Does Integration Still Matter to Blacks?

The vanguard of black opinion, among intellectuals and political activists alike, is oriented more toward the achievement of group identity and group autonomy than toward the use of public schools as assimilationist agencies.

--Yale Law Professor Alexander Bickel

AMID all the noisy rhetoric of the retreat from integration in recent weeks, surprisingly few blacks have spoken out in sorrow or anger. Black leaders, normally quick off the mark to meet any new challenge to civil rights, have largely kept quiet. Their silence in part reflects the general confusion and uncertainty over the turnabout. More important, it shows that for increasing numbers of black leaders and thoughtful black citizens, integration is no longer the magic formula it was in the heady, exultant days following the 1954 Brown decision. There is a new sense among blacks of the limits to what integration can achieve--and a deepening division in the black community over what course to follow.

Many, of course, cling as grimly as ever to integration, particularly in the South, where it has brought fundamental changes. "Naw, we're not gonna give up," said an angry black mechanic working on a Buick in a Gray, Ga., garage. He told TIME Correspondent Kenneth Danforth: "If we had had integrated schools just ten years ago, I'd be driving this Riviera instead of bent over the son of a bitch." In Fayette, Miss., black Mayor Charles Evers found uses for the new adversity. "Black people can fight better when they are pressured. We're on our way still. We're going to keep moving. We're not going back. Brother Nixon, Brother Mitchell, Brother Eastland, Brother Stennis--not one of them is going to stop us now." The rural Southern black especially feels that whites have always had the best schools; the only way for a black to get a decent education is to get inside a white school.

But outside the rural South, while the black parents have the same aim of getting the best possible education for their children, many of them no longer see integration as the only--or even the best--way to obtain it. Separatists now urge black control over schools in black communities, whether in the North or the Deep South. One moderate though disenchanted veteran of a controversial experiment in local school control is Rhody McCoy, administrator of the battered Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn. McCoy says bluntly: "Integration has never worked. What kind of a hypocrite am I to tell black children to do their thing in school and college so that they can take their rightful place in society? Where is that place?" In a striking new alliance, CORE's Roy

Innis has been talking with white segregationist Southern Governors about setting up separate black-run school systems. "Integration is dead," Innis claims. "Its epitaph has been in the coming for a hell of a long time. Integration came to be viewed by the civil rights aristocracy not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself."

Benjamin Holman, black head of the Justice Department's community-relations service, rejects integration as "unrealistic and unwise" because most whites cannot accept it. Holman's goal, he says, "is not some sort of vague, illusory melting pot in which we're all mixed like salt and pepper, but a multiracial society in which we have black neighborhoods and black communities and still live as one nation." While some educators argue that integrated schools cut down hostility between black and white children, two Menninger Foundation researchers found in studying one high school that desegregation "sometimes leads to social segregation and to the solidification of racial stereotyping." Lawnie Taylor, president of a mainly black parents' organization in Pasadena, Calif., agrees. "Simply ethnic balancing of a school, mixing of bodies doesn't solve the problem," he says. "It often produces polarization." Where whites are in the majority, he adds, "cultures, pride and identities of other racial and ethnic groups, especially that of the black student, cannot survive."

Blacks sometimes oppose integration for down-to-earth reasons of practicality and pride. In Fulton County, Ga., black parents protested a decision to close the six-year-old, $850,000 Eva Thomas High School and spread its all-black student body among four white high schools. Reasons: the school is unusually well equipped and its teachers were proud of having one of the highest college-entry rates in the Atlanta area. Carroll High School parents in Monroe, La., objected to downgrading the all-black school to ninth grade only. Carroll recently built a 4,000-seat stadium and a new science and math building; it has won four football championships in its class and boasts the top band in the state. Says its principal: "There are years of hard work in this school. There are years of suffering."

At Miami's Edison High School, Mike Robinson complained: "Now that teachers are being shifted around, we black students are afraid of losing teachers we have begun to trust and respect. We had six black teachers removed. It was a court order, so they just went." Most of the fifth-graders in an overwhelmingly black Newburgh, N.Y., school told an NBC interviewer last week that they were against integration and did not want to be bused to an integrated school, partly out of fear that the whites would outnumber them and try to boss them around. James Stewart spoke succinctly of his classmates' feelings: "Some of them don't like white people."

Issue and motive must be separated, however. Militant separatist blacks may have abandoned integration--just as hostile whites continue to attack it. But more moderate black leaders, while admitting that integration is not a panacea, are still convinced that it is a vital goal. Hence, they are appalled by what they see in national mood and purpose behind the new assault on it. They speak in rage and despair. "What we are up against," John Morsell wrote fellow N.A.A.C.P. staffers, "is a concerted attempt by segregationists, black and white, North and South, with the blessing of the President, to turn back the clock and plant second-class citizenship firmly and forever on us." Massachusetts' Edward Brooke, the only black U.S. Senator, concluded sorrowfully: "The whole tenor of things seems to be further dividing the country instead of bringing us together."

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