National Reports
SHELDON, COURTNEY & WYANT, JOSEPH R. FISZMAN, WILLIAM K. Jr.
National Reports The Future of Georgia's Schools By Joseph R. Fiszman Atlanta A conference in Geneva, a war in Indo-China, the surrender of Dienbienphu. For the average Southerner, these are...
...Louis, or how we should solve all our problems...
...Of all the other Southern governors, only James Byrnes of South Carolina has officially endorsed Talmadge's plan...
...As Mayor Tucker pointed out, the 1950 census showed that St...
...is it equal...
...Had they possessed such vision, they might have wondered who would remain to support the zoo, the art museum, the public buildings, the charity hospitals and all the other costly adjuncts of a metropolis...
...Rufus E. Clement, President of Atlanta University and only Negro member of the Atlanta Board of Education, declared at a luncheon meeting of the Atlanta Junior Chamber of Commerce (the first such gathering at which he was permitted to eat with white club members): "In spite of the law and decisions of the Supreme Court, you and I know that schools for Negroes and whites are not equal, by almost any yardstick you might want to use...
...The New England Telephone Company began hiring Negroes as telephone operators in 1945 and now employs them in jobs ranging up to junior engineer...
...A Negro real-estate broker bluntly stated the private-housing issue from his perspective: "No matter what our achievements or our cultural level, the) don't want us...
...A second candidate, Charles Gowen, offers a school plan of his own...
...They will settle for nothing less than abolition of segregation...
...This change in job outlook is evident, too, from an Urban League official's comment that "today we seldom see a person interested in domestic employment...
...Louis has suffered a gradual loss of power to the state legislature while losing people and industrial concerns to surrounding suburbs...
...Negro leaders in the Boston area are on record in newspaper accounts as feeling that, despite a 1948 U.S...
...Everything must be duplicated —a school for Negroes and a school for whites, even in communities which can barely support one school...
...The bulk of the Negro population is concentrated in the South End and Roxbury in Boston...
...Some 22 per cent of the old city has become blighted beyond repair, and 17 per cent is deteriorating progressively toward that state...
...Are we law-abiding people...
...If the South should attempt to provide two equal school systems for whites and Negroes, it would become bankrupt...
...Georgians are aware that segregation in city schools cannot be abolished as long as segregation exists in housing, and they are also aware that, in the rural districts, segregation will gradually disappear of itself—regardless of the Supreme Court ruling—due to the inability of the poorer communities to maintain and support two school systems...
...Louis alone, Mayor Tucker charged...
...The manpower shortage during World War II gave many Negroes a chance to prove their ability, and the Massachusetts Fair Employment Practices Act, passed in 1946, has helped perceptibly to widen job opportunities...
...Louis shall be allowed to die at its center...
...Teachers' salaries are fixed according to the 1946 cost of living...
...In twelve of the seventeen Southern states, Negroes are now admitted to state universities or private colleges...
...Urban redevelopment and expressway programs are afoot...
...The primary will be held on September 8, with a run-off, if necessary, three weeks later...
...The Negro leaders in Georgia, unlike those in Mississippi, are past the stage where the "separate but equal" formula can satisfy...
...A great many Georgians have never reached the tenth grade...
...The number of illiterates surpasses the number of college graduates...
...For some reason or other, many legislators set themselves up as experts on what was wrong with St...
...Now they hold down sales, clerical, personnel, buying and advertising jobs...
...This charge is regarded as extremely serious by Negroes here...
...Louis on the east, and an arbitrary line, unchanged since the 1870s, limits it from expansion to the West...
...Overall, the city is circumscribed by the Missouri General Assembly, which is also somewhat set in its ways...
...He blackly envisions civil disorder, talks about calling out the militia and the state police, and uses such phrases as "necessity for extreme action...
...Upper Roxbury is a mixed neighborhood, but the trend is toward another all-Negro district...
...Mayor Raymond R. Tucker, an amiable and high-minded gentleman, complained in an address to a church group here this month that virtually a third of his time, since assuming office more than a year ago, had been spent in stumping Missouri on behalf of state legislation desired by St...
