Segregation South and North

NEARLY 105 years after the end of the Civil War, and in a week in which much of the nation closed government offices, banks and schools to honor Abraham Lincoln, the struggle for equality still tormented and divided the nation.

Although the constitutional right of black children to attend schools with whites has long been legally established, Southern politicians were again stirring up opposition to school desegregation. They found a surprising ally in Connecticut's liberal Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who echoed Southern sentiment by charging that the North is guilty of "monumental hypocrisy" and "rampant racism" in its failure to integrate its own schools more fully. As if on cue, a Los Angeles superior court judge ruled two days later that the nation's most spread out (711 square miles) school system must balance its 583 schools racially by September 1971. On the very next day, President Nixon took the politically popular position of supporting the notion that children should be able to attend their nearest school and not be bused to others. If fully followed, that principle would effectively postpone most integration, North and South, until residential patterns change.

Ribicoff's Senate speech was more emotional than practical. "I felt in my heart that this was something I just had to say," he explains. He sent an advance copy to Mississippi Senator John Stennis, who promptly requested that Ribicoff be given the floor during a debate on renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. To the amazement of his Northern colleagues, Ribicoff supported a Stennis amendment that would require the Government to apply its desegregation policies "uniformly in all regions of the U.S., without regard to the origin or cause of such segregation." Stennis' purpose was to relieve the mounting pressures on the South by showing that the North is just as unwilling to desegregate its schools.

"The institutional roots of racism, which depersonalize our prejudices and make it easier for us to defend them," said Ribicoff, "are as deeply embedded in the large metropolitan communities of the North as they are in the small rural communities of the South." He cited Government studies that show that nearly half of all black students outside the South attend schools that are more than 95% black (compared with more than 70% in the South). Added Ribicoff: "If Senator John Stennis of Mississippi wants to make honest men of us Northern liberals, I think we should help him." The basic cause of Northern segregation, Ribicoff argues, is that "we have segregated our society and our neighborhoods. Black migrants in the cities were trapped in poverty because the whites who fled to the suburbs took the jobs with them and then closed the door on the black man." The only long-range solution to school segregation in Northern cities, he suggested, is to provide jobs and housing for blacks in the now white suburbs.

Steal the Buses. Ribicoff's candor drew high praise from diverse Senators. Stennis, understandably, called it "a landmark--a trail-blazing speech." Vermont Republican George Aiken termed it a demonstration of "courage" and even "nobility," while Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island agreed that many Northerners "have hypocrisy in our hearts--we go home and talk liberalism to each other, but we don't practice it."

Few would quarrel with Ribicoff's general indictment of the North, although it could be argued that the South's more purposeful and officially sanctioned racial discrimination has helped push blacks into Northern urban ghettos and that the North's kind of racism more readily yields to appeals to conscience. The desire to treat segregation the same in both North and South is also laudable--but not nearly as simple as it sounds. While the courts have repeatedly ruled that de jure segregation, officially sustained by state and local governments, is unconstitutional, and the machinery to end it is well in motion, no such ruling or procedure has emerged to deal with de facto segregation created by the grouping of blacks in neighborhoods. The Southern strategists clearly hope that any attempt to move massively against the far more complex problems posed by de facto segregation would embroil the whole issue in new controversy, tie up the limited manpower resources of the Justice Department and HEW in complex investigations, and give the South more time to stall in desegregating its own schools.

This diversionary tactic comes at a time when the courts have run out of patience with Southern resistance and are setting deadlines for prompt desegregation. Enlightened leaders in the Carolinas have adjusted realistically to the inevitable and have reasoned responsibly with segregationists in their states. But Governors in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Florida are scoring easy and dangerous political points by stirring up all of the anti-integration forces. Georgia's Governor Lester Maddox even told schoolchildren not to get on buses that would take them to integrated schools and that "somebody ought to let the air out of them [the tires] and steal them [the buses]." He and Louisiana's John McKeithen, Alabama's Albert Brewer and Mississippi's John Bell Williams met in Mobile, announced that they would go to Washington to try to "save our public schools." The issue is being inflamed by George Wallace, who has been attending anti-integration rallies in his drive to unseat Brewer this year and to reach again for the presidency in 1972.

The inflammatory talk is producing more white boycotts of integrated schools and a steady proliferation of private academies. A high school in Mississippi's Oktibbeha County that was to reopen last week with a heavy black enrollment burned down; arson is suspected. Bomb threats delayed the opening of two newly integrated schools in Birmingham. Bills outlawing busing to achieve racial integration are being introduced in Southern legislatures. Most of them are patterned after a law enacted last year by the New York state legislature--and Mississippi's Stennis has introduced an almost identical measure in the U.S. Senate.

