NEW TOOLS FOR SCHOOL INTEGRATION

...Many or most Southern school districts responded to the Civil Rights Acts with some version of what is called a "freedom of choice" plan...

...The attorneys-general of the Southern states sought long "implementing" delays...

...Office of Education had been accepting freedom of choice plans as evidence of action by school boards to comply with the law...

...The New York Times commented that the new guidelines "seem sure to bring renewed complaints from Southern school officials that they do not know what the Office of Education is talking about...

...Studying the 1955 Court ruling more closely, most Southern states came up with "Pupil Placement Laws," setting up complex administrative machinery for dealing with any requests that might come from Negro parents for the transfer of Negro children to previously all-white schools...

...the threat of losing Federal aid was expected to accomplish quickly what the Supreme Court and other courts had been unable to achieve in a decade...

...This is one of the key areas in which everything will depend on the magnitude of the enforcement effort, and how much the Federal government is really prepared to do to protect children and their parents who integrate the schools...

...Unfortunately," as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund notes, "local school officials have not hesitated to lie...

...This is a second area in which genuine progress will depend upon the vigor of enforcement...

...The most basic is this: Until the Federal government puts the full burden for integrating the schools on school boards instead of on children, their parents, civic groups, and lawyers, and until it strictly enforces that responsibility, genuine integration of public schools in the South will not take place...

...It was always possible to show that most or all Negro children who applied for transfer failed to meet the criteria specified by the laws...

...First there was the Supreme Court's famous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education—actually legal shorthand for five separate cases— which declared segregated public education to be unconstitutional...

...In Sharkey County, Mississippi, Mrs...

...In these school districts, therefore, the burden of desegregating the schools remains exactly where it has always been—on the shoulders of the school children and their parents...

...To understand both the strengths and deficiencies of the guidelines, and the external obstacles to their success, the pattern of events to date should be recalled...

...Another major aspect of the problem is the integration of teaching and administrative personnel in school districts...

...The U.S...

...Millions of children in every major city in the South and many small towns and rural areas in which the Negro community is most active now are covered by court orders entered well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act," says Greenberg...

...The report showed that, eleven and one-half years after the Supreme Court declared segregated education to be unconstitutional, only 6.01 per cent of Negro students in the eleven Southern states are in integrated classrooms...

...This was the path that the Court chose, and it has led to everything that has happened since...

...Last year in Louisiana a number of school districts elected to invite court actions rather than submit desegregation plans to the Office of Education, in the belief that the court orders that would ensue would enable them to get by with less integration and still receive Federal funds...

...The general acceptance of paper compliance and de facto defiance, which has characterized the government's approach until now, has invited the prevarication, corruption, tragedy, and social upheaval that followed in many Southern communities...

...Smith that the children must be immediately withdrawn...

...case), the attorneys-general of the Southern states and of other states, and the attorney-general of the United States, to present argument on how the principle of Brown v. Board of Education should be implemented...

...In Neshoba County, Mississippi, Alfred and Wilberta Smith, tenant farmers on a cotton plantation, registered their six children in previously all-white schools...

...This had been largely achieved when a new phase opened with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...He has received no work orders since...

...This is the year in which the Office of Education should make clear, once and for all, not only what it is talking about, but that it means what it says...

...A campaign of intimidation, threats, and economic reprisal was immediately launched, which succeeded in persuading eight of the families to withdraw their children...

...Six-year-old Debora Lewis was the only Negro child to enroll...

...Thus, in Carthage, Mississippi, after extended court battles, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund was able to win for children from nine Negro families the right to enter a previously all-white Leake County school last September—the beginning of the second full school year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act...

...attorney-general, perhaps following the government gospel of the Eisenhower era that the right path in all controversies lies in the middle of the two positions being advanced, asked for "good faith, an immediate start, and time to effect the transition...

...The Southern Regional Council welcomed the guidelines, calling them "realistic tools with which to implement genuine desegregation of Southern school systems...

...In this condition he was arrested for assault and battery, and charged with having attacked the man who assailed him...

...The guidelines, said the Council, imply "a resolve on the government's part to push beyond token integration...

...Even this figure is deceptive because Texas, with an integration rate of 17.18 per cent, and Tennessee, with an integration rate of 16.31 per cent, account for a large proportion of all Negro students in integrated Southern schools...

