Regional Report; 7; School Integration

The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. The South has seen more change in the past six months than in the 11 preceding years. Some of the changes genuine, much of it is token. School discrimination is ending. School people know they can desegregate and continue to receive federal aid or they can refuse the federal money and be forced to desegregate anyway. That was Sylvan Meyer, editor of the Gainesville Georgia Times. He'll be back in a moment with a report on progress or the lack of it in school integration in the deep south. National Educational Television presents Regional Report, a program of fact, comment and opinion from reporters throughout the country, our subject, school integration.

Here again is National Editor Edwin Bailey. This is the second school year in which it is the law of the land that public schools must be desegregated. Our question is, how far has this gone? How much progress has been made? Last year, only 2 percent of the 3 million Negro children in 11 southern states actually sat in classrooms with white children. This year, as school boards face the prospect of losing federal financial aid for non-compliance, there is more progress. But it's far from the massive development that some people expected. Here is Sylvan Meyer to tell part of that story. I'm Sylvan Meyer, WGTV, University of Georgia Television. Superficially, desegregation of schools in the south is a fact. Of some 2950 school districts in the 11 states of the old Confederacy, less than 100 have failed to sign compliance agreements under the Civil Rights Act.

There are three times as many Negro children in school with whites this year as there were last year, yet only 8 percent of the Negro children in the south are in schools with white children. Some school systems, like Ruby South Carolina, merely said to heck with it and went the whole route to integration. Others like Nashville, Georgia, signed the pledge, accepted some Negro children in white schools, and then saw the applications mysteriously withdrawn by the transfers. Lincolnton, Georgia, is one of three Georgia districts still holding out on signing compliance with the Civil Rights Act. Even before its violent confrontations this fall, Lincolnton's leaders refused to consent to television interviews. Last year, Lincolnton got $17,500 in U.S. school aid. This year anticipates $100,000 unless the government gets tough. Its adamant attitude brought demonstrations, then repression and reprisals, but little

has truly changed here except tempers. Mutual distrust and fear cloud efforts to establish communications. And what if the agreements are signed? Lincolnton knows that other districts signed, figuring a piece of paper would not bring much change to their tightly controlled communities. The reluctance to speak for the record is widespread. Alabama school officials who defied Governor George Wallace by signing a compliance agreement with the Federal Office of Education turned down a request for television interview while they go through the sensitive mechanics of change. In the south, neither the goals nor the issues are clear cut. While schools are desegregated in some cases, buses are not. And go to desegregated schools on vehicles that are still segregated. Even statistical information is sketchy and unreliable. Many precincts have yet to report.

Who will take the initiative in saying that the spirit of the Civil Rights Act is carried out? One knowledgeable observer in this field is former North Carolina newspaper editor Reed Sarat, who for five years was director of the Southern Educational Reporting Service. In that position, he was constrained from comment. Now he has another responsibility in Southern education and can send it to give his first television interview on regional report. I think that the Southern states have seen that freedom of choice offers the best way for them to achieve their objective and at the same time, at this point, obtain the approval of the Office of Education. Yes. Now is the process it's underway? Is it really changing people? I don't know that people themselves are being changed. This is a slow process, as I think almost anyone would agree. Some of the situation is changing and the ways in which people react to the situation also

is changing. I doubt myself very much that the way people feel of basically has changed a great deal yet. That is, I don't think there are going to be many Negro schools, many Negro children, going to the public schools and the deep south states where resistance is strongest. Athens Clark County, Georgia set up a student transfer plan in 1959, but neglected to tell the Negroes about it. The situation actually started in 1963 with five students. Clark County is not typical in that it is fairly far down the road. It is typical because no one seems able to say whether Negro agreement to the status quo residential patterns are a tacit and mutual gradualism or at work there. I believe if the pupil transfer applications had been made known to the Negro community that efforts would have been made to integrate the schools in 1959.

Has the white community or the school board tried to discourage you from proceeding with integration plans? Not in a major way. How many Negroes are now in the formerly white school? Over 200. Why such a relatively low number? A low number of 200. I think in comparison with the other communities, with the population of this county, I think we have a high number rather than a low number. We have a low number due to few Negroes trying to apply. I would say that we could have 400 if 400 had applied. But this is not due to the school board. This would be due to Negroes not wanting to go to the schools. Was there a reaction from the community to the first integration?