The North's ambivalence was further dramatized by Superior Court Judge Al fred Gitelson's ruling that Los Angeles was violating the rights of its black and Mexican American children--who constitute 44% of the city's 654,000 students--by keeping most of them in schools with few whites. Gitelson accepted arguments of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had filed the suit, and found the school board guilty of de jure segregation by building new schools, drawing new attendance districts and creating busing policies without regard for the fact that they would not achieve integration. He also moved toward blurring the distinction between de jure and de facto, contending that "Negro and Mexican children suffer serious harm when their education takes place in public schools that are racially segregated, whatever the source of such segregation may be." He ordered the board to develop a plan that would reduce the percentage of minority students in each school to no more than 15% above or below their representation in the city, and in no case constituting more than half of a school's enrollment.

Acting School Superintendent Robert Kelly contends that that will require busing more than 240,000 children at a cost of $180 million over the next eight years; School Board President Arthur Gardner declared that this would "virtually destroy the school district." It already faces a deficit that could reach $54 million next year. The school board will appeal the decision and the case may well wind up in the Supreme Court.

However difficult it might be to achieve racial balance in Los Angeles' sprawling school district, it is impossible in a city like Washington, D.C., where 94% of students are black. It is highly impractical in New York City, where more than half of the 1,000,000 pupils are heavily concentrated in such huge ghettos as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. In many heavily black cities, the only answer is to create school districts that spill over city boundaries into white suburbs. In the case of Washington, this would also involve two quite reluctant states.

Shibboleths. Thus in the nation's largest cities, there may be no immediate solution to the segregated-school dilemma; the only practical course is to improve the teaching in the schools as they exist. But in countless smaller communities, North and South, the use of buses --however inconvenient or expensive --is not only practical but virtually the only way to achieve integration. That is what makes President Nixon's defense of the antibusing forces so questionable. To be sure, his statement was carefully hedged. But he expressed no personal zeal for the principle of integration, but shifted the responsibility to the courts. Nixon's ambiguous thinking, as read by Press Secretary Ron Ziegler: "The President feels that in the efforts to eliminate, according to the mandate of the court, the dual school system to the maximum degree possible, we should not use busing, and also, to the maximum degree possible, it is the feeling that we should do everything to preserve the neighborhood school system, to allow children to go to the closest school in their neighborhood."

There is, of course, considerable justification for the idea that children should be able to walk to school; also, parents take a more personal interest in schools in their own neighborhood. But there are elements of hypocrisy in these shibboleths. More than 17 million children are being bused daily already, mostly because they live beyond walking distance of their schools, and there are no studies that indicate they suffer educationally as a result. In the South, where housing is less segregated than in Northern big cities, countless black children are now bused past nearby white schools. Nor is the nightmare envisioned by Senator Stennis, that children would be "boxed up and crated and hauled around the city and the country like common animals," really true. But most parents understandably fear that their children will wind up in an inferior school and will be retarded by their teachers' efforts to help slower students. The idea that black children have suffered for more than a century from poor schooling, and that the only way to reverse this historical process is to ask white students to make sacrifices of their own, is hardly persuasive to most white parents. Yet some blacks also think their children may suffer from the daily contrast between the ghetto and an affluent school neighborhood.

Since 1954 the nation has been committed to the principle that segregated education is inferior education; no study since then has refuted that concept. But as for busing as a solution, it is a hard political reality that the opposition is so strong that massive use of the practice will not soon be tolerated in the U.S. --unless the courts rule otherwise.

It was not one of the Administration's finer weeks in dealing with the nation's racial problems. At a Republican fund-raising dinner in Chicago, Vice President Spiro Agnew attacked as "supercilious sophisticates" any who advocate "open admissions" of minority students to the nation's colleges. He seemed to suggest that an open-admissions policy is a kind of intellectual version of busing. Admittedly, the policy has dangers and must be administered carefully. But Agnew's assertion that the main criterion for admission to college should be aptitude, while it sounds unimpeachable, in fact ignores the realities.

Ghetto children raised in ghetto schools cannot develop and display their aptitude in the same way that white students do. To refuse them special consideration is to condemn them to the self-perpetuating cycle of inferior education. In fact, the concept of compensatory help is well established in the armed forces and in industry. Progressive businesses, including IBM and General Motors, do not insist on conventional aptitude in hiring blacks; instead, they train them for jobs that the schools have not previously equipped them to handle.

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