The Unwanted

Who wants 24 ninth-graders? They graduated last June from George Washington Carver Elementary School in suburban Detroit's Royal Oak Township (pop. 8,000).* Last week every high school in the area refused to accept them. It was not just that the youngsters are Negroes; they also happen to be products of a black hell of vice and corruption.

The U.S. Government spawned present conditions in Royal Oak Township during

World War II, when it flung up flimsy barracks for Southern Negro defense workers. Today nearly half the population is on relief. Narcotics, robbery and corruption are common. Last winter Police Chief William Ware stole a Christ mas fund for underprivileged children. Township Supervisor Elwood Dickens' saloon, the dirtiest in town, is a hangout for minors. Royal Oak Township's rapes, burglaries and arson cases go uninvestigated. The township treasury has an unexplained shortage of $5,000.

The township's youngsters are not without promise. Not long ago one of them turned up with an IQ of 140. But Carver School's Principal Adelaide Long has her troubles. A cinder-block monstrosity, the school bears knife scars from floors to ceilings. Insurance companies have given up on the windows: last year the kids broke $3,000 worth, and this year Principal Long is converting to plywood.

Until last year, Carver's graduates went on to Detroit high schools as tuition students. As the schools grew more crowded. Detroit grew more weary of Royal Oak Township's youngsters. Moreover, the Carver school district now owes Detroit $125,053.67 in back tuition. With one former superintendent having already looted school funds, Carver is in no position to pay.

After Detroit rejected tuition students, the Carver district's school board appealed to the adjacent white suburbs. Ferndale, which already has a 10% Negro high school enrollment, had no qualms about turning down Carver graduates. Oak Park, a predominantly liberal Jewish community, suffered some embarrassment. In the end, Oak Park followed Ferndale. Only a nearby Roman Catholic parochial school. Our Lady of Victory, still accepts Royal Oak Township's children. But it is not a high school.

Last week all sorts of experts were mulling over "long-range" solutions for Royal Oak Township's problems. Some of them thought the place should be wiped out as a political entity. But no one had yet found a high school for Carver's 24 ninth-graders. The only solution, it seemed, was to plunk them back in Carver and call one of its battered rooms a high school.

*The half-square-mile remainder of a once larger township, which split up into such cities as Berkeley and nearby Royal Oak, where rabble-rousing Father Charles E. Coughlin made his radio tirades during the 19305.

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