Initially yes, there was. Some of it were very unfavorable. Most of it were very favorable. There were extremist groups that protested vigorously. In fact, as far as our store here is concerned, the Ku Klux Klan picketed us one day. The week before that it had been the representatives of the NAACP. But most of the reaction was favorable. I don't think that everyone approved of it. We didn't expect everyone to approve of it. But we felt that most of the people in Clark County approved of the way it was done, perhaps not if they didn't approve of the actual integration itself. Except where local leadership is pressed hard, school officials think they are home free for this year with tokenism. Why? Perhaps because the nation itself thinks that segregation is over and remaining advances will take place in relative obscurity.

Perhaps because endless and innumerable devices have been concocted for evading newly applied federal regulations that still are not clearly defined. Perhaps because the Crawfordville and other incidents of direct protest have confused the local administrative school picture and have encased it in bureaucratic entanglements. So what will happen to change attitudes? First as the attitude of the government itself, then perhaps the degree of opposition at the local level, certainly the availability of leadership at the local level, and then of course the degree to which long-held notions are really changing. While some in the south work for methods of evading federal regulations, other southerners are trying to find ways of complying with them. Most of the school plans that have been submitted to the Office of Education are so-called Freedom of Choice Plans.

One of the first to criticize these and to insist that the federal government reject them when they come from local schools as a frontline civil rights worker, Mrs. Francis Paulie, who is the director of the Georgia Council on Human Relations. Well actually because it's a freedom of choice, it's a misnomer, it really is not free and there's very little choice. The, it still leaves the burden of the transfer of the Negro child to the white child on the back of the Negro instead of on the school authorities where it actually belongs. And where the HEW has said it belongs. How has this worked in practice? Well in practice, very slightly, but I'd say over the state as a whole, the Negro has to find out when he can seek a transfer, and this is often very difficult, because the transfer periods often are limited to as low as two days in Athens, Georgia, to maybe

one week in July here, two weeks in August there, one week in May somewhere else. And so the periods of the timing is difficult for the Negro to find out when he can go to seek this transfer. Then when he actually gets to this place, often it's a place that's difficult, maybe it's a courthouse where the Negro has to go. When the courthouse in many particularly South Georgia towns, the Negro is afraid to go to the courthouse, but he must go here to pick up this application blinding. Then it must be signed by the parents or so forth, sometimes it has to be notarized. And it has to be returned to a certain place by a certain time. All of these things that the Negro must find out in some way, and then must be able to follow through on this.

Well then often the trouble really begins then. Then people begin to say to the child, in one county, the principal visited the children and said, now really, you really don't want to transfer. You may not get along very well over there in that white school. Your background hadn't been the same, and are you sure you want to transfer? Or maybe in another place, they'll call a group together and say, well you know you like to play football, but you won't have a chance to play football over there. Typical of a belt of counties across the southeast is Beringen in South Georgia. These counties stretch across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. They reveal in their structure all the subtleties of history, all the invisible handling of situations by the power structure. In Nashville, Georgia, at the back of town with big warehouses and with not much to do between seasons, 30 applications from Negro students for transfers to white schools were

accepted on a Saturday by Monday all 30 were withdrawn. The Nashville Herald, the local paper, commented that it seemed hypocritical to accept these applications and then maneuver to evade the rules. Miss Elsie Griner, Jr., a native of this area, a former gospel and folk music star, was the author of this article. We asked her why Beringen County signed the compliance forms in the first place. Only one thing, federal money, unless we have federal funds, we cannot operate the schools in Beringen County. And of course, that was the sole motivation for submitting a desegregation plan. Was it difficult for the Negro students to make an application to transfer under the freedom of choice plan? No, no. Making the application was quite easy. All of the parents made their applications to the Negro School principal. And they had a period of about two weeks during which they made those applications.

At one time, he submitted all applications to the county school superintendent. That was on Saturday before school opened on Monday. It does seem to be rather strange coincidence that all 30 of those applications would be withdrawn in about a 30-hour span. But that is the picture as it has been given to us. There are no Negro students in the white schools in Beringen County because of those applications having been withdrawn immediately before school started. Has none of the white community speculated as to why that is happening? Of course, they speculated. Some of the parents and a great many of the students have speculated. They have asked why the desegregation didn't come off his plan to a large number of the white community.

