SCHOOL SEGREGATION Northern STYLE

...Compliance with the Supreme Court's 1954 edict, he ruled, "was not to be less forthright in the North than in the South...

...There appears to be general agreement— at least among serious students of the problem—with the Supreme Court's opinion that school segregation on the basis of race "has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children...

...The problem is one that has deeply concerned the New York City school board, which has pledged itself to reduce de facto segregation in the city schools...

...children in the upper elementary grades are assigned to a nearby school in a white neighborhood...

...a white student in a predominantly Negro or Puerto Rican school may also exercise the option to enroll in one of the receiving schools...

...The significance of Judge Kaufman's decision was the judicial recognition that racial segregation in the public schools can result from causes other than segregation in housing...

...Launching of the Chicago suit— which followed the refusal by school officials on opening day to permit eighty-five Negro youngsters to register in schools outside their home districts— came not long after the Illinois Advisory Committee to the Federal Civil Rights Commission issued a report charging that "by reason of housing patterns or other facton...

...In Chicago, eighty-one per cent of the children in the heavily-Negro schools were on double session, although these same children made up only about onethird of the total elementary school population...

...Under the Princeton Plan, school authorities assign all children in the first three grades—regardless of race or where they live—to one school located in a Negro area...

...New York City's Commission on Integration found, for example, that "the schools in the colored neighborhoods of Greater New York have tended to be older, less well-equipped, and more crowded than the schools in the white neighborhoods...

...Today only fifty-two per cent of the country's 18,900,000 Negroes still live in the Deep South—the result of the continuing northward movement of the Southland's Negro population...

...One device is to permit under-utilization of schools in white neighborhoods rather than accept the overflow from crowded Negro schools...

...Apparently profiting from his experience in the New Rochelle case, Zuber served notice that he would ask for discovery subpoenas to obtain the full record of the Chicago board of education in matters concerning vacant seats in white schools...

...If all new schools are to be located exclusively in fringe areas, obsolete and dilapidated schools in the heart of Negro neighborhoods remain open...

...Transfers to other schools were permitted, but in practice those who availed themselves of the opportunity were almost exclusively white...

...A similar suit is being planned in San Francisco...

...This would mean a different kind of discrimination against Negro pupils, whose constitutional right to equality in education demands at the very least that they shall not be required to accept inferior physical facilities...

...Figures released by the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People indicate an even more telling measure of inequality: The average white public school in Chicago has 669 pupils...

...and, second, that as long as a community has no racial requirements overtly affecting, school admission, local authorities are under no obligation to eliminate or even reduce the segregation in their schools that may arise from related community segregation practices...

...A glance at the 1960 census statistics provides confirmation...

...If New Rochelle was an exception in the lengths to which it went in keeping Negro pupils apart from whites, its attitude is nevertheless typical of cities and towns north of the Mason-Dixon line which have refused to attack the problem of school segregation on the ground that the Fourteenth Amendment does not "affirmatively command integration" (as a 1957 Circuit Court ruling put it) and forbids only the use of governmental powers to enforce segregation...

...This article is based on their study of school segregation in the North for the Public Affairs Committee...

...Yet a few courageous and far-seeing school boards—among them the much-maligned New York City Board of Education—have chosen to face the problem rather than ignore it, a choice that recognized responsibility to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, inferior education resulting from racial segregation...

...In Chicago, 102,000 of the city's 117,000 Negro elementary school students attend virtually all-Negro schools...

...New York City has the largest Negro community in the world...

...ninety per cent of the elementary pupils in Chicago attend schools which are predominantly of one race...

...WILL MASLOW is executive director and RICHARD COHEN is public relations director of the American Jewish Congress...

...In Philadelphia, thirty elementary schools have Negro enrollments of more than ninety-nine per cent...

...While only 524 pupils registered under the open enrollment program in the fall of 1960, the first year of the plan, the program worked out so well— both in terms of community acceptance of the idea and improved school performance—that a large scale expansion took place in the fall of 1961...

...The Chicago action, launched in mid-September, asked the Federal District Court to declare Chicago's neighborhood school policy "illegal and unconstitutional...

...The crucial tests, he ruled, in what has now become a landmark decision, are motivation and effect...

...The time is long past when the men and women who administer public education in the North can continue to evade the full measure of responsibility they bear to make this promise of equality come true...

...Most Northern communities, however, have refused to assume any responsibility for segregation in their own schools...

...Judge Kaufman charged that the local school board had sought to keep Lincoln a "racially segregated" school since 1949 and ordered the board "to implement desegregation as required by the Fourteenth Amendment...

...The open enrollment program is, therefore, almost a complete break with the concept of the mandatory neighborhood school...

...Faced with the problem of balancing Negro, Puerto Rican, and white pupil enrollments in new schools at the expense of perpetuating physically inferior schools, New York compromised...

