Attack on De Facto

Attack on De Facto While a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions has struck down school segregation in the South, the North has remained largely untouched. The reason is that segregation was created by law in the South, whereas it was supposed to have resulted from circumstances in the North. This comforting distinction has now been challenged by a federal court ruling in Detroit. U.S. District Court Judge Stephen J. Roth declared that what appears to be de facto segregation in the Detroit school system is actually de jure and must be abolished.

In his decision on a complaint filed by the N.A.A.C.P. and a group of parents, Roth acknowledged that the vast Negro migration northward, as well as economic factors, was responsible for blacks settling in Detroit's ghettos. He also recognized that many blacks chose to live apart. Even so, whites over the years have steadily erected barriers to integration; monochromatic neighborhood schools were not just an accident. "Governmental actions and inaction at all levels--federal, state and local--have combined with those of private organizations, such as loaning institutions and real es tate associations and brokerage firms, to establish and maintain the pattern of residential segregation."

Evil Without Fault. Segregation has not only been maintained in Detroit, Roth went on to say; it has been actively pursued. The city has bused Negro children to predominantly black schools, but it has not bused whites to black schools. By continuing to build schools in the ghetto, it has reinforced segregation. By establishing so-called "optional" schools in mixed neighborhoods, it has encouraged whites to escape integration. While the state government has provided funds for the transportation of pupils in the suburbs, until recently it has offered no aid for busing in the city. In addition, its formula for aiding schools penalizes poor blacks; suburban communities are able to spend more on their schools while paying a lower tax rate. Despite this bill of particulars Roth wondered if it might be beside the point. "It is unfortunate that we cannot deal with public school segregation on a no-fault basis, for if racial segregation in our public schools is an evil, then it should make no difference whether we classify it de jure or de facto. Our objective, legally, should be to remedy a condition which we believe needs correction."

At first glance, Detroit seemed to be an unlikely target for a suit against segregation because it has been less of an offender than most Northern cities--as Roth noted in his decision. Between 1966 and 1970, black teachers in the system increased from 31% to 42%. In the same period, black administrators rose from 11% to 37%. Two black deputy superintendents were hired. Detroit was the first school system to introduce textbooks that gave a picture of black life as well as white. When books were not available from commercial publishers, the city printed its own. In the spring of 1970, the school board drew up a plan for extensive integration.

That was the beginning of the breakdown. Once they got wind of the plan, many white parents reacted vigorously. They kept their children home from school and set up a Citizens' Committee for Better Education to fight the scheme. They probably would not have succeeded without black help. Discouraged over the prospect of integration in a city that was on the verge of becoming 50% black, Negroes in the state legislature teamed up with white conservatives to support a bill striking down the integration plan and substituting a decentralization program that would require a student to attend the school nearest his home. The blacks hoped that this would give them control of a majority of the schools in the city. When the bill was passed by both houses of the legislature, the N.A.A.C.P., opposed to black separatism, brought suit against the law as unconstitutional and asked for relief from segregation.

The opposition of the N.A.A.C.P. turned out to be well founded. Not content with just overturning the integration plan, irate members of the Citizens' Committee circulated a recall petition against the four school board members who had voted for the plan and got a surprising 130,000 signatures. At the subsequent election, all four were voted out of office in the first successful recall in Detroit's history. Said Edward Zaleski, a policeman and a founder of the Citizens' Committee: "We were fighting for our children. They were fighting only for an idea."

Return of the Klan. Decentralization, moreover, did nothing for blacks. Because of a larger white turnout in the election, hard-core conservatives gained six out of 13 positions on the new central board, while blacks won only three. Previously, blacks had held two out of seven seats on the board. They have a majority of only two of the eight newly created regional boards, though they constitute a majority of the population in six of the eight districts. Also the regional boards have proved weak and ineffective.

Conditions in the schools have deteriorated so alarmingly that a new integration plan will not be easy to put into effect. While black militants terrorize the remaining whites in the Detroit schools, the Ku Klux Klan has been gathering recruits in the suburbs. Last spring a suburban high school principal was tarred and feathered by hooded Klansmen after he organized a two-day human relations program for blacks and whites. Yet any integration plan, if it is to succeed, must include the suburbs, as both the N.A.A.C.P. and the Citizens' Committee have emphasized. If full-scale integration is ordered in the city only, whites will flee in ever greater numbers to the suburbs. But if suburban schools should be incorporated into the plan, it would be possible to maintain the Negro percentage in each school at 20%. Whites would also get the message that it was no longer possible to run away from integration.

Up to the Court. The new plan will take shape during court hearings beginning this month in Detroit. It will also be shaped by the reaction of the U.S. Supreme Court. A decision similar to Detroit's was handed down by a federal district court judge in Pontiac, Mich., last year and was sustained by the U.S. Court of Appeals. It has been appealed to the Supreme Court, which will probably not accept the case until its two vacancies are filled. The court's decision will then be problematical--and far-reaching. If it agrees that de facto segregation is indeed equivalent to de jure, the North will have to do what the South has been required to do: end segregation no matter what its cause or origin.

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