That was a token that Beringen County was in current step that we weren't backward anymore. And of course, that was a disappointment to them in the serious one that all of those applications were withdrawn. What's the Negro response to these questions? Silence. They just say they changed their minds. We've been unable to get any other statement or any other suggestion from them. How widespread are these pressures? Well, I would say that these pressures are almost the entire state with maybe just a few of those isolated counties where there are no Negroes of very few Negroes. It's a matter of where all of these parents and all of these children have these fears, the fears of losing a job, as well as the actual threat of losing a job, or the cases where jobs actually have been lost, but the fears are so great.

The fear that that child will not have police protection. The fear that that child will be behind in school or not be able to keep up. All of these feelings that the Negro has, that you can expect him to have after having been oppressed for so many years, makes it to me, seemed to me impossible for him to carry the burden of taking the initiative and transferring two white schools and actually integrating the schools. Of course, in our community, our population is about 75, 25 white and colored respectively. And the bulk of the colored community lives from one paycheck to the next. That's an economic reality of this particular area, and the withholding of that one paycheck might mean some great disadvantages to that particular family.

This is the thing that can happen when a total portion of a community is not economically fit to fight for its sale, or to, maybe that's the wrong word, to fend for its sale. You see in the South, and particularly in Bury and County. That's the only county I know very much about. There is a rap work between the races, because we live in a small place from an area standpoint, and we have all had the economic pressure of rural America applied to us. It's not that we have, we have felt it more than any other county in the South Georgia, but these are the situations as they are here. Whatever pressures could be applied from physical violence to economic pressure have not been

done so openly, and I have no reason to believe that they have been apart. Integration happens sometimes because of technical reasons, because of school consolidation, or because large schools refuse to continue to accept Negroes from small, outlying communities. Ruby, a small town in North Central, South Carolina with a population ratio of 70 white to 30 Negro, integrated completely. Well Jim Youngerner was proud that his community rose to this challenge, but yet recognizes an undecurrent of hostility. The students began as usual, they came and went to their classes, and then we went to the auditorium, and the news reporters went to the auditorium with us, where I opened the school, and I informed the students there that they would be treated alike in every

respect, that if one needed a weapon, then regardless of race, color, or creed, he would get that weapon, and I made it clear to him, and I believe they understood it. Did you have to talk to the community to persuade them to accept integration? No, we did not. We did not. We simply talked with various groups, and they accepted the situation, and wholeheartedly. Did they have accepted it if it hadn't been for the Civil Rights Act? Now I can't answer that.

I don't know. How do the other districts in the area look at Ruby now that it's integrated? I think that the other districts in Ruby look up to Ruby as somewhat as a model, really. I hope I'm not sticking my neck out by saying that. I believe they do, though. Do you think they will drop the freedom of choice plan, and totally integrate as Ruby has in the future? I believe they will. Why? I believe they will, because it's a whole lot cheaper. The South is moving erratically and hesitantly, as though waiting for the bureaucrats who control the dollars to set the pace of change and to say how far it must go. When the stakes are known, even in the hard core areas, it seems to go as far as it must. David Ceeley is the government official responsible for deciding whether desegregation plans comply

with the law. Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Spiveck asks Mr. Ceeley to explain why, if 95% of the districts have complied with the law, only 7% of the Negroes actually attended schools with white children. Well, I think the confusion comes in the word compliance. We have not reported that all of these districts are in full compliance. What we have said is that the 95% of the school districts have complied with the requirement for filing either an assurance of compliance or a desegregation plan. The fact that a district has a desegregation plan does not mean that they are totally desegregated, merely means that they have a plan to become desegregated. This is the basic source of the confusion, I believe. What are the major problems you have encountered in the actual application of free choice in the South, this fall? The fundamental factor in the success of a free choice plan is community attitude, and there's no question but that in some communities the attitude is such as to make free choice

virtually unworkable. This year we have allowed any district which wish to undertake a free choice plan to try it, but I'd say that unless the attitude of the community is favorable in which a child can exercise his choice freely and without fear of reprisal, that it cannot be a very workable plan. So far, the focus of Title VI has been on obtaining and approving desegregation plans from the South. What steps will now be taken to check on compliance to ensure that the necessary investigation and enforcement is performed? This very definitely is the next phase, is checking into compliance, I think not only because of the responsibility to Congress, but in fairness to those districts who are carrying out the act honestly, this will take both field visits by our staff and written reports from the school districts, both kinds of activity are contemplated.

