Segregation by Integration

As the South's dual school system yields to integration pressures, Negro teachers rejoice in the new benefits for their race--and worry about their own professional futures. Some are finding that when Negro students go off to the white schools, the Negro teacher does not go along. He loses his job.

Faculty integration may well become one of the stickiest issues as pupil integration accelerates under federal insistence that federal money cannot go to segregated schools. Ironically, the states and districts that are setting the pace for integration are the ones already under fire from civil rights groups for dismissing too many Negro teachers.

"Retaliation." Though authorities dispute him, N.A.A.C.P. Counsel Jack Greenberg contends that 500 of North Carolina's 11,792 Negro teachers will lose their jobs this year. Eight Negro teachers in Asheboro, for example, have been dropped with the closing of all-Negro Asheboro Central High School, and no Negro has been hired to teach next fall at the city's other, and now only, high school. Fired Negro Teacher Louis H. Newberry, who holds a master's degree from New York University and has pursued graduate studies at the University of North Carolina, says bitterly: "I think my qualifications are superior to anybody they have over there." The whites, argues Negro Teacher Gaines Price, "are being forced to integrate, and they are retaliating by not absorbing teachers of the Negro race."

No Corner on Incompetence. In Florida, Dr. Gilbert Porter, executive secretary of the all-Negro Florida State Teachers Association, contends that "several hundred" Negro teachers are being dismissed, and says: "Among all of the Negro teachers being let go, one or more must have qualifications equal or superior to those of the white teachers in that county." Elsewhere, 22 Negro teachers in four Arkansas school systems being integrated have been told that they will not be rehired, and ten Negro teachers in Texas claim to have been dismissed because of integration shifts. Since integration is barely getting out of token status, thousands of fur ther firings seem likely in the future.

Educators concede that many Negro teachers do not measure up to their white counterparts. "The dual system has guaranteed that," says a Texas expert. Donald Agnew, specialist in Negro education for the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, says that, although "I hate to talk about it, since our organization has worked for years to raise standards," he que tions "the quality of instruction that Negro teachers have received and can impart." At the same time, John Griffin of the Southern Education Foundation points out that "Negroes have no corner on the incompetence market." In fact, well-educated Southern Negroes have long gone into teaching for lack of other opportunities. Florida has based some of its dismissals on National Teacher Examination scores, and Griffin predicts that the test will "weed out some substandard white teachers too."

Laying Down the Law. In what could become a key legal decision, Federal Judge Thomas J. Michie ruled last week that the Giles County, Va., school board violated the Constitution's 14th Amendment when it dismissed all seven members of the city's Negro teaching staff in integrating the city's schools last year.

Michie said the evaluation of the teach ers was "arbitrary," and that "bold assertions of incompetence are not substitutes for reasoned analysis of the individual situations." The seven have found other jobs, but Michie ordered that they be notified of any future openings in the Giles schools and either be hired or advised in writing of the reasons why they were not selected--and the court would review the reasons. The National Education Association has promised to help similarly dismissed teachers secure their rights in the courts.

A more practical preventive against such abuse may lie in testing whether U.S. Education Commissioner Francis Keppel has the power under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to withhold federal funds from school districts that discriminate against Negro teachers. One section of the act's Title VI specifically prevents him from trying to stop discriminatory employment practices, but Keppel nonetheless believes that discrimination against Negro teachers has a discriminatory effect on schoolchildren, and thus his office can require faculty as well as student integration as a qualification for federal aid.

"We must not deceive ourselves that the exclusion of Negroes is not noticed by children," says Keppel. "What can they assume but that Negroes are not deemed by the community as worthy of a place in mixed classrooms? What can the white child assume but that he is somehow special and exclusive, protected from some sort of contamination? How can the world of democracy have meaning to such children?"

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