...Because of double-shifting, with each child attending only approximately half-time, in these schools, the Committee noted, "numbers of children are idle on the streets throughout a good part of the school day, in many cases without supervision...

...Finally, there is increasing appreciation of the fact that in the North as well as in the South, schools in Negro neighborhoods do not measure up to white schools...

...These figures from the nation's four largest Negro communities tell a story that may come as a shock to Americans who think of school segregation in terms of Little Rock, or New Orleans, or Prince Edward County, Virginia...

...the schools then draw their enrollments from both Negro and white neighborhoods...

...SCHOOL SEGREGATION Northern STYLE by WILL MASLOW & RICHARD COHEN IN NEW YORK CITY, ninety-five public elementary schools have enrollments of ninety per cent or more Negro or Puerto Rican pupils—an increase of twenty segregated schools within the past year...

...Significantly, the lawyer for the Chicago Negro parents is Paul Zuber—the same attorney who represented the New Rochelle parents in their successful court struggle...

...These communities have worked out approaches to integration at least equal in ingenuity and originality to the regressive techniques developed by school boards like New Rochelle's...

...The Negro parents, in their complaint, accused School Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis, "with the acquiescence and condonation of the Board of Education," of having "drawn school district lines and periodically altering] them for the purpose of containing the plaintiffs' children and other Negroes within the prescribed school district...

...It offers what appears to be the most effective approach yet devised to give children in segregated schools the opportunity to a racially-integrated education...

...The plan has also been successfully introduced in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Willow Grove, Pennsylvania...

...But there is a serious drawback to this approach that continues to perplex even the best-intentioned of school administrators...

...The authors consulted school officials, social scientists, and Negro and Puerto Rican leaders in a dozen Northern communities...

...As Judge Kaufman put it in his decision: "If a board of education selects a school site, or otherwise operates its schools with a purposeful desire to segregate or to maintain segregation, the Constitution has been violated...

...Another approach to eliminating de facto segregation is a system under which Negro children from overcrowded schools are transported by bus each day—with their parents' permission—to under-utilized schools in white neighborhoods...

...At the root of this failure and this reluctance are two false assumptions: First, it is assumed that de facto racial segregation in Northern public schools is the simple result of the ghetto housing to which Negroes are subjected...

...at the same time, the number of "receiving" schools was increased from twentyeight to ninety...

...Yet if the Negro, the Puerto Rican, and the Mexican are to make their full contributions to American life, it will happen only if they enjoy the right to the equality in education which the Constitution and the Supreme Court say is theirs...

...Chicago (813,000 Negroes), Philadelphia (530,000), and Detroit (482,000) each has more than twice as many Negroes as the largest Negro communities in the South—New Orleans (234,000), Houston (215,000), and Atlanta (186,000...

...The NAACP charges that only one of these schools is in a white neighborhood...

...It is of no moment whether the segregation is labeled by the defendant as de jure or de facto, as long as the hoard, by its conduct, is responsible for its maintenance...

...Since the plan does not rest on a racial or ethnic base and can also be defended as a device to prevent overcrowding of individual schools, it should withstand legal attacks based on claims that the plan is unconstitutional and discriminatory...

...Benjamin C. Willis, superintendent of Chicago schools, has estimated that 25,000 pupils in the city get only a half-day's schooling in double-shift schools...

...The effects of school segregation on juvenile delinquency among Negroes has been the subject of too little research by our sociologists and social psychologists, yet the Committee's observation is one that Northern cities haunted by teen-age gangsters and riddled with juvenile crime might well study...

...the quality of the teaching provided in these predominantly colored schools has also suffered...

...By 1949 the district had a population that was for all purposes 100 per cent Negro...

...in predominantly Negro schools, the average enrollment is 1,275...

...The illusion that residential segregation and school segregation stand in a simple cause-and-effect relationship was shattered earlier this year by Federal District Judge Irving R. Kaufman when he found the New Rochelle, New York, board of education guilty of segregating its schools even though the words "race" and "Negro" were scrupulously avoided in official declarations of school admission policy...

...The Committee reported, for example, that eighteen of the twenty-two Chicago schools with enrollments of more than 2,100 are predominantly Negro...

...The problem poses the greatest challenge to the American system of free and universal education that our country has known in this century...

...its more than one million Negro men, women, and children outnumber the Negro population of almost any Southern state...

...In Detroit, nearly half of the city's Negro children attend schools in which Negroes make up more than eighty per cent of the school enrollments...

...While expressing the opinion that "there is not a deliberate policy of discrimination" in Chicago schools, the quasi-official civil rights group added: "There . . . is no question that the schools which are predominantly Negro suffer from serious problems by reason of the size of school population and classroom membership...

