SURPRISE IN ST. LOUIS
Lasch, Robert
Surprise in St. Louis by ROBERT LASCH This is the second of a series of articles on the course of public school integration in the United States. The first, "Miracle in Washington," appeared in...
...There have always been special classes for the retarded, and now Negroes and whites attend these side by side...
...Louis University, whose home in another section had been appropriated by the state to make room for an expressway...
...When in a minority, Negroes did not stick together as closely as whites did in the same situation...
...Louis area for turning back the clock...
...The migration of Negroes continues year by year, and sometimes takes on a sudden spurt...
...In the 25 years before integration, Negro enrollment in the grades had more than doubled as white enrollment went down by one-third...
...Nobody took this very seriously...
...In the other six, the Negro minority just after integration was estimated respectively at 24 per cent, 14 per cent, 5 per cent, 13 per cent, one per cent, and one-half of one per cent...
...Louis, but integration does not mean complete racial mixing of all schools and student bodies...
...Joseph, and most of the St...
...Louis Schools End Segregation Negroes make up almost one-third of the school population in St...
...Above all, Archbishop Ritter of the Catholic church decreed in 1947 that parochial schools would henceforth operate on an unsegregated basis...
...It is a difference of cultural background, family habits, educational level, interest in and training for learning, parental concern, and direction...
...Everybody snickered...
...The first, "Miracle in Washington," appeared in the December issue...
...On the whole, this sociologist reported, integration took place with a minimum of confusion and conflict...
...This was rather advanced-Some Catholic laymen protested, and threatened to take the case to court...
...By now the scholastic deficiencies of many of the Negroes were pronounced, and the Negroes knew it...
...That the responsible leaders of the community should take steps to forestall the catastrophe of a Negro influx was not new...
...Since high school enroll-ments show greater stability through the winter months than after a sum-mer vacation, these schools were inte-greted in February...
...At the formerly Negro schools, white attendance ranges from 18 per cent to less than one per cent...
...When the Negroes first came in, a disparity of academic standards was immediately noticeable—daily testimony as to how truly unequal the old "separate but equal" schools had been...
...Even such communities as mighL have been ready to drop color line were unable to do so unitil the Court acted...
...Shook it, and perhaps in some degree shamed it...
...He had bought the land and nearly completed his new home when the condemnation action was started...
...In all cases, the new non-racial districts were drawn by a mechanical formula which eliminated any possibility of gerrymandering...
...If the story was a small one in St...
...They reacted as any children would—with feelings of frustration and defensiveness which found expression in greater aggressiveness, arrogance, and bad temper...
...To them integration is not a special new element, but simply a part of the total teaching situation which they are facing for the first time...
...Superintendent Hickey gives much credit for the orderliness of the change-over to the St...
...Now, after integration, 37 of the white schools and 13 of the Negro have mixed attendance...
...The year's delay in tackling the elementary schools gave more time for redisricting, and for preparing the community through neighborhood and teacher meetings...
...As the rurally dom inated legislature never otherwise: 14 The PROGRESSIVE |provided, Missouri schools were in effect constitutionally segregated at time of the Supreme Court opinion of 1954...
...The Archbishop ordered read in all the churches a letter pointing out that church members who supported a court challenge would be subject to excommunication...
...Louis schools...
...Louis, Springfield, St...
...Young teachers just out of college, who may themselves have, attended classes with Negroes, seem to be much less impressed by the problems...
...Integration brought marked relief and, one should suppose, a higher standard of teaching to the Negro schools...
...The evident aim was not so much to provide recreational facilities for the community as to prevent this particular resident from moving in...
...One immediate result of integration was the relief of overcrowding in the Negro schools...
...In the postwar years, employment opportunities for Negroes widened...
...Church and social groups steadily worked for tolerance and inter-racial understanding...
...Louis suburbs got started within a year...
...Negroes showed a stronger desire to become members of white cliques than whites did to join Negro groups...
...High schools came first because fewer numbers of students were involved, and it was simpler to draw new, non-racial districts for 11 high schools than for 121 elementary schools...
...Louis for the end of segregation in public schools...
...But Hickey was grateful that the newspapers did not make a big thing of it...
...The opposition collapsed overnight...
...Probably this theory is an oversimplification...
...Consciousness of race was never entirely absent...
...It's not really a racial difference," said one principal...
...Socially, the adjustment was made rather quickly...
...Louis took a collective look at the ugly emotions evoked by this vestigial outburst of racism, and quietly decided that, somehow, the established white population and the constantly increasing Negro minority—now approaching ROBERT LASCH, editorial writer for the St...
...The Fairmount Park riot —not a big riot, as such things go, but serious enough—apparently shook the community...
...It was never repeated...
...Within a few months,: nobody minded or even paid attention to the presence of children of another race...
...Teachers vary in their capacity to grapple with these family and individual difficulties...
