A Colonial Portrait

...Three successive Presidents have asked for local self-government...

...Yet shocked comments usually draw the easy moral and avoid the deeper responsibility...

...And thanks to the House District Committee, headed by Congressman John L. McMillan of South Carolina, the final victory—an end to colonialism—is more elusive than ever...

...Thanks to the courts and Presidential orders, and to local conscience, Negroes are now halfway to equality in Washington...

...It must be unflinchingly noted that the problem will get worse before it gets better...

...They can starve the Washington school system of funds, harass it by investigations and then condemn the very results they have helped to bring about...

...It was perplexing— this awareness of color—so much a part of the city and yet so far removed from the reality of the white man's daily life...

...In recent years, social and economic barriers to equality have been eroded...

...Last November, Negroes took the lead in censuring their own community for a near race riot that made a shambles of a high school football game...

...Concerned white parents then joined the exodus to the suburbs, where it is almost impossible for a Negro to buy a home in a lily-white section, assuming he has the money to try it...

...The worthies of the Board talk privately about that ultimate of horrors—a Negro Mayor...

...In the 1920s, apartheid was almost as rigidly enforced in Washington as it is in South Africa today...

...This ugly edifice of discrimination has been chipped away fragment by fragment, and by now most of the walls are nominally down...

...But this need not preclude home rule, and indeed until the 1870s the people of Washington elected a mayor and city council...

...It would take the kind of fight normally uncongenial to the President's temper to give Washington self-government...

...Nearly a century after the Civil War, the school system of Abraham Lincoln's city expunged the color bar...

...Indeed, Congressman McMillan likes his colonial prerogatives, and has an abiding interest in such local affairs as police department promotions, cardealer licenses and the welfare of parking-lot operators who have made an art out of fleecing commuters and shoppers...

...How the prosperous and comfortable whites of Washington respond to the mood of the majority race will be as much a moral test for America as anything that happens in foreign affairs...

...Everywhere there is the same drift to the suburbs by whites, leaving the downtown as a black core—a phenomenon now known as the "doughnut and the hole...

...The Negro, however, still cannot become a union bricklayer or electrician...

...by 1960, the percentage swelled to 53.9 per cent of its 763,956 persons...

...Negro spokesmen are as concerned as are the whites about the violent expressions of this hostility...

...Here the vectors cross, because Dixiecrat members of Congress who opposed school desegregation in Washington now want to extract political profit by keeping the schools a Horrible Example...

...It is an old saw in the capital that General Lee never captured the city in the Civil War but that Confederates have ruled it since...

...How useful and important Confederate control of Washington can be was illustrated by an incident a few years ago when a notorious Louisiana racist hired a photographer to stir up a few staged fistfights between white and Negro youngsters in the capital...

...The biggest victory came after the 1954 Supreme Court school decision...

...Thus when the winds of change came to Washington, they did not blow away the shackles but only the covering of dust...

...They have been a faceless community, dimly known to whites mainly as domestic servants and delivery boys...

...In a city consecrated to democracy, a Negro could not eat in a downtown restaurant, stay at a luxury hotel, join the local bar association or press club, or become an apprentice in a buildings-trade craft union...

...But it is easier to amend the Constitution than to breach the walls of the impregnable House District Committee...

...Thus the Dixiecrats are sitting pretty...

...11 years later, 81.5 per cent of the public school students were Negro...

...This point is forcefully made in an excellent new book about the Negroes in Washington, Dusk at the Mountains, by Haynes Johnson, a Washington Star reporter...

...When he was alive and spitting, the late Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi explained with amiable candor why he was happy to become chairman of the Senate District Committee: "I wanted this position so I could keep Washington a segregated city...

...Johnson, who is white, also observes, accurately: "From almost my first day in Washingon, I had been struck by the presence of the Negro question...

...It is a prudent wager that the sun will set on Portuguese Africa before Congress ever gives self-government to the only city in the United States with a Negro majority...

...In 1950, 35.5 per cent of the city's 802,178 inhabitants were colored...

...Though it is nominally a "local" matter, the implications of Washington's racial problem are in every respect national...

...Crime statistics here rouse the most mordant discussion among whites...

...When President Kennedy last month once more asked Congress to liberate Washington, one hopeful change had already occurred...

...By tradition and the seniority system, either the Senate or the House District of Columbia Committee is invariably in Dixiecrat hands...

...When the systems were merged, and Negroes from the old ghetto schools were for the first time able to attend the less flagrantly inadequate white schools, the result was an overall lowering of academic standards...

...Since Negroes generally have large families, this increase has had a disproportionate impact on school enrollment...

...some labor leaders and real estate dealers remain among the most devoted disciples of lefferson Davis...

...What is happening in the capital is only a more drastic version of what is happening in most large American cities...

...Karl E. Meyer is a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post and Washington correspondent for the British New Statesman, where this article also appears...

...The segregated schools camouflaged the chasm between the races...

...After a half-century of agitation, a constitutional amendment was recently ratified that gave Washington residents the right to vote for President...

...For generations, Negroes in Washington have been "kept in their place" by custom, Congress and the courts...

...both political parties have pledged support...

...One consequence of this belated change was to make Washington more attractive to Negroes...

...The significance of the increase is various...

...They have been systematically plundered by landlords and merchants who make them pay once for being black and twice for being ignorant...

...pupils from wretched homes are understandably less bookish...

...The struggle for the principles of the Declaration of Independence has its vast ironies in Washington —beginning with the fact that the Declaration itself is enshrined in a stately marble building located on the site of an old slave market...

...The story is long and melancholy and familiar to almost everyone who lives in Washington...

...But one could not escape it...

...The idea was to drive home the wickedness of "mixin' and minglin...

...No big city in America has a higher rate of petty street assaults, and each new batch of crime figures is more distressing than the last...

...The fraternal spirit of major craft unions is not even skin deep...

...The "tension" that results springs in good part from the hostile discovery that the chains exist...

...The Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to arrange the government of the District of Columbia...

...five times the Senate has passed home-rule bills...

...The next time someone in Congress lectures Fidel Castro on his failure to hold elections, it would be wholly refreshing if someone else got up to ask Congressman McMillan who elected him Viceroy of Washington, the Formosa of the Confederacy...

...At that point, Congress decided the capital was not ready for democracy—because, after the Civil War, Negroes had won the right to vote...

...The White House would be opposed not only in Congress but also by local business interests represented in the Board of Trade...

...Yet, perversely, every step forward in desegregation makes it more difficult to wrest the final victory of political self-rule...

...At the United Nations, Portugal is condemned for its repression in Angola, and in Washington an American President appeals (as Kennedy did last month) for an end to foreign rule in the capital...

...But Governor General McMillan, the Viceroy of Washington, has made sure that no bills emerge from his committee...

...In 1950, the schools were about evenly divided between the races...