Racial Tension in New England
WINDER, ALVIN E. & WHITE, JAMES S.
NATIONAL REPORTS Racial Tension in New England By Alvin E. Winder and James S. White Springfleld, Mass. Recently, a national magazine began an article on the racial turmoil here with the...
...The picture is no brighter where jobs are concerned...
...Today they remain tightly concentrated, 90 per cent of them living within the radius of one square mile in sub-standard housing...
...This is truly a ghetto group cut off from the city by a cordon sanitaire composed of a ring of white suburbs, de facto segregation in the schools, and increasing unemployment...
...Last January, the District court ruled that racial imbalance existed and should be eliminated...
...Jesse Parks, local NAACP education chairman, has also declared that "unless the School Department can come up with a more satisfactory plan of integration, Negro school students will be called upon to boycott the schools...
...Negro parents living in the neighborhoods serviced by these schools ask the crucial question, "how good an education will my children receive...
...A recognition by leaders of the white community that some move had to be made to deal with Negro discontent...
...Another major source of Negro discontent involves Springfield's law enforcement agencies...
...The visitor to Springfield who avoids the Negro ghetto would see it as another busy, contented New England city...
...And it was the specific issue of police brutality that touched off the nationally reported demonstrations, picketing and arrests here late in August...
...They have repeatedly requested an end to discrimination in both hiring and placement of police officers, as the following exerpt from a letter to Mayor Charles V Ryan Jr., written in 1964 by a Citizens Committee on Police Practices, clearly indicates: "We refer specifically to the manner in which personnel is selected for the bureaus...
...The August demonstrations underscored the Negroes determination to openly display their dissatisfactions and bring about changes...
...During an interview, one municipal department head told us quite candidly that there is no need to concern oneself with Negro appointments because the Negro vote now has negligible consequences...
...The plan stipulated that Negro children from imbalanced schools can transfer to predominantly white schools...
...The immediate provocation was the arrest in July of 17 Negro men and one white woman at the Octogon Lounge, a cabaret frequented by Negroes, on a charge of disorderly conduct...
...A white housewife indignantly comments, "Mayor Ryan had to get his family out of town during the demonstrations...
...Negro spokesmen, including representatives of CORE and the NAACP, counter-charged the police with brutality...
...Recently, a national magazine began an article on the racial turmoil here with the statement: "For more than a century this New England city has taken pride in its record of harmony between Negroes and whites...
...During the period 1950-1960 the "Hill Area," the major area of Negro concentration, elected two Negroes to the Springfield City Council...
...In many ways, too, it reflects the pattern of Negro-white relations in Northern urban centers...
...ALYIN E. WINDER is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts...
...Walter English, director of a citizens' Community Tensions Committee, issued a fact sheet claiming that the police are intimidating witnesses in civil rights cases...
...After much publicity and little implementation, it fell into disuse in 1945 when School Superintendant John Ganrud left office...
...A home-owner living in an all-white area complains that "these demonstrations have worked the Negroes up to the point where it is not safe on the streets after dark...
...Mayor Ryan's response-he petitioned Governor John Volpe for a unit of the National Guard to police the marchdid not result in any lessening of tensions...
...JAMES S. WHITE, an education instructor at the University of Massachusetts, is also an assistant director of the Springfield anti-poverty commission...
...As elsewhere, middle-class Negroes have attempted to escape the ghetto...
...Primarily as a result of pressure from Negro organizations, the School Committee passed a formal resolution, in September 1963, which stated that a racial concentration existed in some of its schools...
...and that many arrested Negroes are treated brutally...
...Today, according to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Springfield has seven elementary schools and one Junior High School with over 51 per cent non-white children...
...A Springfield Community Renewal Survey found that although non-whites make up less than one per cent of the total labor force, they comprise about 11 per cent of the total unemployed, and further, that the unemployed rate for non-whites has substantially increased in the past 10 years...
...The plan was doomed to failure from the beginning, though, because no representatives from the Negro community were included in its direction...
...The Urban League reports that during the past year neighborhood hostility was encountered in five areas of the city where non-whites either purchased or planned to purchase housing...
...Negro community leaders charge that 20 per cent of the total arrests made in the city are of Negroes though they comprise 10 per cent of the population...
...Three-quarters of all Negro men employed are in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, while considerably less than half the employed white males are in these occupations...
...Urban League statistics, moreover, show that approximately 30 per cent of Springfield's non-white families live in poverty as defined by the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity...
...By 1950, Negroes repre sented 3.7 per cent of the total population...
...it was designed to work within the existing neighborhood school structure by aiding the placement of Negroes in local industries, selecting and promoting teachers on the basis of merit, and encouraging a positive faculty attitude toward Negro students...
...Even with such findings to substantiate the enormous difference between the achievement of white and Negro youngsters, some white leaders maintain that the gap is due to the background which the Negro child brings to school...
...They face each other across a wall of growing tension and hatred...
...Though Police brutality set off the August march on City Hall, the protest really was an outcry against the accumulating injustices being suffered by a rapidly growing, impoverished, ghettoized and unrepresented group of people...
...Dissatisfied with the School Department's failure to implement this resolution, a group of Negro parents filed a law suit in the United States District Court requiring the School Committee to take steps to eliminate racial imbalance...
...Included in those not selected [for this bureau] are all the Negro police officers...
...Yet, in the words of Reverend Cobb, Springfield is divided into two communities, one white and one black...
...Today there are 17,000 Negroes out of a total population of 170,000...
