MIRACE IN WASHINGTON

...The majority of them, public opinion polls showed, looked with disfavor on the Supreme Court's decision when it was first announced...

...Without intending it, Davis, Williams, and Gerber had exhaustively documented the very argument on which the Supreme Court had based its historic decision...

...A white high-school teacher said of her mixed classes: "They behave as nicely as they ever did...

...Agnes Meyer, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post and Times-Herald...

...It was precisely what the "Subcommittee to Investigate Public School Standards and Juvenile Delinquency in the District of Columbia" was established to prove...

...Fortunately, segregated PTA's have disappeared with the segregated schools...

...Boundaries of former white and Negro schools were redrawn without regard to race...

...Thanks to the zeal of a dedicated minority, thanks more to Supreme Court decisions, the situation has changed dramatically for the better in the past five years...

...They were not even interested in wrecking them, except as it might be incidental to their main purpose—that of obstructing integration everywhere else...

...In September 1955, the remaining parts of the school system were integrated...

...Particular credit is due to the city's Negro community...

...White families, particularly those with children, have been moving out...

...Edward Burling, Jr., head of the District Citizens for Eisenhower, and many others...

...This point, which the Subcommittee belabored over and over again, was not something the school system neglected—once integration had compelled it to face the problem...

...The furthest they would go, in accordance with Southern customs, was "Professor," a title which one of the Negro principals courteously but firmly rejected...

...Now, again in their majority, they have accepted integration, are seeking to make a success of it, and defend it vigorously against attack...

...Money will be needed, but beyond money the help and understanding of parents as well...

...1.51 1.26 1951-52...

...Persistently over the years forward-looking Washington citizens pressed this situation on the attention of the school board, the Board of Commissioners, and Congress...

...Nearly all Negro schools were scandalously overcrowded, and some of them were in such bad condition that the need to abandon them had long been recognized...

...But, even in the testimony taken by the Subcommittee, there are signs of real progress: • Many teachers and principals said that their initial problems were many and sometimes trying, but that they were getting them in hand...

...Why was it done so promptly and so thoroughly...

...It is fair to say that, until school integration, all but a small minority of Washington's citizens never really grasped the extent to which the Negro and the white communities were isolated from each other...

...Yet, although Negroes and whites often lived close together, although they rode in the same buses and worked in the same federal offices, there was hardly any real contact between them...

...Other statistics compiled by the Bureau of Social Science Research indicate that, among white adults with children under 18 living within the District itself, 65 per cent thought that desegregation was going well—an extraordinary response considering the magnitude of the problem and the briefness of the period in which integration has had a chance to prove itself in the nation's capital...

...Unlike Baltimore and Louisville, Washington has not permitted wide-scale evasion of desegregation through unlimited transfers of pupils to schools outside their zones...

...Through the parents, the school must reach out into the community...

...Not very long ago, the members of such a Committee would have been subjected to letters and phone calls in bitter and bigoted language...

...At the end of the first full year of integration, 51 per cent of the white adults in the Washington area thought it was going either "very well' or "fairly well...

...Time after time, neighbors were set against neighbors in strenuous and divisive conflict...

...There was nothing surprising about this verdict...

...The major innovation has been the establishment of a four-track system in the senior high schools—an honors course, a college preparatory course, a general course, and a basic course for seriously retarded students...

...But nothing substantial was done to remedy it...

...Neither can be acquitted of ignorance and indifference—because the story was plainly set forth in the 980-page report submitted by Dr...

...Yet careful reading of this largely hand-picked testimony gives a very different impression from the headlines it produced for Southern newspapers...

...They have lacked even the interest in their schools most other Americans have shown...

...The classes in Division II schools were much larger than in Division I. This was reflected in daily per pupil expenditure, which ran as follows: White Negro 1945-46 ....................$1.07 $0.84 1949-50...

...If in some respects disappointing (no case of the rape of a white teacher by a colored student was unearthed), the hearings did produce 512 pages of testimony with much ammunition for use by the White Citizens Councils in resisting integration elsewhere...

...In Washington itself, however, the reaction has been encouraging...

...Yet, reviewing the record, and remembering that children, and particularly under-privileged children, are not angels, one finds the picture not too different from any large urban school system...

...A big job lies ahead in making a single good school system out of two sub-standard systems...

...Except for a few system-wide committees on professional matters like textbooks and curriculum, there was virtually no contact between white and Negro teachers...

...Incidentally, the Subcommittee members and Counsel Gerber consistently refused to address these witnesses as "Mr...

...They scented White House pressure to make Washington a "model," and although there has never been definite proof, some people think it was a factor...

...One problem does emerge clearly...

...It was fortunate that they did, because otherwise the Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, might have caught the school system almost completely unprepared...

...The new zones were applied to new students, transfers, and Negroes in overcrowded schools...

...Believe me," he said, "if you think there is any dissatisfaction now, you should have experienced what was here before we integrated...

...Only seven per cent thought it was going "badly," 14 per cent "not so well," and 28 per cent had no opinion...

...Thus, all members of the school board had appeared before him, but only its chairman, a known opponent of integration, testified in public...

...In the white schools, the emphasis had been upon self-discipline rather than upon discipline imposed by the teachers...

...Division I and Division II were under the same Board of Education and superintendent,' but otherwise they were worlds apart...

...In the end, however, five of the city's leading Negro citizens, head-ed by Dr...

...The local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Americans for Democratic Action, and American Veterans Committee chapters were also active and vocal...

...The completeness of this isolation was fully reflected in the school system...

...In their great majority, they long resisted change in the patterns of segregation which dominated this community for generations...

...Superintendent Corning reminded them of the "extreme tension" which the transfer of schools from Division I to Division II had caused, and recalled that the Board was facing several lawsuits against segregation and the prospect of many more...

...For the public hearings, he produced mainly those whom he expected to help make his case...

...The Subcommittee returned to the attack on this point again and again...

...Miss Edith Lyons, the present Assistant Superintendent in Charge of Elementary Schools for the integrated system, formerly held the same responsibility for Division II...

...To the Subcommittee's unconcealed glee, one Negro member of the Board of Education did charge that some of the principals who testified had "made severe admissions of inadequacy" and that the Superintendent "should re-examine [their] competence...

...George D. Strayer in 1949 after an exhaustive survey of the school system...

...The figures for the 10th grade indicate the disparity between white and Negro students—and indicate, what the Subcommittee persistenly tried to ignore, that there are greater disparities within each group: White Negro Total Honors 316 50 S65 College Preparatory 808 356 1,159 General 645 1,453 2,098 Bask 159 1,310 1,477 The school officials from time to time reminded their Dixiecrat inquisitors of something which they would obviously have preferred to forget—the special problem created for Washington by the steady influx of Negro children from Southern schools...

...In 1951, this group started thinking and planning, and in 1953 began to hold voluntary week-end workshops for teachers and principals on the problems of desegregation...

...The only colored principals and teachers called were from all-Negro schools, or from Negro schools which had acquired small minorities of white pupils after integration...

...Now they will provide the occasion—and the need—for parents to work together...

...No Negro teachers were called from substantially integrated schools...

...Mordecai Johnson, presi-dent of Howard University, joined in a statement lauding "those teachers of Washington who are making such a valiant and determined effort to bridge the educational gap created in the past by segregating white and Negro children, thus denying to the latter an equal opportunity to learn...

...It used to make me feel pretty bad . . ." The school officials were therefore constantly under pressure to transfer schools from Division I (white) to Division II (colored...

...It was set up June 6 on the motion of Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi, a racist who subsequently announced his support of the States' Rights ticket...

...Chairman John L. McMillan of the House District of Columbia Committee, a South Carolina Democrat, appointed precisely the sort of subcommittee Williams wanted...

...Once the Supreme Court had made its decision, the school board decided to move ahead promptly, without waiting for the scheduled fall re-arguments on method and timing...

...Nor did they make any serious protest when Davis set the hearings for September, in the midst of the campaign...

...Lacking self-government, the citizens of the capital have been notoriously apathetic and disinterested in the way their public institutions have been conducted...

...Under the old system, the schools were a constant source of strife in mixed communities...

...One veteran white elementary teacher said she thought integration was actually proving of value to children of both races, and added that her pupils "got along fine" together...

...The slack has been taken up by Negroes from the South, for whom Washing-is the first "port of escape" on the way north...

...During the summer, Gerber and his aides privately interviewed many, but not all, of the District's school administrators and teachers...

...Division I was completely staffed, supervised, and administered by white officials and teachers, Division II by Negroes...

...One shrewd principal called a student assembly to discuss the strike, turned it into a pep rally for the coming football game—and had the incredible good luck that one Negro player on the team scored the winning touchdown and was carried off the field on the shoulders of a jubilant throngl Like marriage, however, integration is less a honeymoon than a hard, long, and demanding process of mutual adjustment...