...In another Southern town, Arthur White, a carpenter, found that three jobs that he had lined up were canceled when he enrolled his son and daughter in the local white elementary school...

...The ruling not only offered recalcitrant elements in the South both the time and the temptation to achieve organized resistance, but it opened up immense new questions of constitutional law...

...On March 7 this year, the U.S...

...New Tools for School Integration by RALPH LEE SMITH In December, 1965, the Southern Ed-ucation Reporting Service issued its fifteenth periodic summary of the statistical progress of school integration in the South...

...Until the issuance of its new guidelines in response to the protests of civil rights groups, the U.S...

...sending of forms to Negro parents with the name of a Negro school already filled in as their "choice...

...Southern school boards see this situation clearly...

...K Creation of an atmosphere of social fear and social reprisal for parents and children who have the initiative and courage to challenge the above procedures and try to run the gantlet...

...It was exactly the wrong kind of decision," Norman Amaker, a school case expert on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said ruefully when I interviewed him...

...By the time they arrived at the police station Lewis was semiconscious...

...extremely brief daytime periods, during which most Negro parents are working, when they must apply for "freedom of choice" for their children or forego the opportunity...

...Three police officers witnessed the attack and stood by for approximately ten minutes while it took place...

...These include: K Failure to inform Negro parents about the availability of "free choice" of schools...

...f Failure to provide transportation for Negro children to previously all-white schools...

...Perhaps the most serious, in his view, is the provision which permits school boards now operating under court orders to continue as in the past even though the amount and speed of desegregation under such orders falls far short of the requirements of Washington's guidelines if the latter are actually enforced...

...The new guidelines reflect the department's tardy recognition that this is a central problem of school integration...

...In addition to the enforcement issue, Jack Greenberg, Director-Counsel of the Fund, points out several intrinsic weaknesses in the guidelines...

...OfRALPH LEE SMITH is a free lance writer on national and international affairs...

...These laws withstood several court tests, and could be used flexibly...

...in Mississippi, 0.59 per cent...

...The attacker and Lewis were then both put in a police car, and Lewis' assailant continued to beat him in the car and in the police station...

...discriminatory use of birth certificate and health certificate requirements...

...After this decision had been handed down, the Court invited attorneys for the parties in four of the five cases (excluding the Washington, D.C...

...rejection of Negro pupils for reasons not specified, with no machinery for appeal of the rulings...

...This was, of course, a losing game, although it gained some time for the Dixie resistance...

...Since then he has been unable to get a job in Leake County, and has been receiving economic assistance from several groups, including the American Friends Service Committee, and legal assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund...

...The role of the school board is to sit tight and fight progress...

...Negroes have discovered that after the Federal and local authorities have conferred and the Federal officials go back to Washington, the overwhelming majority of Negro children still goes to Negro schools...

...His most recent book, "The Tarnished Badge," deals with the problem of police corruption in the United States...

...The South, which virtuously maintained for so long that its dual school system provided "separate but equal" education, now downgrades or fires Negro teachers when schools are integrated because they are allegedly inferior to white teachers...

...Anyone who takes the trouble to study the legal Chinese wall behind which this near-nullification has been carried out will find it hard to avoid certain conclusions...

...Initial reaction to school desegregation, when it was finally required by court orders, was open defiance, which culminated at Little Rock in 1957...

...As Southern schools have begun to admit Negroes under court orders, the communities have been taking vengeance on Negro teachers...

...The Fund also believes that the guidelines themselves have serious deficiencies, at least some of which raise questions as to whether the lesson about shifting responsibility for school integration from children and parents to school boards has been fully learned...

...When the pressure of court orders became too severe, the authorities would review the applications on file, place a few Negro students in integrated classrooms, and keep the rest in segregated schools...

...Until the issuance of the new guidelines, HEW had done nothing about firing of teachers or integration of school personnel...

...Despite teacher shortages, studies by the Federal government and the National Education Association have identified 700 Negro teachers who have already been downgraded or fired in the South, and the actual toll is probably higher...

...In Alabama, 0.43 per cent of Negro pupils are in integrated schools...

...At this late date, the Office of Education and the nation should put an end to delay...

...in South Carolina, 1.46 per cent...

...Fanny Wright, who sent her two daughters and one son to previously all-white classrooms, was wounded by a shot fired into her house by a more accurate marksman...

