National Reports: Florida's 'Moderate' Segregation Formula
PERLMUTTER, NATHAN
Florida's Moderate' Segregation Formula By Nathan Perlmutter MIAMI FLORIDA'S skillful preservation of its segregated school system is being carefully studied by Southern law makers. For the...
...still another would have provided a fine and imprisonment for Negro or white parents who enrolled their children in a school pupilled by another race...
...But the closed and mixed schools in Arkansas and Virginia have exposed to the rest of the South the weak ness of all-out intransigence...
...There was another factor at work for "'moderation" in Florida, and in other sections of the South as well...
...Bills to provide tax deductions for any person or corporation who contributed money to a private school also were seriously deliberated...
...The Governor, pointing to the effectiveness of the law to date, pleaded that a token show of integration in Miami would serve as legal immunization against possible court findings that it was unconstitutional...
...Insofar as small county gubernatorial aspirants in the legislatures are concerned, they must avoid exclusive identification as "pork choppers" (small county politicians) as surely as "lamb choppers" (large county politicians) must avoid being stereo typed as city slickers...
...At some future date, somewhere in Miami, Tampa or Jacksonville there will be another school in another changing neighborhood, into which a school board will place a handful of Negro children and thus "com ply" with the law...
...The South, as editor Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution has constantly repeated, has not been told the truth by its political leaders...
...On and on, in succeeding trumpet calls of belligerent bluster, the bills were introduced—and, strangely, smothered...
...Miami's move, the cracker-controlled legislature feared, threatened the state's care fully worked out, "legal" anti-segregation program...
...To understand what happened in Florida, it is necessary to under stand that, notwithstanding the still-powerful grip which race attitudes hold in the South, the segregation issue itself is responsive to the shifting winds of political reality as well as to Southern "politics as usual...
...That massive resistance was politically expedient in Virginia when Governor J. Lind say Almond was campaigning is also evident from his election...
...Phenomena like massive resistance die piece by piece over the period of time required by the reverberating facts of death to reach from the Richmonds into the Georgia backwoods and in to the far and remote cracker counties of northwest Florida...
...It is designed, of course, to maintain segregation or nearly complete segregation by using sociological and psychological criteria for as signing students to a particular school...
...But something else had happened, something of long-range importance...
...True, the legislatures, apportioned according to population estimates of the Year One, are heavily balanced in favor of the small counties, and are indifferent to the voices from the populous metropolitan areas...
...He noted that Arkansas and Virginia had both tried massive resistance and both now have desegregation, while "moderate" Florida's schools are white as ivory...
...the last, which became law without the Governor's signature, permits a parent to withdraw a child from an integrated school if a school board denies a request for transfer to a segregated school...
...And so the Legislature ended, its arrival and departure for all practical purposes those of the lion and the lamb...
...Increasing ly, the segregation issue is taking its place alongside legislative apportionment and taxes as an issue dividing the large and small, or rural and metropolitan, counties...
...The Legislature, its destination as sure as the sleepwalker's, preserved and fortified the State's segregated school system...
...However, whereas the state legislatures are inhospitable gauntlets through which big city desires stumble and fall, the metropolitan areas with their numerical voter pre dominance enjoy refuge and sway in the executive chamber...
...His pork chop sympathies beyond question, Beasley proceeded to establish his currency with the lamb chop counties...
...In short, to be Governor of most Southern states, the aspirant must ably display a politically ambidextrous personality on such issues as reapportionment, taxes and, today, as the death of massive resistance sinks into the Southern minds, on segregation...
...It had been greeted with a maximum of apprehension and a minimum of expectation, and, happily, it disappointed on both counts...
...But the Legislature wasn't impressed, particularly not by a Governor it condemns as a Southern apostate...
...It believed, and by and large still does, although some doubts seem to be setting in...
...they are voters...
...As the die-hard segregationists in the backwoods fall back before the advances of the courts, and as they, in their defiance, grow more and more adventurous, with the free, compulsory public school system, the internal Southern cleavage between urban and rural counties widens...
...Consequently, massive resistance is politically passe for Florida, as indeed it is throughout the South today...
...Only four comparatively innocuous school bills became law...
...that the Supreme Court had acted unconstitutionally...
...For the Sunshine State appears to have come up with an anti-integration formula that may survive court action...
...But this is not enough to explain the failure of the Legislature to enNATHAN PERLMUTTER is Florida director for the Anti-Defamation League...
...In those Georgia backwoods, in the outlying parishes of Louisiana, in the small counties of Florida, the emotional fervor for massive resistance remains turgidly alive...
...The Orchard Villa school, chosen with either clever or unconscious irony, is in a changing neighborhood which will shortly be a Negro neighborhood...
...The vagaries of politics had sufficed to stifle legislative extremism and so to maintain for Florida its embattled free, public school system...
...This is the accidental Florida formula which the Deep South is studying...
...and, importantly, they are concentrated in the big cities in the big counties...
...That did it...
...The first allows county school boards to separate students by sex in the event of racial desegregation...
...They had made their record, too...
...the third amends the Pupil Assignment Law to permit school boards to determine the effect of a student's admission on the academic standing of a school...
...So it was that Speaker Tom Beasley of the Florida House, by his own description a member of the "ardent segregationist" faction ("maybe I'm the most ardent"), saw fit to establish at the outset of the session a "clearing house" committee on race legislation...
...Bill after racist bill, those passed in the Senate and those with certain majorities in the House (short of two-thirds), marked time in Beasley's extraordinary committee...
...The hostility which Southern state governments bear the Federal government differs only in degree from the hard feelings Southern big cities bear their own state governments...
...And as each bill lingered, weakened and died, the name of Tom Beasley bubbled and boiled as a gubernatorial candidate...
...They are numerous...
...Governor LeRoy Collins, at the opening session, implored the legislators to stand pat with their two-year-old Pupil Assignment Law...
...It simply didn't work...
...For the PTAs, the church groups, the teachers' groups, the professional groups that have been urging the maintenance of the free public school system are suddenly finding them selves part of a rather meaningful lobby...
...That Governor Orval Faubus' defiance of the Federal Government was politically sound was proven by his subsequent re-election...
...In this regard, the Miamis of the South share a Hatfield kinship with the New York Citys of the North, as opposed to the Tallahassee and Albany McCoys...
...Passed by a special session in 1956, it authorizes local school boards to classify and assign pupils to schools on the basis of criteria other than race...
...They ranged from laws that would have closed down the entire school system in the event of the desegregation of a single school to laws that would have made teaching in an integrated school a criminal offense...
...an other would simply have prohibited compulsory school attendance in de segregated schools...
...Last April, the Florida Legislature convened in a mood of massive resistance amid widespread predictions that extreme race legislation would be passed...
...Meanwhile, consistent with the requirements of gubernatorial jockeying, Dade County Senators were introducing two of the race bills, albeit "moderate" ones, which finally became law...
...One bill would have prohibited any discussion within the public school system which might tend to "influence" or "persuade" in favor of racial integration...
...In so doing, it boosted the longevity of school segregation throughout the South...
...Florida, in satisfying itself with making faces rather than with throwing legislative stones, has altered the balance in the great tug-of-war...
...By "accepting" the Supreme Court's decision, as the Pupil Assignment Law implicitly does, and by acceding to token integration in a token school it has averted action in Federal courts for the time being...
...Speaker Beasley—from miniscular De Funiak Springs in northwest Florida, the only legislator in Florida history to serve as Speaker for a second time—had launched his gubernatorial campaign without any resort to coyness...
...In Florida, the stiffening of sup port in metropolitan areas for the free, public and compulsory school system plainly suggested to the Legislature's gubernatorial hopefuls the need to adjust their segregation tactics accordingly...
...At his request, the House adopted a rule that a two-thirds majority vote would be necessary to withdraw a bill from committee...
...It was "politics as usual...
...It believed, too, that massive (and in some cases, muscled) resistance was the way around or even over the Court's illegal fiat...
...Political lies do not die all at once...
...Thirty-three race bills were introduced in both houses...
...Besides, unable to succeed himself, Collins is a political lame duck, and with the 1960 gubernatorial prize up for grabs, he was ad dressing a Legislature which included many defiant aspirants to his position...
...The Legislature's deter mined truculence had been triggered by the Dade County School Board's earlier decision to admit four Negro students in September into Miami's Orchard Villa school...
...act extreme legislation...
...the second allows 25 or more citizens to set up a private school...
...Problems of legislative apportionment, tax sources and tax distribution contain a high irritation factor and rub hard the sensitivities of the competing large and small counties...
Vol. 42 • July 1959 • No. 28
