Essay: WHAT THE NEGRO HAS-AND HAS NOT-GAINED

(4 of 6)

For the Negro who never gets to the college level, things are considerably bleaker. In a recent study of 650,000 children, the U.S. Office of Education reported that, compared with whites, the average Negro child actually attends newer schools and has newer textbooks but is less likely to have modern scientific equipment or competent teachers. The Negro needs good teachers even more than whites because of greater deprivation in his family background. Eighth-graders in Negro slum schools, for example, commonly read at sixth-grade levels. The IQ of the average Harlem pupil drops from 90.6 in the third grade to 87.7 in the eighth grade. An extraordinary 67.5% of all Negroes fail the armed forces' pre-induction mental tests (v. 18.8% of the whites).

Four out of five U.S. students attend schools that are practically all black or all white. School segregation is rising in the North because an increasing number of neighborhoods are becoming wholly black. Ironically, integration has progressed far more rapidly in the South. Only 10% of the South's 3,500,000 Negro schoolchildren attend integrated classes, but that is twice as many as a year ago. Federal education officials say that 4,200 of the 4,600 Southern school districts have sent in "acceptable" plans for integration. But the increase is slowing down because Congress—itself reacting to the reaction against Negro demonstrations and gains—has softened the penalties for noncompliance.

HOUSING. Getting good housing is perhaps the most difficult hurdle of all for most Negroes. One tragedy is that urban renewal often means Negro removal—replacing shacks with vertical ghettos for middle-income Negroes and forcing lower-income Negroes to move to even meaner slums. Because the Negro urban population has almost doubled since 1950, the ghettos are spreading. Negroes now constitute 27% of the population in Chicago, 37% in St. Louis, 39% in Detroit, 40% in Birmingham, 41% in New Orleans and Baltimore, 24% in Norfolk and 63% in Washington. Worried about being surrounded by Negroes, most whites flee to the suburbs when Negroes move into an urban neighborhood; there, barely 4% of all residents are Negro.

When given the choice, most Negroes are not terribly eager to live next door to the white man. Even in the 17 states and 31 cities that have enacted fair-housing codes since 1958, thousands of huge, moderately priced apartment towers are pure white. Despite a fairly large supply of open housing, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission estimates that, since 1958, fewer than 60 Negro families have moved into white areas. The Negro's desire to enjoy the superior schooling and housing of a white neighborhood is very much tempered by his fear of striking out alone. He has a long way to go before he will live side by side with the white man even in moderate numbers.