...In the political arena, it is obvious that Negroes have not fully explored their opportunities...
...Ten years ago, Negroes were seldom found working in Boston's leading department stores other than as elevator operators, stock clerks or janitors...
...I am sure we do...
...Only a four-day visit by the New York Metropolitan Opera—which served more as a fashion and jewelry show for the audience—has placed these two most-discussed topics momentarily in the shadow...
...finally, he would leave the de facto maintenance of segregation (even in the face of an adverse Supreme Court decision) in the hands of the school superintendents, making them responsible for the assignment of students to particular schools and classes...
...And do we have the wise leadership in the South that will help the people make that sober second thought...
...They all endorse better highways, segregation and the county-unit system...
...Are we willing to give a sober second thought to the problem, or are we willing to be pushed pell-mell into making decisions before we know all the facts...
...Supreme Court decision declaring voluntary racial covenants unenforceable in the courts, the Negro is, in practice, barred from white neighborhoods by the hostility of whites...
...Only in the last 10 years has there been an impressive broadening of employment opportunities...
...The metropolis is "hamstrung" be-cause of its dependence on the legislature for decisions on matters which concern St...
...New horizons will open, of course, for the children...
...Louis to tax itself...
...This is separate...
...Is it only because—as the President of the National Education Association, William Early of Savannah, puts it —we spend as much on a road to get the Yankees from Chattanooga to Tallahassee as we do for education in Georgia.' It is because of this and much more...
...Boston's metropolitan area has an estimated 51,000 Negroes, far under the Negro population of New York, Detroit or Chicago...
...It will divide our country...
...Louis had the worst housing conditions of any large American city except New Orleans...
...Louis The timeless Mississippi bounds St...
...There is no lack of remedial measures...
...St Louis Falls Apart As Missouri Looks On By William K. Wyant Jr...
...Living out of suitcases, pleading the big city's dire need in remote hamlets, conferring with economy-minded Governor Phil M. Donnelly (a Democrat) at Jefferson City, 127 miles away, Mayor Tucker and his aides finally wrung from the rural lawgivers a new financial lease on life...
...They all seek the favors of the influential County Commissioners Association and the Georgia Teachers' Association...
...Georgia today spends 85 cents per child per day as compared to a national average of $1.24...
...One Negro with a PhD in physics succeeded in buying a residential home when a white real-estate dealer suggested he inspect it after dark...
...Why must teachers struggle so...
...They became experts in the field despite the fact some of them had never been to St...
...The schools are not much better—although great strides have been made in the last few years...
...Each day, new candidates for the Democratic nomination crop up...
...Insurance companies now employ 600 to 700 Negroes in clerical positions as contrasted with about 25 in 1944...
...All I asked was that it give us permission to tax ourselves...
...Like many American cities laid down before the automobile replaced the quadruped, St...
...A twentieth-century crusade urging more equality for the Negro in job and housing opportunities would find some ammunition—though not a spectacular amount—in this city...
...For the average Southerner, these are matters of remote and unsubstantial importance...
...Teachers see in the plan a threat to their occupational gains...
...Period...
...In general, Boston Negroes will agree that considerable strides have been made, though slowly, but that complete emancipation is still a talking goal...
...There are now only a handful of Negroes in white communities around Boston...
...But this must be done in order to maintain the pretense of "separate but equal...
...The job picture is not quite so alarming, though, viewed in historical perspective and considering the lapse of years since Emancipation, it is disquieting to Negroes...
...Says Georgia's Governor Herman Talmadge: "It's a rape of the Constitution . . . national suicide...
...To an outside observer, the candidates thus far seem very much alike, although one of them, Fred Hand, does affect a mustache...
...The Southern Problem Up North By Courtney R. Sheldon Boston In the 100 years since Harriet Beecher Stowe roused the country with her abolitionist writings and helped to emancipate the slaves, the lot of Negroes in the queen city of her native New England has not improved rapidly enough to remove it from controversy...
...Upon the recommendation of Talmadge, the last legislature elected an Educational Committee to prepare a plan for the establishment of private schools to replace the public-school system in the event that the Supreme Court abolishes segregation...