...Miracle in Washington by DAVID C. WILLIAMS RETURNING to Memphis after his tour of duty as counsel for the special House Subcommittee investigating the Washington schools, William E. Gerber told the press that the capital's integrated school system is "a disgrace to the nation" and that white children have been "thrown to the wolves...

...It was left for a voluntary group of citizens, stimulated by the American Friends Service Committee, to lead the way...

...As Superintendent Corning had to acknowledge to the Subcommittee: "The two systems were so completely separated that quite naturally marked differences developed in methods of teaching, in interpretation of curriculum, in methods of student control, in criteria for promotion, and in general management...

...This time Van Arkel received no such abuse—but, on the contrary, many offers of aid and support...

...The bigger and more challenging task of genuine integration is still to be finished, and it may take years...

...Indeed, throughout the hearings there was evidence that a school system which had once resisted integration had now buckled down to the job and was determined to make it work...

...There has been no discrimination in public transit...

...One white principal told the Subcommittee: "My school was built for 650 children, and I had only 300 children in it...

...De-segregation has been thoroughly carried out in the Washington schools, and it will not be undone...

...Melvin Hildreth, Democratic National Committeeman...

...In the wintertime, in the rainy days, I would see several hundred Negro children going by [my] half-empty school...

...Integration had a stormy beginning, with student strikes inspired by outside agitators in several of the schools...

...In spite of the fact that the Republican platform called for "intelligent study, understanding, education, and good will" in achieving school integration, they did not insist upon their right to the appointment of a minority counsel to instill this spirit into the hearings...

...which appeared in a high school paper...

...Of course, Congressmen Davis and Williams were not interested in helping the Washington schools solve their problems...

...In the center of the stage, in fact, are the ordinary citizens of Washington, in the school system and outside...

...Dr...

...White parents and alumni often bitterly resisted such transfers...

...The press, which (except for the Washington Post and Times-Herald) had been lukewarm at best about integration, rose to the occasion magnificently in editorials, in the caliber of the reporters assigned to the story, and in the space it gave to the hearings and to the facts which did not come out at the hearings, but which the friends of the schools had to dig out for themselves...

...Thus, in many areas of the city, "white" schools became half empty while "Negro" schools were jammed far beyond their capacity...

...I did not see how the teachers were teaching in Division II, and she did not see how the teachers were teaching in Division I." The impact of the integration of the two very different systems was first felt with respect to discipline, raising fresh problems with which— as one might expect—some principals coped well, others badly...

...In 1948, when the impact of the swelling tide of new Negro arrivals from the Southern states had already begun to be felt, a study by the Research Division of the Board of Education revealed that the difference in the educational levels of the Southern children was so great it would take an average of eight years in the Washington schools to bring them up even to the level of the segregated school system then existing...

...1 never have any incidents...

...And the full story, of course, is even more complex...

...Washington has always been less "ghettoized" than most American communities, and there are Negro homes in most areas of the city...

...The same pattern prevailed in the District government...

...One of the most heartening aspects of the past two years, and one that was evident even in the Subcommittee hearings, is the degree to which Washington teachers have risen to their professional responsibilities in spite of the prejudices which many of them held...

...Nearby [was] a school built for 1,200, with 1,890 in it...

...In the case of at least two high schools, their principals had to rebut misleading testimony by resort to the press, since they were not permitted to testify in defense of their schools...

...Done it was, therefore, and for the past two years the schools, the children, and the parents of Washington have coped with all the problems of pioneers in a different field of human relations...

...Hansen, on behalf of the school administration, has seen in the past two years' experience a "miracle of social adjustment...

...But only 3,000 out of 105,000 pupils were involved, and neither the school officials nor the District government wavered...

...It affords a fascinating if only partial glimpse of a community and a school system facing squarely and for the first time problems which were always there, but Which had been veiled by segregation...

...The Committee promptly set to work assembling the facts and, by statements to the press, rounded out the partial and distorted record the Davis Subcommittee was presenting...

...or "Mrs...

...It is a story with some heroes and some villains—but the great majority of its characters are neither heroes nor villains, neither crusaders for civil rights nor militant bigots...

...The record, of course, is only a partial one...

...When the Subcommittee closed shop October 1 and departed for parts south, it left behind it a community that had been shocked into the realization that separate school systems cannot be adequate, democratic, or equal...

...As in all American cities, there has been a massive migration to the suburbs in recent years...

...Yet, although segregation was visibly breaking down under the weight of its own absurdities, school officials dragged their feet...

