An Unfinished Task

During the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, a local Catholic priest received a phone call from a Boston clergyman asking what steps the church was taking to cool the hostilities. The answer did not completely satisfy the Bostonian. Last fall the Little Rock priest dialed his Yankee colleague: "I'm returning your call," he said. The Bostonian hung up.

Throughout the South, news of Northern and Border-state unrest over busing has been greeted with understanding and something more than a little regional hubris. For 22 years, since the Supreme Court's pathfinding decision against "separate but equal" education, the South has borne the brunt of federal court orders, HEW guidelines and financial sanctions, and national "holier-than-thou" attention. Now, perhaps, the South can teach other regions a few civil rights lessons.

Burgeoning Academies. At least when it comes to compliance with federal directives, that may be so. Of the more than 2,600 school systems in the eleven Southern states, the overwhelming majority desegregated under HEW pressure, and roughly 650 by direct court order. By 1972, 18 years after Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, 46.3% of all black pupils in the South attended schools that were predominantly white (compared to 31.8% in the Border states and 28.3% in the North and West). On the whole, desegregation has been most successfully achieved in small towns and rural districts, whereas problems remain in a number of city systems.

According to three separate polls, most Southern school administrators feel that the quality of education has improved where desegregation has taken place. In Norfolk, Va., massive busing to achieve racial balance in the schools was ordered in 1970. Over the next two years, the average standardized reading test scores for black students rose from 74.4 to 81.9 (on a national norm of 100), while white students' scores went up from 92.3 to 96.7. In Little Rock, says School Superintendent Paul R. Fair, "desegregation is working."

But such optimistic reports and the South's positive record on compliance --notwithstanding the boll weevil's pace in many districts--have obfuscated some problems that the South still faces. As Journalist John Egerton writes in a report for the Southern Regional Council: "The South's report card in school desegregation is better than the North's but by no means outstanding. School desegregation in the South is in the main an unfinished task."

In fact, "second generation" problems abound, reminding all who are committed to quality and equality in education that desegregation neither guarantees integration nor necessarily stops discrimination. One type of discrimination now alleged by blacks is that a disproportionate number of schools in black neighborhoods were closed when school systems were unified, and many black teachers and administrators either lost their jobs or were effectively demoted following desegregation. "My appreciation for black history was greater in my schooling than what my children get," complains a Nashville father.

In some areas, the burgeoning of all-white private academies has led to the resegregation of public schools. Summerton, S.C., for instance, finally desegregated in 1970. Today, thanks to the private schools, there are 2,125 blacks and four whites in the public schools. Overall, there are now 3,500 private academies in the South. About 750,000 mostly middle-class students--one out of ten white students in the South--attend these schools, which vary widely in quality and tuition. Some are makeshift affairs in church basements; others have multimillion-dollar facilities and are as good as or better than the region's public schools. Although they were founded in response to desegregation, the academies are preferred by some parents partly because they tend to be less permissive (paddling for discipline is a common practice) and because many of them are church-affiliated, a great plus in the South. Many parents gladly send their children on long bus rides to get to the private schools. Admittedly, the academies may have eased the desegregation process to some degree. As one Meridian, Miss., white fifth-grader told his mother some years back: "There won't be any trouble; all the troublemakers have gone to the private schools."

Ax-Handle Saturday. Not only have the academies spawned resegregation, but many urban school districts --especially in Atlanta, Richmond, Charleston, S.C., and Houston--have become increasingly black because a large number of whites have moved to the suburbs. Another pattern of resegregation occasionally takes place within desegregated schools when students are simply assigned to segregated classes. Sometimes the black students segregate themselves. For example, at the season's first pep rally this year at Indian River High School in Chesapeake, Va., all the blacks sat on one side of the gym while the whites sat on the other Says Dorothy Polk of Charlotte, N.C.: "Black children tend not to join in as much, and this is a matter of concern."

In addition, grouping students by ability (a common practice throughout the country) almost invariably leads to essentially segregated classes--an indication of the quality of black schools before desegregation. Generally, even the white schools were nothing to boast about, in part because the South has always spent considerably less per student than the rest of the country.

The process of Southern school desegregation has varied widely from city to city, but Jacksonville (pop. 528,000) offers an illustrative example of both the battle and eventual accommodations. For 15 years after the Supreme Court's Brown decision, the 14th largest school district in the country paid little, if any, attention to the law of the land. Duval County (Jacksonville and environs) employed busing, but primarily to move black students--30% of the roughly 115,000 students--from throughout the county to inner-city all-black schools. During that period, civil rights demonstrations by black groups prompted a violent reaction from the conservative working-class whites. In 1960 a Ku Klux Klan "ax-handle Saturday" resulted in a riot in which blacks who were peacefully picketing for integrated restaurants were severely beaten.

Rankled Blacks. It was more than a decade later, after a lawsuit, a massive black boycott of the schools, and the disaccreditation of the district's high schools, that the Jacksonville school board and the N.A.A.C.P. were called to meet a federal three-judge panel in Atlanta and ordered to produce a desegregation plan. The accepted two-phase plan, for '71 and '72, aimed at achieving 30% black enrollment in all but a few of the county's schools, but also called for the closing of nine of the previously black schools, either because their facilities were inadequate or because they were in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Blacks were particularly rankled by the shutting down of two relatively new schools, while the oldest white school in the system, built in 1898, remained open.

Today, 55,000 students are bused, and the enrollment in private academies, which peaked in 1972 (17,600 students attending 58 private schools), has dropped somewhat. Says one black student: "Black and white students get along better, do things together, and color is nothing." How Jacksonville managed to desegregate without widespread violence is accounted for by some by the taste of what the city got on "ax-handle Saturday." Others credit the blacks' patience and restraint, or the fatiguing 15 years of school-board resistance that gave whites time to adjust to the idea. But as one local observer put it, "Maybe Jacksonville just muddled through."

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