Where there is noncompliance, there will definitely have to be enforcement proceedings if the school district will not comply voluntarily. Well, there not be a temptation because the penalty is so great to avoid excessively punitive enforcement, let's say. Well, I think we would avoid excessively punitive enforcement in any case, but you can't avoid the responsibility of carrying out what Congress imposed here, that a district which continues to discriminate, which will not take voluntary steps to stop discriminating. That district simply cannot participate in federal programs. Nine years ago, Nashville, Tennessee, was the scene of tension and demonstrations when it became one of the first southern cities to desegregate its schools. We go back for a look at it now. I'm Eugene Dietz, Education Editor of the Nashville, Tennessee, on reporting from WDCN TV. Things were not always this quiet in Nashville.

There were mobs in the streets, mass arrests, general disturbances as public schools were desegregated, September 9, 1957, under federal court orders. The school was bombed on that night. Miss Delamay Grumes, Principal of Fair School, recalls the first day of desegregation. But as far as the well, it was a beautiful day. As far as the situation, it was very rough. When I came to school early that morning, there were cause with KK signs on them. Sooner mob gathered. There were jails from the crowd. There were rocks being thrown. There were all kind of insults being hurled at me and the teachers. The chief architect of the Nashville desegregation plan, which became a model for the south, was W.A. Bass, then superintendent of the city schools. This now retired recalls walking through the mobs at the schools on that first day. One woman in particular was violent in her opposition. She stormed out like a witch almost.

What has happened to our rights, our state rights? Why is it the federal government can tell us to do anything? And she wanted to know what had become of our state rights. And I tried to appease her anger and at the same time give her the information she needed. And I told her that that issue had settled at Appomattox. From the second day after integration was launched, we had no difficulty of any consequence. On the other hand, we had a sympathetic feeling on the part of the public at large and the teachers of the city. Everything as it may appear, recognized that after all these were all Nashville's children entitled to a good education. And they accepted the decision of the court, gracefully, and cooperatively. The Nashville plan proposed by school officials an answer to a lawsuit seeking complete integration provided for desegregation a greater year beginning in the first grade.

These officials credit the continuing support of many groups for widespread public acceptance of this plan. The groups include the clergy, the academic community, PTA, elements of the press, and the city administration. Mayor Beverly Briley puts it this way. I think that government ought to be a part of social change. I think that we should find some degree of leadership. And if the problems of this type are not solved, it's the fault of local leadership, both governmental, industrially, and in the community. John Sagan-Thawler, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, looks at the role of the press. Well, I think the first of all, the role of the press in this area, as in every other area of controversy and crisis and conflict, involves providing courage of the news developments in the community. But beyond that, I think it involves also the need to raise the

editorial voice in a form of leadership, the art position, editorially, since the time of the Supreme Court decision. When this first became a controversy, pertinent controversy, our effort has been toward leading the community, trying to lead toward justice on the law. The school board has ordered a speed-up, effective in the fall of 1966, when all grades will be desegregated two years earlier than required by the courts. The board also has voluntarily integrated the faculty. What is Nashville learned after these nine years, Dr. John H. Harris, director of public schools? Well, I would say that we have learned that the white children have accepted the Negro children extremely well. We have learned that some people did not think a Negro teacher could teach white children. And I would be pleased to report that, in some cases, I have had white children asked

to be transferred into the Negro teacher's rooms. They have felt some of these teachers extremely good, superior, high quality, know their subject and are well trained. What lies ahead? Well, we'll never be without problems. We have people with opinions. And well, as you've often heard me say, no problems, no work. We'll have our problems, but we're satisfied with what has taken place so far. So this is Nashville, nine years after school desegregation. Most schools in the north have been desegregated for years, but that doesn't necessarily mean that black and white go to school together. The problem here is residential segregation, so that the neighborhood school is all one race. It's called de facto segregation. For the story of how one city has tried to meet this problem, we call upon the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Posit.

This is Frank Hawkins reporting for Station WQED in Pittsburgh. While Pittsburgh's Negro population is not as large as that to be found in most of the North's big cities, its problem of racial integration in the schools is nonetheless complex or urgent. The city school board has been subjected to picketing and other demonstrations by an impatient Negro community. The board's response has been an exhaustive study of the problem of racial integration and a report on what the schools are doing to achieve it. Admittedly, this report is not a success story. It is rather a statement of the tremendous social demands directed toward the schools and an affirmation of the board's determination to meet those demands, honestly, creatively and responsibly. The key figure in attempts to achieve better racial balance in Pittsburgh's public schools is the superintendent of schools, Dr. Sidney P. Marlon, Jr.

