New York Dilemma

New York City's million-pupil school system was threatened early this week with a massive Negro boycott in protest against de facto segregated schools. Whether or not the boycott made its point, the nation's biggest school system seemed deeper than ever in the North's most difficult dilemma.

The Board of Education desperately made public a long-range plan to ease segregation by pairing about one-fifth of the mostly Negro schools with nearby mostly white schools, and integrating the student bodies. Whites protested what seemed to them forced integration; local integration organizations (plus the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and the Urban League), pressed to abandon their boycott, insisted that the integration plan fell far short of their aspirations.

Cross-Bussing? Negro leaders argue that since Negroes cannot rapidly break down job and housing barriers, they have to muster against the schools--the decaying schools of central Harlem and Brooklyn that are 90% or more Negro and Puerto Rican. With ample evidence that such schools tend to "manufacture" retarded pupils because of overcrowding, poor teaching and lack of cultural stimulus, Negro leaders want compulsory integration with the better and often underused white schools.

New York's able School Superintendent Calvin Gross (TIME cover, Nov. 15) fervently wants to equalize Negro schools with a "saturation" dose of extra money and better teachers. "But you can't get enough money from the city or state," counters the Rev. Milton A. Galamison, a Brooklyn Presbyterian minister and graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, who heads a committee that unifies Negro organizations.

"Even if a Negro school were made academically superior," he says, "it would still be unequal, for it could not adjust the child to the context of the culture in which he lives." Galamison called in Bayard Rustin, who worked out the organization of last summer's March on Washington, to run the planned boycott.

Galamison wants "cross-bussing"--mass transfer of Negroes to white schools and vice versa. Many Negroes prefer the Gross approach. And white parents balk violently, aware that Negro and Puerto Rican children are increasing in numbers at such a rate that soon they will be a majority in the New York school system--in fact, they already are a 3 to 1 majority in Manhattan.

"Why Start with Me?" Sensing the depth of white feeling, the Board of Education argued that "mandatory transportation of great numbers of children over wide areas would inevitably result in educational chaos." What the board proposed instead was "the Princeton Plan" (after the New Jersey town that devised it), pairing of relatively close schools, setting a maximum of 1 1/2 miles between matched grade schools, 2 1/2 miles between junior highs. The plan would start next September, take as long as three years to complete; it would affect only ten of the city's 31 Negro-Puerto Rican junior highs, only 20 of the 134 segregated grade schools. Heavily segregated schools in Harlem and Brooklyn would be untouched.

The measure of white reaction was a furious hassle over the proposed pairing of two Queens grade schools, one 87% white, the other 97% Negro. The schools are only six blocks apart; all first-and second-graders would attend one school, all third-to sixth-graders the other. One Jewish mother's reaction: "If the Negroes want to get ahead, why don't they do what we Jews did?" Said disheartened Rabbi Myron Fenster: "What the whites are saying is: 'If the whole society is rotten, why start with me? I don't want to take the first step. I want to take the last step.' "

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