Civil Rights: Bending the Guidelines

CIVIL RIGHTS

In January 1966, a dozen years after the U.S. Supreme Court urged "all deliberate speed" in integrating Southern schools, only one of every 13 Negro children in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy was attending a school with white students. This record of non-compliance with the court order is all the more remarkable in view of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, by which the U.S. Office of Education was empowered to withhold federal funds from segregated school districts. Some 1,500 districts in the eleven states did in fact desegregate under this prod. Last week the U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported nonetheless that the great majority of Southern school districts have managed to evade integration while still adhering to the letter of federal desegregation guidelines.

The trouble, the commission found, lay largely in the guidelines themselves. Francis Keppel, former U.S. Commissioner of Education, had allowed the districts to choose between two methods of integration. One, plainly subject to gerrymandering, would set up geographic boundaries within which all children, Negro and white, would attend the same schools. The other would leave Negroes free to attend any school of their choice that had vacant space. Most of the districts, and almost all of those in the Deep South, opted for the second method, thus putting the full burden of integration on the Negro himself.

Many Negroes have been deterred from sending their children to white schools by fear of economic and physical retaliation. In Franklin County, N.C., when the local newspaper published names and addresses of 61 Negro children who applied at white schools, crosses were burned on their families' lawns and bullets fired into their homes. In Sumter County, Ga., a Negro mother was fired from her job within 24 hours after she had chosen a white school for her child. In Calhoun County, Miss., a Negro pupil registered for the seventh grade in a white school but failed to attend classes after her family was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan; the school board then told her she could not attend classes at all, since she had rejected "the school of her choice."

The commission has now proposed a new federal law to outlaw such harassment, and has advised the Office of Education to refuse the free-choice option to districts that have failed to create a "climate conducive to acceptance of the law." Its report also urged the Government to explore new methods of integration, notably complete abandonment of Negro schools in small districts where neither free choice nor zoning has broken the color bar.