...fice of Education issued new guidelines for enforcing school desegregation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...Greenberg points to other problems: "We fail to see specific standards for eliminating [racial] gerrymandering [of school zones], selection of school sites for new construction or expansion of existing facilities, favorite tactics of districts that want to continue segregation far into the future...

...Legal barriers, including pupil placement laws, have been quietly dropped, and in their place a spider's web of administrative procedures and social pressures has been substituted—a web that comes close to achieving the same result as formal legal barriers...

...School buses picking up Negro children go to Negro schools only...

...September will usher in the third school year since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the twelfth since the Supreme Court found segregated education to be unconstitutional...

...So far most "desegregation plans," including the various "freedom of choice" packages, have been agreed upon by U.S...

...Dismissal or demotion of teachers on "the ground of race, color, or national origin" is prohibited, and desegregation of teaching staffs is required...

...There is no doubt that these guidelines—summarized further on in Washington's response to segregation tactics—represent the greatest commitment yet made by the Federal government to achieve what should have— and could have—been achieved long ago...

...The next day her father, A. D. Lewis, was fired from his lumber company job and the family was ordered to move...

...But the Council added a word of caution: "The years since 1954 have demonstrated time and again that good words of high resolve mean nothing without actual good intentions and avail little unless the government is prepared to demonstrate its resolve with strict enforcement...

...Once the laws were passed, the authorities sat tight, waited for applicants, and turned them down...

...Under these plans school districts certify to HEW that any Negro student wishing to transfer to a white school need only apply for such transfer...

...The next night two shots were fired into the Smiths' cabin, to make it clear to the parents that the withdrawal of their children was not optional...

...H Discriminatory use of "tests" to see if children are eligible for transfer...

...officials and white Southern school boards, with little or no consultation with Negro parents...

...For children and their parents in districts covered by court orders, the guidelines offer no remedy except to return to court in an effort to get the existing orders liberalized or more adequately enforced...

...The new guidelines state that from now on freedom of choice plans will be accepted only if they produce a significant amount of actual desegregation...

...On Christmas Eve, while Christmas shopping in Carthage, he was struck from behind and mercilessly beaten, receiving face, head, chest, and internal injuries...

...Attorneys for the Negro children argued for immediate desegregation of schools in the South...

...They put school boards on notice "that the burden of compliance will be upon them rather than upon students seeking to attend integrated schools...

...Her white grocer told Mrs...

...Smith's articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, and The Reporter...

...The cost, both in human terms and in terms of respect for the law on the part of the victims of these arrangements, hardly needs comment...

...The new guidelines' effectiveness in desegregating public schools will depend fundamentally on whether the Administration is willing to make a powerful political commitment on manpower and funds to achieve desegregation," said spokesmen for the Fund, and added: "We have had no encouragement in this area...

...The necessary funds and manpower should finally be committed...

...The underlying concept, that a constitutional right could be postponed—which in education is tantamount to denial—for administrative reasons, has implications that have not yet been fully explored in the law...

...The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has for so long borne the brunt of the legal battle for school integration (it is currently involved in 175 court cases on the school issue), has many serious reservations about the guidelines...

...A forthcoming book, "The Medicine Men," will be published this fall...

...It took a long and costly series of court tests over a period of five or six years to demonstrate that the pupil placement laws were simply a tool for evading integration...

...What the Court had given with one hand, it took away with the other...

...This penalizes those who were courageous enough to seek their rights in the late Fifties and early Sixties before Congress and the Executive Branch of the Federal government had decided to act...

...The program was launched with great expectations...

...This resulted . in a ruling, handed down on May 30, 1955, which is less well-known than the 1954 decision, but which has had a deep impact on events and is regarded by many lawyers as being as revolutionary in its principle as the 1954 decision...

...Officials of the Fund agree with the Council that real results will depend on real enforcement, but they take a somewhat less optimistic view than the Council on the outlook in this area...

...This Act, dealing with a wide range of civil rights, gave the Department of Health, Education and Welfare the responsibility for overseeing school integration, and the power to withhold Federal funds from non-complying school districts...

...in Louisiana, 0.69 per cent...

...The South was slow to realize how powerful a weapon the Court had put into its hands...

...The situation is not without its ironies...

...But, as the most recent statistics on integration reveal, the South has shown itself more than equal to this new challenge...