We asked Dr. Marlon, what was the board's intent in issuing the report on its quest for racial equality? Mr. Hawkins, the Board of Education in Pittsburgh determined some six months ago to the state as clearly as it could its position on this paramount concern in urban schools today. It sought to declare firmly its position and support of racial integration by a rational and constructive process as distinct from sudden historical mood to place high emphasis upon education as the root to integration and to establish the minds of all of our people both Negro and White, exactly where the Board of Education stands on this subject. I would say that the report in a friendly way and yet in a very firm way says this report is intended now to pacify Negro citizens, not to console or reassure White citizens, and it is a hard-nosed declaration that this issue is a terribly difficult problem for

boards of education which has not been solved anywhere. There is, as you know, contained in our report and ultimate creative massive solution, which we recommend. This solution lies in what we would call the confrontation of this issue as a city-wide problem, not being able to problem. We can try here a design in which we have invited a major survey from the Harvard Center for Field Studies to permit a fit for spending what may be as much as a year-on-long working with us and for politicians, social scientists, educators, lawyers, economists and others working with our staff. And developing what we will call a large high school concept, where we will leap over the traditional differences in neighborhoods and sub-compartments of the city and have a sufficiently large area of large high schools, not being now a three or five thousand people high schools, that will by exquisite location of sight, and I mean big sites, and

I mean wonderful, beautiful schools, with a first quality instructional program for the latter half of this century. Big enough to embrace people of all kinds, social and economic differences, as well as racial differences. And we'll end up, I hope, with five or six big schools of this kind, rather than 12 or 15 schools that is we have now, and that this will bring about a rational and logical and reasonable and joyful integration of our boys and girls throughout the city. This report, which is entitled the quest for racial equality, is totally unsatisfactory to us. The report merely indicates that with respect to desegregation, which is a fundamental issue with us, because we feel that you cannot have quality education, which is segregated, that nothing can be done until the school board acquires somehow large sums of money to

build what Dr. Marl and our superintendent calls the massive high schools. And then only will we possibly have desegregation on the secondary school, the high school level, so the reports completely unsatisfactory as far as we're concerned. Can you think of any way to make the boy's efforts any more acceptable to the Negro community? Well you must remember, Frank, that the report was not intended particularly to please NAACP leaders, nor indeed to please those from the white population who are looking for a different route. I think that Mr. Brown does speak for the NAACP and rightly should, however, I would offer a little quotation from a major editorial in our principal Negro newspaper in Pittsburgh also reflecting on this same report.

This document is one which the educators of Pittsburgh may be proud of, it reflects credit upon all who contributed to its compilation, because it is one of the first note where the efforts to treat fully and analyze the complicated maze, which is education today. It is a more than adequate statement of the problem. It is indeed a statement of the problem, more than solution, Frank. The solution will be a long time coming. We are in front of the overcrowded and predominantly Negro Westinghouse High School, with Berg Brown, the president of the Pittsburgh branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. How do you react to the school board's policy declaration, that quote, to remove a child by government action from his neighborhood solely to accomplish an enforced integration, which may be contrary to his family's wishes, is a serious and affront to freedom as enforced segregation, in full?

Well, that statement simply is Dr. Marlon's thinly disguised way of saying that he believes in the sanctity of the neighborhood school. It's a silly conclusion because, after all, it was government action which placed the children in neighborhood schools, there's nothing particularly sanctified about neighborhood schools. And many of us are saying, and many of us can justifiably say that it is this same government action that forces us to stay and go to these neighborhood schools, which offer an inferior caliber of education, and this is in the front to us. In the same report, in the same paragraph, the school board speaking through Dr. Marlon, I believe, indicated that it is opposed to busing to promote desegregation, but it's not opposed to busing for other reasons. And we feel that totally speaking, that Dr. Marlon is a person who has decided that if we can maintain the status quo, assuming that we do have, and we do have a great deal

