Nation: Does Integration Still Matter to Blacks?

• Share

The vanguard of black opinion, among intellectuals and political activists alike, is oriented more toward the achievement of group identity and group autonomy than toward the use of public schools as assimilationist agencies.

—Yale Law Professor Alexander Bickel

AMID all the noisy rhetoric of the retreat from integration in recent weeks, surprisingly few blacks have spoken out in sorrow or anger. Black leaders, normally quick off the mark to meet any new challenge to civil rights, have largely kept quiet. Their silence in part reflects the general confusion and uncertainty over the turnabout. More important, it shows that for increasing numbers of black leaders and thoughtful black citizens, integration is no longer the magic formula it was in the heady, exultant days following the 1954 Brown decision. There is a new sense among blacks of the limits to what integration can achieve—and a deepening division in the black community over what course to follow.

Many, of course, cling as grimly as ever to integration, particularly in the South, where it has brought fundamental changes. "Naw, we're not gonna give up," said an angry black mechanic working on a Buick in a Gray, Ga., garage. He told TIME Correspondent Kenneth Danforth: "If we had had integrated schools just ten years ago, I'd be driving this Riviera instead of bent over the son of a bitch." In Fayette, Miss., black Mayor Charles Evers found uses for the new adversity. "Black people can fight better when they are pressured. We're on our way still. We're going to keep moving. We're not going back. Brother Nixon, Brother Mitchell, Brother Eastland, Brother Stennis—not one of them is going to stop us now." The rural Southern black especially feels that whites have always had the best schools; the only way for a black to get a decent education is to get inside a white school.

But outside the rural South, while the black parents have the same aim of getting the best possible education for their children, many of them no longer see integration as the only—or even the best—way to obtain it. Separatists now urge black control over schools in black communities, whether in the North or the Deep South. One moderate though disenchanted veteran of a controversial experiment in local school control is Rhody McCoy, administrator of the battered Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn. McCoy says bluntly: "Integration has never worked. What kind of a hypocrite am I to tell black children to do their thing in school and college so that they can take their rightful place in society? Where is that place?" In a striking new alliance, CORE's Roy

Innis has been talking with white segregationist Southern Governors about setting up separate black-run school systems. "Integration is dead," Innis claims. "Its epitaph has been in the coming for a hell of a long time. Integration came to be viewed by the civil rights aristocracy not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself."