Education: Desegregation In New York

While Southern cities were firing legal smoke shells at school integration last week, New York City announced a historic breach of de facto segregation. A growing problem in every big Northern city, de facto segregation results from slum housing, racial ghettos and rigid school zoning laws. In New York City, where three-quarters of Manhattan's public-school pupils are now Negro and Puerto Rican, the concentration of them in some schools is as high as 100%. Negro parents complain that such schools are educationally inferior. Demanding a chance to send their children to more racially mixed schools, many of them were prepared to...