of neighborhood segregation, then this is what he's for. Somebody that knows what we're doing in Pittsburgh on this are any other important issue in education, I think, knows that we're not satisfied with the status quo. And again, it's not so important what I think as an individual. It is more important, I think, with the Board of Education declares formally on this subject. And again, I would refer to their report, which I have a complete and absolute support. The Pittsburgh Board of Public Education declares the segregation of children for reason of race, religion, economic, handicap, or any other difference. Every reasonable and constructive measure that can be afforded will be taken for the ultimate elimination of de facto segregation in our schools. That is a rejection of the status quo. You can't separate education from the economic problems that our Board may have. You can't separate education from our social structure, but we feel, and this is a fundamental

principle with us, that you cannot have quality education in a segregated setting. And as long as you have segregation, whether it is by legal fire or by neighborhood patterns, it is segregation, and it is an evil, and therefore it is a problem for the school administration to grapple with and deal with effectively if they can. I think that the school board should immediately undertake a comprehensive study of the existing school boundary lines to see where these boundary lines can reasonably be shifted and changed to promote racial balance. I think the school board should also consider the actual reorganization and restructuring of certain schools so that we can not only achieve racial balance, but we can have optimum use. There is no point in having schools that are overpopulated in other schools that are underpopulated. And by redistricting and restructuring these schools, I think that we can achieve both goals or at least improve upon our present situation.

I can assure you that the exhaustive studies have been made of possibilities of changing school lines. The solution still escapes us with made some minor adjustments to this truth. We've afforded some improved integration by means of moving children from other crowded schools to underpopulated schools, and this four limited numbers have been successful. But as for a quick solution in changing school district lines, no, we do not find such a solution, Frank. We find that, regrettably, we have an increasing number of segregated schools. Whereas as recently as 15 years ago, we had six schools that were 80 percent of more Negro boys and girls. There are now 19 such schools, and this is dreadful, but correspondingly, we had a few years ago, a population of 18 percent Negro boys and girls 20 years ago against 82 percent white.

Now we have 37 percent Negro boys and girls and 63 percent white. These changing numbers impose extraordinary burdens upon this redistricting, and I must add, that as we have redistricted, in some cases, and as there tends to be an increasing number of Negro boys and girls, we regret to say that white families have often departed to the city. What is the nature barrier to better racial integration in the fixed-blade schools? I believe right now I'm talking that it's money. I think that the tremendous program I described is a massive solution to a massive problem. In Pittsburgh, speak of this as a $50 or $60 million task lying immediately ahead of us. Proceeding right now, if we had the money, it would take us four or five years at the very least to plan and execute these large high school solutions. We will, of course, weave this into the work of the housing survey now going on. We will look for funds from state support, as well as local support, to accomplish this.

About the single largest barrier right now, the realization of this big solution, is money. Money would, of course, be helpful. Money can solve and help solve many problems, but the real solution is to have a dedicated staff and a school board in the citizenry, which is dedicated to achieving racial balance. I've indicated before, and I'll say it again, that we can do a great deal here in Pittsburgh to improve racial balance if only we have the will to do so, and it will not take large sums of money. Certainly large sums of money and new school construction would be a way to do this, but there are other ways of at least improving the situation. It should be evident from the scene you have just witnessed that the quest for better racial balance in Pittsburgh schools proceeds in an atmosphere conducive to progress. There is conflict to be sure, but there is also agreement on objectives, disagreement

only on how to achieve them. If the dialogue proceeds with good faith on both sides, Pittsburgh may yet point the way to harmonious racial integration in big city school systems. If it fails, it will not be for what of sincere effort on the part of some of its most responsible citizens. In another large northern city, the issue is the same, but the fight has moved from the boardroom to the streets, here is our report. That civil rights protest song is not coming out of Alabama or Mississippi. This time it's being sung in Chicago, Illinois, a northern city where equality of education

was supposed to have been achieved long ago. Because the city's Jim Crow housing pattern creates ghettos, Chicago's neighborhood schools tend to be overwhelmingly negro or predominantly white. As a school board member once said, integration is that period between the first negro moving in and the last white moving out. To break this pattern of de facto segregation, civil rights leaders called for school districts to be enlarged, to transfer within a section of the city. They further charged that some district boundaries had been gerrymandered to preserve the segregated status quo, and at negro children were receiving an inferior education. This was denied by school superintendent Benjamin C. Willis, one of the nation's outstanding school administrators, who maintained that the neighborhoods, not the schools, were segregated. Dr. Willis immediately became the number one target, as civil rights leaders demanded his ousted.

