officially desegregated in 1950, it
enrolls Negro students only if the sub
jects they seek are not available at
any other Virginia school.
At Blacksburg, Va., VPI Vice Presi
dent Warren W. Brandt said the
Syracuse charges “are quite untrue”
and that the school has been desegre
gated for more than a decade.
‘Completely Desegregated’
“All our facilities are completely de
segregated,” Dr. Brandt said. “Admis
sion is based solely on the student’s
academic record and the recommenda
tions of his former teachers.”
Last year, according to figures
furnished to Southern Education Re
porting Service, VPI had one Negro
in a student body of just under 6,000.
Figures for this year have not been
made available.
The trustees of Washington and Lee
University have voted, in effect, to
permit enrollment of Negroes, accord
ing to a statement to the student
newspaper Oct. 28 by President Fred
C. Cole.
Dr. Cole said the trustees voted last
summer to allow the faculty-controlled
committee on admissions to set ad
mission policies. The committee is said
to favor desegregation.
Washington and Lee has an enroll
ment of about 1,000 men. The school’s
WASHINGTON
he four-year closing of pub
lic schools in Prince Edward
County, Va., “led to vast changes
in the community” and severely
damaged intelligence quotients
and achievement levels of Negro
children, a team of researchers
has reported to the U.S. Office of
Education.
The researchers—a Michigan State
University group headed by Prof.
Robert Green—conducted intensive
testing and interviewing in Prince Ed
ward County last year under a grant
from the Office of Education.
Unique Situation
They described the study as “an at
tempt to catalog the results of a signifi
cant and unique situation in the history
of American education: the closing of
the public schools” in the county.
Prince Edward public schools were
closed in the fall of 1959 to avoid court-
ordered desegregation. White students
were enrolled in a private academy, but
most of the county’s Negro pupils re
ceived only sporadic remedial instruc
tion—or no schooling at all—until a
Since then several newspapers have
written editorials on the subject. A
typical editorial appeared in the
Greensboro Daily News of Oct. 26 un
der the title, “The Perils of Book
Burning.” It concluded:
“Dr. Jackson is well-intentioned. But
his view is typical of the new wave of
dogmatism which seems to be sweeping
the nation. It stems from a sense of
guilt about racial injustice. And yet
history cannot be rewritten and litera
ture destroyed simply to assuage a new
generation’s feeling about the past.
Book burning is no answer to man’s in
humanity toward man.”
No action has been taken or asked
since then.
campus adjoins that of Virginia Mili
tary Institute in the Shenandoah Valley
town of Lexington.
Since its founding in 1749 the uni
versity has had only one Negro student.
He was John Chavis, a free-born Negro
who attended in 1802, according to the
July, 1930, issue of the North Carolina
Historical Review.
Political Action
GOP Candidate
Attacks Sen. Byrd
On Closed Schools
Richard A. May, who was the Re
publican candidate for the U.S. Senate
from Virginia, said in an address Oct.
8 that “the Byrd
machine showed
its disinterest in
public education
when it threat
ened to close
down the schools
during the mas
sive resistance fi
asco.”
May, who ran
against incumbent
Sen Harry F.
Byrd, told the Ar
lington Education Association at Strat
ford Junior High School:
“No matter what one may personally
think of the Supreme Court’s 1954
school decision, the drive of the Byrd
machine to wreck your great public
school system in defiance of the law
of the land is a long-lasting stain on
the leadership which Virginia once
gave the Republic.”
Sen. Byrd was re-elected on Nov. 3.
free school system, financed by private
donations, was established in the fall
of 1963. Public schools reopened under
court order this fall, but almost all
of the county’s white children continue
to attend private classes.
In a 230-page report to the Office of
Education, the Michigan State research
ers said IQ levels among Negro child
ren who had no schooling for four
years dropped by as much as 30 points,
placing many of the children at the
“borderline defective” level.
Impossible to Recover’
“If environments exert their greatest
effects during the early years, then
many of the observed deficits will be
impossible to recover,” the report said.
It added, however, that “intensive ed
ucational programs” may make up for
some of the educational loss.
Short-term remedial programs pro
vided for the Prince Edward Negro
pupils “were partially effective but
were not adequate substitutes for con
tinued education,” the researchers
found.
They reported that some 14-year-old
children who once had known how to
read lost the skill during their pro
longed absence from school. An early
discovery in administering the testing
program was that some 10-year-old
children needed instruction in how to
hold pencils and turn pages.
Reduced Goals
The study points to reduced educa
tional and occupational goals among
children deprived of schooling. How
ever, delinquency “was not as wide
spread as might be expected in a situa
tion where a great many young people
had an overabundance of free time. . .”
Relations between white and Negro
residents of the county were acutely
affected by the school crisis, the report
says.
“Communication, although not com
pletely destroyed, decreased sharply,
and both racial groups tended to be
come psychologically deaf and blind to
the actual feelings, opinions, needs and
desires of the other group.”
Effects of Closed Schools
Reported by Research