The Facts About School Segregation
GORDON, MILTON M.
The Facts About School Segregation The Negro and the Schools. By Harry S. Ashmore. North Carolina. 228 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Milton M. Gordon Department of Sociology, Haverford...
...To particularize on the credit side, the tabular and graphic presentation in this volume is unusually clear, and the writing style is a model of lucidity and effectiveness, thus increasing the chances of a wide readership...
...In view of the economic logic of the situation and some of Mr...
...If one may cavil at anything about this valuable report, it is only its brevity (there are only 139 pages of text, the rest consisting of annotated tables) and the author's tendency to de-emphasize the role of segregation in increasing school costs in the South in the past (while conceding its increasing relevance for the future, should segregation be retained...
...The aim of the Fund was to obtain and present the data objectively and not to argue the case either for or against de-segregation...
...A similar conclusion is reached as regards admission of Negroes, by court order, to the previously all-white graduate and professional schools of Southern universities...
...The facts and figures are all here...
...Accordingly, a research staff was assembled and over 40 scholars and social scientists, many of them Southern, were commissioned to get the facts...
...Field studies of these cases were made in 25 communities ranging geographically from New Jersey to New Mexico, and a sample of them is reported on in this volume...
...Recent years, however, have seen some examples of "de-segregation" north or west of Dixie...
...They will need the good will and informed patience of the nation as a whole...
...Now the citizens of the affected states and communities are faced with the complex problem of carrying out the Court's decision and desegregating the public schools...
...The social distance encompassed in that period, however, separates two distinct eras of ethical sensitivity and sociological understanding...
...contributor, N. Y. "Times Magazine'' The chronological distance between the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which sanctioned "separate but equal" facilities for Negroes and whites, and the recent Court decision declaring racially segregated public education to be unconstitutional, is only 58 years...
...Among other results, these constant demographic shifts would have made it increasingly expensive and difficult to maintain a segregated system of education...
...For this task, all will find Harry S. Ashmore's report, The Negro and the Schools, the definitive summary of the segregated past and present in public education and of the resources available to an integrated future...
...but it is still large...
...Under the pressure of the more recent decisions, the notorious gap between Negro and white educational facilities, as exemplified by current expenditures per pupil, teachers' salaries and other indices, has been closing...
...On the whole, the process has worked out well...
...This report represents a happy union of foundation money, social research and good journalism, and its pinpoint timeliness is not accidental...
...Reviewed by Milton M. Gordon Department of Sociology, Haverford College...
...Ashmore's own statements and data elsewhere in the text, this deemphasis seems unwarranted...
...Negroes continue to move out of the South into other regions of the country in significant numbers, they are moving out of the rural South into Southern cities, and they are keeping their children in school longer...
...In the non-South (Ashmore's term), educational segregation has not infrequently resulted from discrimination in housing, from administrative policy, and occasionally, in border states, from prescriptive or permissive legislation...
...Certainly all who participated in this project have contributed to an enterprise which will serve the nation well as it proceeds to deal with the problems of transition to a more democratic era in race relations and public education...
...professional educators and laymen alike—have steeled themselves for a far more severe public reaction than they actually encountered...
...One thing that stands out in these case histories," he declares, "is the frequency with which those who have had experience with integration...
...Last year, the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education sensed that, whatever the outcome of the litigation before the Court, now was the time to take a "new and comprehensive look" at biracial education in this country...
...More detailed monographs and studies on the material will be published later...
...Ashmore emphasizes that segregated education in the South has been but one aspect of a two-pronged general educational problem in the region: low per capita income (only in small part balanced by a greater percentage of income spent for public schools) and a great inadequacy in rural schools as compared with urban...
...of disorder or violence in the transitions...
...It is instructive to be reminded that segregation in public education is not exclusively a Southern phenomenon...
...Various judicial decisions which either reinforced segregated education, or later, beginning in the 1930s, began to erode it, are presented and analyzed...
...Ashmore cites only one incident (in Cairo, Ill...
...executive director of the Arkansas Gazette, was made director of the project and given the task of preparing the basic summary and interpretation of the findings for presentation to the general public...
...The volume includes chapters describing the structure and resources of Negro and white education in the South from Reconstruction days to the present...
...The study points to underlying basic sociological trends which bear significantly on the current and future educational pattern...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 28