...There is growing acceptance among such liberals that white children are also limited in their understanding of the world about them by being restricted to contacts with other whites, and that the false feeling of racial superiority that may result from school and other experiences in which Negroes play inferior roles may be harmful as well...

...Finally, an experimental program was launched under which 296 children entering the first and second grades were permitted to register in sixteen out-of-neighborhood schools...

...At this point the school board froze what the judge described as the district's "artificially created boundaries" and refused all future requests for transfers even in the face of empty desks in other New Rochelle schools—desks numbering twice the total registration in the Lincoln School...

...The selection of school sites can also be crucial in reinforcing or breaking patterns of school segregation...

...The New York study found that only 50.3 per cent of the teachers in the predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican elementary schools were fully licensed, as compared with 78.2 per cent in white schools...

...Transporting pupils by bus, open enrollment, redrawing district lines, and any other of the techniques that have been successfully employed to reduce de facto segregation in the North cannot in themselves wipe out the .enormous disability of being born into a society that still subjects the Negro (along with the Puerto Rican in New York and the Mexican in California) to an inferior status in the kind of work he does and the kind of home he lives in...

...Judge Kaufman held that as far back as 1930 the local school board had so gerrymandered school district lines that Negro pupils were confined exclusively to the Lincoln School and white pupils to others...

...Another method of reducing segregation is to locate new schools on the fringe areas of Negro concentration...

...The plan has been put into effect in New York City, where 919 boys and girls from the all-Negro Bedford-Stuyvesant slums of Brooklyn were transported by bus to schools in the neighboring borough of Queens and in Detroit, where 314 Negro pupils were transported to hitherto all-white schools...

...Judge Kaufman's ruling has already had its effect not only in New Rochelle—where some 267 boys and girls were transferred on the first day of classes from Lincoln to eleven other schools—but also in Philadelphia and Chicago, where Negro parents have filed suit to compel local officials to move their children out of crowded schools in Negro neighborhoods to vacant classrooms in white sections...

...When these Northern Negro population statistics are viewed in the context of the prevailing "black belts" that characterize residential patterns in the country's big Northern cities, the conclusion is inescapable: School segregation— and the inequality of education that results—is as widespread above the Mason-Dixon line as it is below...

...Of fifty-four new elementary and junior high schools built in a recent three-year period, thirteen were placed in predominantly Negro or Puerto Rican areas, seventeen in mainly white neighborhoods, and the remaining twentyfour in mixed or fringe areas...

...enrollment in racially-mixed schools averages 947...

...Under this plan, all pupils from twenty-one junior high schools with Negro and Puerto Rican enrollments ranging from eighty to 100 per cent were given the opportunity to enroll in twenty-eight other schools that were being used at less than ninety per cent of capacity and that had Negro and Puerto Rican enrollments ranging from four-tenths of one per cent to twenty-four per cent...

...Some 2,830 pupils in ninetyfive schools with heavy Negro and Puerto Rican enrollments were accepted under the program...

...Boards of education, he warned, may not put the sole responsibility for segregated schools on residential patterns if they reinforce such patterns, either by their own actions or by what he termed "culpable inaction...

...By far the most extensive effort to overcome Jim Crow schools resulting from residential segregation has been the "open enrollment" program initiated by New York City last year...

...The result: two racially mixed instead of two segregated schools...

...One method—the "Princeton [New Jersey] Plan"—has proved particularly effective in desegregating schools in smaller communities where a school serving a Negro neighborhood may be relatively close to a school serving a white one...

...A variation of this plan was introduced in Westbury, Long Island, where authorities began transporting white pupils to the new building by bus in order to prevent a new school in a predominantly Negro area from turning into a segregated school...

...The gerrymandering found by Judge Kaufman in New Rochelle is but one of a number of ingenious if insidious techniques developed over the years to keep some schools white and others Negro...

...Free bus transportation is provided when the new school is more than a half-mile from the child's home...

...In addition, some 2,669 sixth-graders were enrolled in thirty-one "receiving" junior high schools from 120 "sending" elementary schools...

...The open enrollment privilege is not extended on a racial or ethnic basis...

...But while the damage to Negro children, the harm to whites, and the inequality in school facilities resulting from de facto school segregation in the North may be recognized—and deplored—there has been an almost unanimous failure by the public to perceive some of the less obvious causes of segregation and near-unanimous reluctance by local school boards in the North to accept responsibility for doing something about it...

...Chicago's school board has been accused of this by the NAACP...

...Yet the sorry truth is that more Negro children go to what are de facto segregated schools in the major cities of the North than attend de jure segregated schools in urban areas of the South...

...Nevertheless, the designation of schools in Puerto Rican and Negro neighborhoods as "sending" schools means in practice that almost all the children exercising the right to enroll in another school are Negro and Puerto Rican...

...Another method is to manipulate pupil placement policies so that Negro children may not transfer out of their neighborhood schools...