Schooling For America’s Negro Children

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27678, 7 June 1955, Page 11

Schooling For America’s Negro Children

[Specially Written for the A WASHINGTON, June 5. It always comes as a matter of much surprise to foreigners that America, which shows such genuine concern for the independence of small countries and the protection of minorities in various parts of the world, experiences so much difficulty in dealing with its own minority problem, the negro. 1 ~

In at least 21 States, the future of negroes, who total some 16,000,000, or one-tenth of the entire population, is again being discussed with various degrees of vehemence after the Supreme Court decision to implement its decision in principle of a year ago, that segregation in American schools must end.

There are 21 States in which such segregation is either permitted or required by the State law, all of them in the southern area, where negro slavery flourished before the Civil War.

Just a year ago the Supreme Court literally stunned these States by banning racial segregation in schools, thus striking at the root of the whole segregation problem. In the intervening period the Supreme Court has heard arguments concerning when and how its decision, is to be carried out in these 21 States, and has now said that integration must be accomplished on a reasonable local basis.

Some Southern States had feared that the Court might set a date on which integration must be accomplished. • What must interest any objective observer is what has happened in those Southern States between those two Court decisions. The first decision created more argument, and caused more people to think of the problem than anything that has occurred since the Civil War, and thought and argument within the 12 months have created a growing public opinion in the South that racial discrimination in public schools must end. Today this is definitely not the majority opinion in the South where, in many places, there is a strong and sometimes fierce and bitter opposition to mixing-white and coloured children.

Indeed, it is not hard to find predictions from advocates of white

•Z.P.A. by FRANK OLIVER] supremacy that segregation will still be in force in some parts of the South for generations to come, but what is rising is a tide of public opinion in the South recognising that the dual school system is not compatible with American principles and the statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. At present, duplicate school systems prevail throughout the South. White children are taught by white teachers and coloured children by coloured teachers in separate buildings. The question being faced by this new public opinion in the South is not whether, but how, this duplicated system is to be ended and integration accomplished.

The Supreme Court is coming in for encomiums for its recent decision, to take into account this rising tide of opinion favouring integration, and which decision indeed might have been worthless without such opinion existing in the South. It was obvious that once the segregation issue reached the Supreme Court its decision must be against it, but it was equally obvious that neither the Court nor the Government could coerce 21 States.

At first, some thought the Supreme Court had to some extent vacated responsibility by ruling that the lower courts in the South must decide “whether the action of the school authorities constitutes good faith implementation of the governing constitutional principles” against racial discrimination.

It may be true, as one Southern senator has stated, that the court has created “a generation of lawsuits,” for there are defiant voices in areas where the problem is most difficult. But most observers felt that the decision wisely recognises that there is a real will to integration in the South and that the will will find a way.

In some areas authority is willing, but beset with enormous difficulties, not the least of which is that the coloured school system is invariably inferior to the white system, and that it is going to cost a mint cl money to raise the coloured stan-. dards to where integration is feasible and practicable.