The Board of Education, divided into pro and anti-Willis factions, was caught in the crossfire between the civil rights movement and white parent groups, who supported Dr. Willis and his policies. Almost every day, from May to September, demonstrators marched from the lakefront through the loop to city hall. They were joined on the picket line by nuns and clergymen, as the anti-Willis campaign became the rallying point for the entire civil rights movement in Chicago. Most of the time, it was peaceful, nonviolent, but there were occasions when things got a bit rough, such as the day Dick Gregory battled policemen loading him into a wagon. The situation took on national significance when Chicago's young civil rights leaders forged an alliance with the Reverend Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Even 20,000 demonstrators followed Dr. King in a dramatic march on city hall, where he announced that Chicago would be the beachhead for his long-promised invasion to attack segregation

in the north. And I is the feeling, and a very strong feeling, that Mr. Willis does not understand the depths and dimensions of the problem of de facto segregation in public schools, and does not grasp the mood of the Negro at this hour. Dr. Willis, Chicago and its school system have become the symbols of de facto segregation in the north. We interviewed Dr. Willis at his office at the board of education. Has there been segregation de facto or otherwise in the school system? Well, one might look up and count the schools and find that as of last two or three weeks ago, around 1 October, some 57 of our elementary schools could be all white without a Negro child in them, and some 66 of our elementary schools would be all Negro.

In other words, this would total about one-fourth of our schools would be their all white or all Negro. Now, this is number of schools, not number of children, that would be different. And this is caused by the housing pattern, rather than the school board policy. People go to school where they live. And we certainly, the school board and our superintendent of schools certainly do not have anything to do with where people live, the fact that some 12 percent of all of the children in school in this city go to public school in the morning from public housing. I don't know who decides where that's to go, certainly the board of education, but what about the charge that there's low quality education in these schools and contrast to other schools? I think there's a lot of nonsense and has been all along. As a matter of fact, where a town or city didn't exist 10 years ago, and if a city existed today of 100,000 people and 10,000 children, all the teachers would be new to that school,

because the community is new. And any special steps been taken to bring about integration. We've had permissive transfers and other items over a period of some four years. But I think it becomes quite clear that mothers of children would like to have their younger children going to school very close to where they are going to be. Is it a proper function of a school system to promote integration? What do you think the public schools should be? The public schools are not mine. I work for a community in relation to the public school system. What's your response to the charge by Dr. King, Mr. Rabie, and others that you have not been sympathetic to their problem and have failed to understand it? Well, again, I think that when people take time to look at the record, they will probably find an unsurpassed group of activities or projects or programs have been introduced

in the city of Chicago. And somewhere along the line. These people who have been misleading others and have been liberally quoted in the press will certainly have something to answer for. Can you give us some examples of some of these things that have occurred? You asked, well, let's say one point would be the quality of education. What is? What makes for quality of education? Twenty-five years ago, one would have said, how many children you give to a teacher, size of class? Many would be an element. And whether you're able or willing to pay enough salary to bring competent and devoted people into the classrooms, this might be too. You might add to this a number of books in the library and whether you had one in a school and so on. Well, now, if these are elements of quality, if you look in the city of Chicago, you'd find 60 or a higher percent of the children in sections of this city, where they're totally

niguo, are in new buildings erected in the last ten years. You will find that our lunchroom program is located here. Anyone like to see this documented, right in the card, I'll send you the report we used in documenting this before the power committee in Washington, July 1965. As I recall, you made the statement that your objective is to provide the best education possible for the greatest number of children. Of course, through education and through the schools, let each become all he is capable of there. And doing that, many of the social problems we're conferred with will be solved. I think people solve problems. People will solve problems. And your role is to equip the people. I think schools just certainly need to help everyone, master the tools of learning, acquire basic knowledge, search out and do something about the creative talents that people possess.

Maybe it's the ability to write, to take pictures, to be an artist, whatever their ability may be, and certainly to citizenship education. Thank you very much, Dr. Willis. On the other side of the hill is the Civil Rights Command post in the Negro ghetto in Chicago, Southside, where strategy and tactics for the anti-Willis campaign are being met. I talked to Al Rabie, leader of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago. Mr. Rabie, Dr. Willis and his supporters contend that it's the neighborhoods, not the schools that are segregated. What is your answer to that? Certainly the segregation within the neighborhoods of the city of Chicago contribute to segregation in our school system, but it is not the total and final answer to it. The problem is that the manipulation of boundary lines by the superintendent and his administration has not only intensified it, it has in fact intensified it.