...Principals were charged with the responsibility of organizing community cooperation and preparing students and teachers for the change...
...At the formerly white schools, Negro enrollment ranges from 56 per cent to less than one per cent...
...A strenuous and conscious effort is made by the teaching staff to treat every child as an individual and to avoid classification by color...
...From the beginning, Superintendent of Instruction Philip J. Hickey bore down hard on the theme that integration was not optional but mandatory...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, has made a special study of school Integration In that city...
...In Kirk-wood, a St...
...Officially, the School Board will not admit that any special academic problems have arisen...
...She took it as a racial msult and told her brothers...
...Louis newspapers and radio stations...
...In the second year, however, new problems arose...
...The Board of Education took care to publish the new boundaries well in advance, and to make sure that every parent knew what to expect...
...He used an I.B.M...
...25 per cent of the whole—would have to learn how to live together The swimming pool crisis, so this theory holds, acted as a cathars which purged the community's vio lent emotions and cleared the way fox a remarkably peaceful acquiescence in school desegregation...
...Jackie Robinson came to the Dodgers, and the St...
...The reason for proceeding by stages was not so much a faith in gradualism as a concern for practical school administration and a belief that the community would better digest the transition in several quick bites...
...The older ones who had taught all their lives in segregated schools find it hardest to adjust...
...In a sense, St...
...Louis Cardinals took to admitting Negroes to all sections of the ball park...
...Because of the poor educational background of some Negroes they tend to outnumber whites in some of the "slower" groups within classrooms...
...Louis suburb which is now in its third year of elementary school integration, teachers found the second year harder than the first...
...A child approached in a friendly way generally gave a friendly response, regardless of race...
...Louis Board of Education had adopted, without significant community protest and with much active support, a program for ending segregation...
...By mid-summer of 1954 the St...
...So long as segregation prevailed, white schools had vacant rooms while the Negro schools were packed...
...The other 23,000 children attend unmixed schools of which 27 are Negro and 46 white...
...The circumstances were novel and interesting...
...But St...
...Because of residential concentrations, the city still has one all-white and two all-Negro high schools...
...Hickey scolded the white boy and called upon the students to carry out integration in a spirit of good citizenship...
...At the elementary level, there are 123 schools of which 40 used to be Negro and 83 white...
...Tension started to rise...
...machine which was color-blind...
...Their view is that prolonging the process would only magnify the difficulties, and that within four or five years problems now being experienced will have been forgotten...
...Louis, it was otherwise in Bombay...
...The effect was to free all school districts to act as they wished...
...Missouri's "bootheel"—the cotton-growing Mississippi river delta counties at the southeast corner of the state still operates predominantly segregated schools, but even there some high schools have ended discrimination, and everywhere else the old system is dead or dying...
...There is no denying that a sudden mixing of children from sharply varying cultural and family backgrounds creates problems for the teacher, especially in the middle-class schools where the gulf is widest...
...The object: to protest against the council's decision to condemn a piece of property on which a new resident was building a $50,000 home...
...The closest thing to an "incident" occurred at Beaumont high school, which is located in the general area of the Fairmount Park swimming pool troubles...
...At this point, two days after the initial incident, Superintendent Hickey and his aides went to the high school to address a special as: sembly, called at the request of the Student Council...
...Kansas City, St...
...Louis county, Missouri, a dozen typical suburban couples met not long ago to address a resolution to their city council...
...An oafish, overgrown white boy squirted a water pistol at a Negro girl...
...When one teacher made a little speech to prepare her pupils for integration, a white child spoke up from the back of the room, "Miss X is a nigger lover...
...Louis schools shortly after integration went into effect...
...Like many other cities, St...
...By tacit agreement all of the news agencies determined in advance to report any news that developed out of desegregation, but to manufacture none...
...A great many elements combined to prepare St...
...She found, as might be expected, that racial differences had not vanished overnight, but neither had insuperable problems of child behavior been created...
...The novelty was that a dozen families who would be immediate neighbors of the Negro in question should invoke the democratic process—with the active support of the Catholic Archbishop and the Protestant Metropolitan Church Federation—in defense of his right to move in...
...The surprising thing is not that school integration should produce some problems, but that it should come so easy...
...Parks and other public facilities were progressively opened without color line...
...Within a few hours the entire incident had evaporated...
...The staff member in charge of redistricting was a Negro whose only instructions were to distribute the school population as evenly as possible among the schools which could be most conveniently attended...
...In spite of all difficulties, there is no perceptible sentiment anywhere in the St...
...It is not the color of the skin that matters, but we would only be fooling ourselves if we failed to face the fact that we now have in our school one group of youngsters so very different in all these ways that the teaching problem is complicated and the social results in the classroom difficult...
...The official attitude was that the Supreme Court had spoken, and the only question was how—not whether—St...
...But it is little more than half a dozen years since the opening of public swimming pools to Negroes provoked a nasty flare-up of racial antagonisms and violence...