...Its chairman was Representative James C. Davis of Georgia, a long-time foe of integration in the District of Columbia, who two years ago encouraged student strikers in Washington to defy the law...

...When the school system was attacked, however, they sprang immediately to its defense...

...One day I was talking to a little colored girl, and one of the colored boys said: 'Miss Reid, why don't you stop talking to her and bat her over the head, the way the last teacher did?' " In the long run, the much more difficult problem is the disparity in academic achievement between Negro and white children which integration forced upon the attention of the school administrators and the community...

...A Negro principal credited integration with improving the morale of colored students by "removing resentment" and stirring incentive...

...Like Davis and Williams, Representative Woodrow W. Jones, North Carolina Democrat and Joel Broyhill, Virginia Republican, had signed the Southern Manifesto against the Supreme Court decision...

...Called later the same day, he spoke of "the lack of interest, of information, the lack of communications between, say, Miss Lyons and me in the days past when we taught together in separate school systems, despite the fact that we often did many things together, but we did not get into each other's classrooms...

...A high proportion of them were born in the city and have lived in it or nearby all their lives—indeed, the school system has been rightly criticized for the degree of "in-breeding" which prevails...

...Carl F. Hansen, presently Assistant Superintendent in Charge of Senior High Schools, presided over the Division I elementary schools at the same time that Miss Lyons was in charge for Division II...

...1.94 1.48 How did the community and its school administrators permit such conditions to develop and persist...

...As recently as 1951, virtually all restaurants, theaters, and hotels excluded Negroes altogether...

...Negro parents just as bitterly resented sending their children to jammed and sometimes distant schools, while nearer schools were denied them, and on occasion resorted to strike action...

...The white principal of a school with a Negro majority said that he had this year "the best and smoothest opening of school that we have had during all [my 26] years...

...The white principals and teachers called were mostly those whose testimony was considered helpful to the SubDAVID C. WILLIAMS, editor of the ADA World, writes from Washington for a number of American and foreign publications...

...The officials cf the school system were definitely not leaders in this transformation, although there were strong practical reasons as well as reasons of principle why they should have been...

...There were separate teachers' colleges and separate examinations for teachers, conducted by separate boards of examiners at different times...

...Counsel Gerber has called the Washington school system "a disgrace to the nation...

...Segregation was the rule in schools, churches, civic organizations, and professional societies...

...More might have been expected of the remaining two members of the Subcommittee, Republicans DeWitt Hyde of Maryland and A. L. Miller of Nebraska, but they washed their hands of the affair...

...The Subcommittee record is replete with instances of the iron curtain between the two systems...

...Here is a difference of opinion in which those who live in the Washington metropolitan area deserve the last word...

...Only when his Democratic opponent chided him for staying away did Hyde show up to move that the hearings be postponed until after November 6.) Whatever the GOP sins of omission, the primary responsibility for the hearings was taken by Davis and Williams, with the occasional presence of Jones and Broyhill...

...Asked whether Division I used the same system for promoting students as Division II, she answered: "I have no way of knowing, but I think so...

...The Subcommittee made much of obscene notes passed to white girls, and of an editorial entitled "Hands Off...

...The problems in many of the schools reflect those of the under-privileged areas in which they are located...

...One principal, who had tried sincerely to prepare herself and her faculty for integration, confessed herself surprised and shocked by the hostility and suspicion which many of the Negro children showed toward white teachers and students...

...Negro families, restricted by housing discrimination in the suburbs, have stayed in the District...

...Francis B. Sayre, Dean of the Washington Cathedral...

...A Washington Commitee for the Public Schools was formed, headed by Gerhard Van Arkel, a prominent local attorney, and including such leading citizens as the Very Rev...

...They acquiesced in the appointment of Gerber, a hanger-on of the Crump machine in Memphis, as counsel...

...On May 25 School Superintendent Ho-bart Corning submitted a blueprint calling for a September, 1954, start on integration...

...In that, they may well have succeeded, for the whole truth seldom quite catches up with a skillful mixture of facts and smears...

...committee's objectives...

...Even in the response to the announcement of the Committee's formation, there was a heartening sign of the changed spirit in Washington...

...Quite naturally, some of the Negro children found it hard to adjust to the new spirit of freedom...

...The tradition in Division II had been quite contrary, with stern discipline enforced by the principals and teachers...

...Things were said at the hearings which will hurt, and hurt deeply, for years to come—yet Negro leaders showed great self-restraint under extreme provocation...