Desegregation: How Much Further?

LAST fall the Supreme Court ordered Southern school districts to end segregation "at once." By this fall, the Nixon Administration claimed that 90% of the region's 2,721 districts had abandoned the old "dual" system, one black and one white, that officially segregated the races in separate schools. But the newly adopted "unitary" system often has a catch. Largely because of neighborhood housing patterns, hundreds of "desegregated" districts still contain predominantly segregated schools.

Last week the Supreme Court heard an unusual three days of arguments on the next major questions in the school controversy: Does the Constitution require an end to "racial isolation" in individual schools and classrooms? If so, what racial balance is necessary? By what means may an accepted balance be achieved and enforced?

To complicate matters, evasions of unitary plans still persist throughout the South despite the genuine progress of recent months. In Alabama's Jefferson County, civil rights lawyers claim, as many as 10,000 white students who were supposed to enter black schools this fall have remained in their old schoolhouses. The charge is that white parents have lied about where their children live, using "mattress addresses" in white neighborhoods other than their own. Preliminary checks by the Health, Education and Welfare Department have turned up at least 14 school systems where the use of various forms of "ability grouping," an increasingly debatable educational tool, has resulted in segregated classrooms. In some desegregated schools, blacks are kept out of extracurricular activities and forced to ride segregated buses. In Huntsville. Ala., 113 blacks walked out of a high school pep rally to protest the playing of Dixie, and a fight with white students ensued. The school board suspended the blacks for "leaving school without permission." One black eighth-grader in Louisiana was suspended for saying "Yes" to a white teacher instead of "Yes, ma'am."

Policing racial hostility is difficult: the U.S. Attorney's staff in charge of the Birmingham area has only two lawyers regularly assigned to keep up with more than 60 school systems. In recent weeks, federal courts have made limited progress. They have outlawed sex segregation in Coffeeville, Miss., and Concordia Parish, La. (the practice continues in several Georgia counties). They have also ruled that merging school systems must continue to employ black principals and teachers instead of demoting or firing them and hiring whites.

Emeroinq Issue. Nonetheless, HEW's Office of Civil Rights concedes that it has found some form of racial isolation in approximately one-fifth of the 158 desegregated districts it has surveyed. When schools report their racial composition near the end of the year, officials expect the figures to show that about half of the South's students attend truly integrated schools--a tolerable record compared with those of many Northern districts, but not quite the record that is implied by the Nixon Administration.

Beyond all that, the emerging big issue is the clear effect of residential segregation on the right of blacks to attend desegregated schools. If the Constitution guarantees that right, how can it be enforced in a nation that remains unwilling to integrate its neighborhoods? In seeking an answer, moreover, the Supreme Court confronts its own seminal ruling of 1954 that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

At issue before the Supreme Court last week were two plans--from Clarke County, Ga., and from the district made up of Charlotte. N.C., and surrounding Mecklenburg County--that represent the most exhaustive efforts so far to overcome the South's traditional patterns. Under the plans, which are being challenged by whites, busing and redistricting have entirely eliminated all-black schools. The plans impose roughly the same ratio of each district's racial makeup on each school's enrollment. Both districts had long used busing to enforce segregation. By using it to enforce desegregation, the districts have added 880 more riders in Clarke County, 23,000 in Charlotte. Although whites talked of keeping their children home, most have reluctantly gone along: all but a tiny percentage of the children are now attending the schools to which they were assigned.

Potential Havoc. Lawyers for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund argued before the court last week that this approach should set a pattern for the South. At a minimum, they said, individual schools should have enough racial diversity so that they are not identifiable as black. The court moved in that direction in a 1969 decision requiring that the proportion of teachers in each of a district's schools substantially reflect the district's overall staff makeup. Although he did not urge the court to adopt a fixed ratio for black and white pupils, Attorney Julius LeVonne Chambers suggested that in districts where whites are in a majority, no school should be more than 90% white or 50% black.

The civil rights lawyers implied that similar standards should be applied to Southern districts with plans like that of Mobile, Ala., the third district at issue before the court. In that city, blacks have appealed a lower-court ruling that Mobile's current steps toward integration are "reasonable"--even though blacks calculate that two-thirds of their elementary schoolchildren in metropolitan Mobile are still in all-black schools. The principles on which the lower court based its decision were defended by U.S. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, who appeared as a friend of the court to explain the Nixon Administration's hostility toward busing and its sympathy for neighborhood schools. Griswold conceded that the Constitution permits busing. But he argued that the Constitution does not require districts to break up segregated neighborhood schools if this would involve long bus trips and massive numbers of young children. Chief Justice Warren Burger implied that attempting such a breakup could cause havoc in cities like Washington, where the school population is 94% black.

Few of the justices seemed to have very much patience with lawyers for Southern school boards who argued earnestly that pupil assignments should be "color-blind," based only on "proximity and convenience." Implicit in the court's previous decisions has been the idea that since assignments based on race created segregation, they can now be used to dismantle it. But the Administration's modest view of how much desegregation is necessary seemed to win some sympathy from Justice Harry Blackmun as well as Burger. Justice Hugo Black, long a staunch advocate of rapid desegregation, hinted that he was now skeptical of trying to "rearrange the whole country" to change "the whole practice and tradition of the neighborhood school."

Persistent Pattern. The court is not expected to reach a decision until the end of November at the earliest, and may not conclude its deliberations until spring. Whatever that decision may be, it will leave hanging the persistent pattern of "resegregation." Growing numbers of whites, for example, are sending their children to the South's private "segregation academies." When Alabama's Jefferson County was ordered to adopt unitary desegregation this fall, white suburbs formed their own tiny districts. The toughest problem of all is the movement of whites to outlying residential suburbs. Example: in Little Rock, Ark., where Central High School was desegregated 13 years ago, the proportion of white students has shrunk from 75% to 61% and is still declining.

Administration spokesmen talk of attacking residential segregation with vigorous enforcement of laws barring discrimination in housing and employment. Yet so far this technique has not been very effective. Another approach involves federal aid to make integrated schools so good that educational quality overides white objections. Nixon's request for $1.5 billion, some of which would further that goal, may get through Congress this year, but results would not appear for some time afterward. Hence the real issue before the Supreme Court is whether it will make blacks wait--or whether the court will continue to lead the nation's slow progress toward a genuinely integrated society.

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