...A sociologist at Washington University made a study of two St...
...Teachers often find it difficult to get a response to notes sent home about conduct or grades, or to persuade the parent to come to the school to discuss a child's problem...
...Unlike many Southern states, Mis-prari's government made no effort to undermine the Court decision...
...Although the number of Negroes in parochial schools was relatively small, seven years of practical integration there helped pave the way for the broader experiment in the public schools...
...In some cases the proportion has risen since—one high school now has more than 30 per cent Negroes —but because statistics are no longer kept on racial lines, the precise figures are unobtainable...
...Additional articles probing success and failure in other key areas will appear in The Progressive throughout the year__The Editors...
...Young Negroes come from Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other Southern states to live with relatives and enroll in St...
...Louis is carrying part of the educational burden of other communities because of its success in desegregation...
...Elementary schools followed at the start of the fall term in September 1955, technical high schools in September 1956...
...Louis should comply...
...Louis metropolitan community ever since it became, somewhat to its own surprise, a model for the nation in peacefully ending segregation in the public schools...
...Louis school executives do not agree...
...But in Creve Coeur, a typical suburban community in St...
...Their children consequently are "orphans" so far as school is concerned...
...There, the Times of India that February published a Reuter's dispatch under a two-column headline: Whites and Negroes Enroll Together St...
...Perhaps that was not so surprising...
...All told, the 50 mixed schools enroll some 40,000 children or nearly two-thirds of the total elementary enrollment of 63,000...
...In the schools themselves, ever since the end of World War IL there had been a consciously planned and consistent program of "group relations" designed to break down old separatist patterns of thought...
...A rock was thrown at a student's car...
...Prior to 1945, Missouri communities were subject to the standard Southern-state constitutional requirement of separate schools for Negroes A new Constitution in that year re-vised the clause to say that schools must be separate unless otherwise provided by law...
...But both teachers and children made extraordinary efforts to adapt to the new situation...
...In view of the considerable change in social customs involved in a city which had lived with segregated schools for a hundred years, some news editors would have considered the story underplayed...
...Nobody was asked whether he approved...
...Some teachers believe that the transition would have been simpler if it had been spread over a longer period, say, taking one grade at a time from the bottom up...
...Louis was a Southern city...
...In many Negro families both parents work, and the children get a minimum of home attention...
...Yet in the classroom Negroes tended -to sit together, and whites together...
...Louis schools increased by several hundred...
...On the contrary, the Attorney General within a few weeks ruled that no statute or constitutional provision could be enforced in behalf of segregation...
...In theory, the purpose of the condemnation action was to acquire land for a playground...
...The first step, put into effect that September, was to consolidate the two teachers and junior colleges, and to end segregation in the specialized schools for handicapped and exceptional children...
...The basketball coach and 14 members of the team reinforced his appeal, as did other student speakers and teachers...
...The controversy has not been settled, but the very fact that it could arise is a token of the spirit that has pervaded the St...
...Louis is less than a hundred years away from slavery, less than a dozen years away from a flat constitutional requirement of segregation, less than a generation away from complete second-class citizenship for Negroes, less than seven years away from the swimming pool riot...
...Since September 1955 there has been a special program for gifted children, and in these classes, too, whites and Negroes are found together...
...The truth seems to be that Negroes remain segregated in so many areas of community life—not legally but by custom and social habit—that they do not readily enter into the new situation in the schools...
...OEOPLE who live in suburbs do not ordinarily stick their necks out...
...There were scuffles in the corridors and some drawing of knives...
...Among other things, the difference in economic level reflects itself in school life...
...He happened to be a Negro—a professor of ophthalmology at St...
...Some middle-class Negroes try conscientiously to take part in parent organizations and other aspects of school activity, but the larger number do not...
...It is a long time since St...
...Louis had for years been getting an influx of Negroes from the South while more and more middle-class white families were moving to the suburbs...
...During the weeks immediately following the Emmett Till slaying in Mississippi, the number of Negroes enrolling in St...
...The Beaumont incident was handled quietly, on inside pages, without inflammatory headlines or news treatment—yet also without suppression of essential facts...
...Next, at the beginning of the second semester in February 1955, the high schools were desegregated...
...Although the Post-Dispatch to this day defends its tradition of race-labeling Negroes in the news columns, the newspapers editorially supported each successive step in desegregation...
...Like many another ur-banite, he wanted to move farther out, in quest of whatever it is that makes city dwellers put up with the inconveniences of suburban living...
...Next day a group of Negroes hauled a white boy out of a car near the high school and beat him up...
...Some thoughtful students of social relations believe that St...
...In general the start of desegregation was reported just as calmly, matter-of-factly, almost nonchalantly...
...Although white pupils expressed sporadic hostility on the verbal level, "positive" types of relationship between Negroes and whites far outweighed "negative" types...
Vol. 21 • January 1957 • No. 1
