Resegregation

The name of the process is "resegregation." It happens typically when a once-white school is opened to all races and in a few years becomes all-Negro. Or, in another backfire of the Supreme Court's desegregation decision, a few Negroes may try classes in a white school, and then for various reasons resegregate by returning to Negro schools. The result, in many places, is more segregation than ever.

The trend is clearest in the border cities, where Southern Negroes are migrating in vast numbers* while whites move to the suburbs. In St. Louis, Southern School News said last week, Negro students have reportedly increased by 75% since desegregation in 1955; the city has more virtually all-Negro schools than before. The same goes for Baltimore, which in the past decade has gained 40,754 non-whites and lost 175,522 whites. In Washington, D.C., where schools desegregated in 1954, so many white students have left the school system that Negroes now make up 80% of total enrollment.

Negroes sometimes add to the resegregation trend by shunning integrated schools even when perfectly free to attend them. More than three-quarters of Oklahoma's biracial school districts have desegregated, for example, but the number of Negroes in mixed schools is actually declining. Some officials say that many Negro youngsters fear competition with better prepared white children, preferring to get high marks in inferior Negro schools rather than low marks in superior mixed schools. Worse, the decline in Oklahoma's all-Negro high schools seems to be cutting the number of Negro youngsters going on to college.

In large Northern cities, a kind of resegregation results from ghetto housing. New York, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia all have Negro populations that are at least twice as big as the South's largest Negro communities, those in New Orleans and Houston. Hundreds of Northern city schools are predominantly Negro, and becoming more so. This ironic turn of events puts the Northern schools in a category somewhat like the "separate but equal" Southern schools that the Supreme Court outlawed. Believing that such de facto segregated schools are inferior, Northern Negroes are starting legal attacks, calling for such solutions as taking students by bus to distant mixed schools.

But if the majority of a city's schoolchildren are Negro, "integration" may be a fairly elusive goal. The phenomenon of resegregation also suggests that the law can go only so far in correcting racial inequalities--and that stressing the fine points of integration is less important than insisting on excellent schooling for all U.S. children.

* Only about half of all U.S. Negroes now live in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, compared with 71% in 1930.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.