...Prior to 1961, elections to local office were on the basis of ward representation...
...The last minority to enter Springfield, the Negroes, like previous groups, gravitated to the oldest and most decayed sections of the city...
...Although no reason for this has been given, civil rights leaders feel the denial was prompted by her arrest in a civil rights demonstration...
...But racial tensions were perhaps first felt here in the area of education...
...But as the Reverend Charles Cobb, a leading member of the Negro community, remarked when he was a candidate for the School Committee, many teachers construe a teaching assignment in one of the seven ghetto schools to be a method of disciplining the teacher...
...Pointing to the fact that the arrested patrons were badly manhandled, one of them requiring hospitalization for several days, they asked: "Are the several policemen who were the arresting officers simply over-zealous in their handling of the group, or is this an indication that the Negro community will be roughly handled by the white power structure in the future...
...The CORE candidate for Mayor has made a point of emphasizing the different attitudes of the white and black communities on every important issue...
...Many of these officers have proper qualifications and extensive seniority...
...For example, he observes that "the white community seems to accept Police Chief Lyons' explanations for violating the Police Commission's order not to send policemen involved in the Octogon incident to principally Negro areas...
...In addition, since plan A's inception no Negro has been appointed to any municipal post...
...Escaping the ghetto, however, is not a simple matter of economics...
...In 1961, a new city charter known as Plan A went into effect, requiring that all candidates for local office be elected on the basis of a city-wide vote...
...According to a recent study by the Springfield Urban League, "of all housing occupied by non-whites, 60 per cent was in unsound condition as compared to 18 per cent of all occupied housing in Springfield...
...Thus the final results of the Springfield Plan strenthened the Negroes' cynical feeling that it was merely a public relations maneuver...
...The only move by the school administration has been to deny a civil rights worker permission to student-teach in the city's schools...
...White reaction to the racial crisis in Springfield ranges from concern to apathy to outright hostility, with the latter seeming to predominate...
...Springfield's major Negro influx began well after the tum of the century...
...And he is right...
...As an example, we call attention to your crime prevention Bureau, which at this moment has not made any changes...
...Although the District Court ruling has recently been set aside by a higher court, Springfield responded to its de cision by developing a plan for open enrollment...
...a wall that threatens to crumble under the pressure of ugly violence...
...Legal slavery in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was not abolished until 1790, and abolition did not automatically bring an end to a kind of slave status...
...As far back as 1940, the "Springfield Plan" was launched under the auspices of the Springfield School Department...
...Early this month Dr...
...Why does it have to happen to us...
...But out of 3,500 Negro students in racially imbalanced schools, less than 200 were slated for transfers when the new school year commenced this September...
...Shortly after the Octogon Lounge affair, the sergeant who had been in charge of the officers at the cabaret was sent to arrest Oscar Bright, head of the Council of Negro Organizations...
...The Mayor has thus far not responded to the charges of Reverend Cobb...
...I have lived here all my life...
...10 years later the count was 27 males and 12 females...
...A white girl, an office worker, insists, "I don't care about Los Angeles...
...In addition, there remain 200 large Negro families displaced by Urban Renewal for whom no provision has been made...
...Springfield's negro leadership is pressing the challenge on all fronts...
...they shot bullets into the walls and windows of his house.' Meanwhile, Springfield's white leaders appear to be trying to minimize the existence of any racial problem here...
...He charges, too, that "the white community by and large is not critical of the Mayor's handling of the civil rights demonstrations and demonstrators, while the Negro community believes that the Mayor and the Chief of Police have used trumped-up Selma-style grounds for denial of constitutional rights...
...An attempt to improve this situation through Urban Renewal has, in effect, created yet another black ghetto, the new Riverview Housing Project, which is now 90 per cent Negro...
...that almost three-quarters of all arrests are made in areas of heaviest Negro concentration...
...Adding salt to the wound is Springfield's recent voting reform...
...The first Springfield census which makes any mention of Negroes, taken in 1754, notes that the city had 22 male and 5 female Negro slaves...
...A white housewife says, "If we had an effective, trained police force like Hartford, we wouldn't have any trouble...
...this is my city...
...The local newspaper has buried the charges of the civil rights candidates and the actions of civil rights groups on its back pages...
...But the history of Springfield tells a different story...
...Police brutality has also been a subject of protest for many years...
...by 1960, 7.5 per cent...
...Plan A, in effect, leaves the 17,000 Negroes in Springfield without an elected voice in city government...
...He observed too, that it was the practice in Springfield to transfer experienced teachers in the ghetto to new ones in white neighborhoods...
...Both men represented the interests of the overwhelmingly Negro population of their ward...
...At least part of the answer can be found in a Spring field School Department request for funds from the Office of Economic Opportunity, which quotes one of its own recent studies: Standardized achievement tests were given to children in grades 3 and 5 in all of the city's 38 schools, and the seven elementary schools with over 51 per cent non-whites ranked at the bottom of the list...
...While Negro candidates for both the City Council and the School Committee have run in the two elections under the reform, and continue to get impressive votes in the Hill Area, they have not been able to obtain enough votes for election on a city-wide basis...
...CORE is sponsoring three Negro candidates in the coming local elections-for the Mayoralty, City Council and School Committee...
...Their efforts have been intensified by their knowledge of such facts as that in a recent year 12 out of 13 children who suffered death due to fire were Negroes, and in each case the cause of the fire was traced directly to slum housing conditions...
Vol. 48 • October 1965 • No. 21