...My trips outstate," said the Mayor in his speech, "were to persuade the members of the Missouri legislature that it should allow St...
...Behind the earnings-tax struggle was the basic question, many observers here feel, of whether St...
...From the midst of all this heat rises a clear and sane voice...
...The highways are bad...
...The world has not yet come to an end because of these things...
...I do not think that was asking too much of anyone, but the legislature did not seem to be in agreement...
...It simply would not be able to finance them...
...And pretense it is...
...I put that on record for those who say that blood will flow in the streets, etc...
...Other organizations interested in education—such as the PTAs and the Georgia Education Association—declare that Talmadge's plan would open the door to favoritism and corruption...
...These figures are taken from the report of the Educational Committee of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce...
...Maintenance costs have risen...
...What does arouse excitement in Georgia is discussion of schools and highways...
...Builders in the suburbs, especially those with several houses on their hands, refuse to sell to Negroes on the assumption that, if they sell one house to a Negro family, the others will be difficult to sell...
...Basically, however, the problems of Negroes in Northern industrial centers are the same...
...I would rest my case on the leadership of thoughtful Southern citizens...
...The coming Supreme Court ruling on segregation will not have an immediate effect on Georgia—Georgia is not one of the cases being considered...
...There are more than 1,000 such Negro students, and there has not been a single incident...
...Louis to levy an earnings tax which produces $8 million annually...
...These require an outlay of funds, however, and the city's earnings tax is one way of seeing to it that suburbanites, who earn their livings in the city but live on greener hills outside, share the cost with city-dwellers...
...When the city limits of St...
...Significantly, too, Griffin attacks the "powerful money interests in Atlanta" and the "out-of-state controlled press...
...then, he would exhaust all means of maintaining segregation...
...While the white school has an enrollment of 945, the Negro school must somehow accommodate 2,280...
...Sooner or later, some say in ten or fifteen years, the present system will collapse and a natural mingling of the races will begin in the classroom...
...There is only one Negro in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, none in the Senate, and none on the Boston City Council...
...Louis were crystallized, the worthy burghers then in charge could hardly have foreseen that one day the cornfields 20 miles out would blossom with bungalows, and people drive in to work...
...The Mayor's complaint referred to prodigious efforts made by himself and other civic leaders here to obtain passage by the General Assembly of an enabling act authorizing St...
...Strong and influential organizations in Georgia itself have expressed themselves against segregation on principle...
...If there is a desperate shortage of white teachers, there is a surplus of qualified Negro teachers—each year, 500 Negro teachers apply for the 100 new positions open to them...
...According to this plan, children will receive educational grants directly from the state and use them in the schools, which, overnight, will have been transformed from public property into the private possessions of this or that political friend...
...Talmadge cannot seek re-election as Governor, and the race to succeed him is wide open...
...They insist that integration of whites and Negroes in private housing is the best means of increasing mutual understanding...
...First, he would assume a wait-and-see attitude...
...Yes, schools and highways...
...Take two schools in the same district of Atlanta—Bass High for white children and Howard High for Negroes, each with a capacity of 1,404 students...
...To date, however, only one candidate, Marvin Griffin, Lieutenant Governor during the past four years, favors the Talmadge plan...
...Louis, and lived and worked several hundred miles from our city...
...He added that the nibbling away of powers of self-government had been getting worse instead of better, and be proposed a new city charter designed to mend these matters...
...Some Negro leaders here feel that increased political activity is one means of obtaining "complete emancipation," but there is wide indifference toward the issue...
...Why must so many rural schools occupy shabby, outmoded hovels...
...But, in the meantime, the heat is rising...
...I did not ask the state to provide financial assistance to us, or to give its largest city a cash handout...
...Next Week: Frank Mankiewicz reports on a visit to Hollywood, new processes and all...
...Of the 202 school systems in the state, 160 pay their teachers the minimum wage scale set by the State Department of Education: from $1,500 a year for a beginner with two years of college, to a maximum of $3,300 for a teacher with a master's degree and nine years' practical experience...
...Actually, both Negro and white schools will benefit from abolition...
...Louis...
...Revenues have not kept pace...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 21
