Integration South & North

The U.S. South last week proceeded with integration 1961 style: peaceful compliance with the law of the land. In Dallas (pop. 680,000). once the biggest city defying the law, 18 Negro first graders entered white schools without incident. So it went in Galveston (35 Negro children) and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (23). One all-white Miami school accepted 277 Negroes. In Little Rock, Ark., 46 Negro pupils marched in the front door at seven of the city's ten junior and senior high schools. Said a white student in the city that only four years ago produced anti-integration riots: "We couldn't care less."

In still simmering New Orleans, twelve Negro children entered six schools with no first-day disturbance. And there the Justice Department launched a new legal assault on Racist Leander Perez, political boss of neighboring St. Bernard parish. Last year St. Bernard set up a special school to handle white students boycotting integrated schools in New Orleans. If St. Bernard persists in this "evasive scheme,'' said the Justice Department in a suit to halt the practice, its own schools should be integrated by court order.

In interesting contrast to Southern progress was a spate of segregation cases in Northern schools. They stemmed, not from defiance of the law, but from the ghetto housing in big cities that creates de facto segregation.

In Highland Park. Mich. (pop. 43,000), all ten of the city's schools were closed temporarily due to a suit charging segregation at one all-Negro school. In New Rochelle. N.Y.. where Negro parents recently won a similar case involving predominantly Negro Lincoln Elementary School, the school board dutifullv transferred 267 of Lincoln's 454 pupils to white schools (while preparing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court). In New York City, which recently began allowing Negroes to transfer to under-capacity schools anywhere in the city, 50 Negro parents threatened to "strike" on the ground that the system is still unsatisfactory. New York State Commissioner of Education James E. Allen Jr. promised to develop a plan for "identifying" segregated schools and overcoming the "educational disadvantages inherent in such schools."

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