And the policies of the Board of Education have in no way attempted to relieve the problems of segregation as a result of presidential segregation. We charge that school districts have been deliberately gerrymandered in order to preserve the segregated pattern. We do and we have before the policymakers in Washington presented evidence which we think is conclusive that this has been the history of the school system. Unlike the South where they have separate school systems for the white Negro children, here in Chicago we have the same school system. What's your objection to the education that is being given in the Negro neighborhoods? The result of that education is that children first aren't being educated and the contributing factors to that are the low number of certified teachers in the schools, the absence of adequate equipment and other contributing factors. How do you go about changing this pattern of segregation in the big northern cities? We think that the Board of Education which ensured in the transition community that every child within that community would get a quality education.

We believe that white parents would stop running from schools and certainly we would have at least resolved one of the problems which is the question of the quality of education aside from the question of integration. Why is Dr. Willis become your main target? Dr. Willis is no more than a symbol in Chicago as Wallace was a symbol in Alabama and represents the status quo here in the city of Chicago as long as he is here, this weirdly certain that there is no change of attitude on the part of those who in fact could correct the school situation here in Chicago. It seems as if the school segregation controversy here in Chicago has become the rallying point for the entire civil rights movement, perhaps even more important in the controversies over employment, housing and so on, but has it become the rallying point and why? It certainly has and I think it has because the hopes and equalization process in our democracy is one of education and there is no hope for children or future generations or the future of our society if the quality of education within our system is not of the highest quality.

Thank you very much Mr. Viva. In so the battle lines are drawn, what happens in Chicago will affect every big northern city. Martin Luther King served this notice when he said, but I do think that Chicago is critical, it has become a symbol of the facto segregation, it has become a symbol of the facto segregation because the superintendent has not been willing to grapple with the depths and dimensions of the problem and I think that the movement must remain alive and must work with determination and passion to solve the problem here in order to serve as an example for the community. This is Hal Bruno, WTTW, Chicago. Jonathan Spivak talks with Francis Kepple, the United States Commissioner of Education. Title 6 is the provision of the law requiring integration as a condition of federal aid.

Are there other steps that the government can or should take as we look ahead to meet this problem of de facto school segregation? So I think I'd have been happier if you said, has taken in order to get the thing in context. That is the title one of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which is designed to improve the quality of education where there are large concentration of children and poor families, overlaps substantially overlaps in North, South, in city and farm areas with relatively high concentrations and what is often described as de facto. And those programs are designed to improve the educational quality in the schools that the children of such groups get. I guess I'm old fashioned but it seems to me that raising the quality of education for this group is going to help in the problem.

What new federal legislation would help speed the pace of school integration? I suppose I'm an educator and it's always dangerous to talk to an educator about new legislation. They're always enthusiastic about it. I suppose there are that is encouragement of various kinds of exploratory things such as things you and I probably talked about and our friends have of kind of cluster schools you know which would make it easier to avoid some of the district boundaries that kind of pilot program. And there are others which I think we could think of which the Congress will have to think about if they're proposed but I want to let me make a basic point here. The federal government is the junior partner in this whole enterprise. The amount of money that's being spent on the elementary and secondary schools by federal taxation and comparison to the amount of state and local taxation is a six or seven percent. The basic decisions are going to be made locally and by states and I'm quite old fashioned

enough to think that's exactly where they should be and I do not think that the federal government should be regarded as the only responsible agent for solving a social problem that is in the conscience as Mr. Mierdell put it of the American people. These reports I think indicate an answer to the question posed at the beginning of this program. In my opinion there has really not been much integration south or north. The office of education charged with enforcement of the law has been overwhelmed by the size of the job. It has too little money and too little staff to even find out if school districts are doing what they say they are doing. Civil rights groups are highly critical. Some blame Commissioner Kepple. Others have told me they are cynical about the Johnson administration that if the administration really wanted enforcement it would make the funds and the staff available. They are even more critical of the policy that permits southern school boards to escape by way of free choice.

A choice which is about as free as a choice to register and vote in some areas. All we can say is that the gain this year may be slight but it's more than in the whole preceding decade. But I do know firsthand that this rate of gain is not going to satisfy Negroes whose children are missing crucial years of educational equality. The . .

. . . . . . . .