Separate & Unequal

"Negro education in Georgia is a disgrace. What the Negro child gets in the sixth grade, the white child gets in the third grade." This appraisal of the Southern Negro's classroom plight came neither from a Northerner nor a N.A.A.C.P. propagandist; it was pronounced in 1948 by Fred Hand, then the speaker of Georgia's own House of Representatives. Hand's observation has now been expanded and documented in a beacon-bright study titled The Negro Potential (Columbia University; $3). The book, containing a statistics-studded chapter on Negro education in the U.S., was produced by Columbia's Conservation of Human Resources Project, a research task force initiated in 1950 by Columbia's President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

All over the U.S., the gap between what the Negro now achieves and what he might achieve indicates that he is the nation's most wasted human resource. Some of Potential's tables show the school experience as of 1950 of young Southern Negro men. Most of them came from poor, unstable families; many had stunted intellectual potentials before they ever arrived at school. In the 18-19-year age group, 1.7% never got to school at all. Of this group, 17.7% completed only one to four years of school. High-school diplomas were won by only 14.7% in the 20-24-year bracket. Only 2.2% of the 30-34-year category had survived the attrition to graduate from college.

Ill-taught Teachers. As Potential reckons the potential, if U.S. Negroes were lifted to the educational level of whites outside the South, there would annually be 143.5% more Negro high-school graduates, 147% more college graduates. Such figures, however, reflect only the lesser quantity, not the lower quality, of current Negro education. Potential's authors report: "On the average [the South's] Negro teachers are much less able than white teachers [despite] the same amount of formal preparation." The vicious cycle: "Like other young Negroes, those preparing to teach are usually handicapped by poor schools and deprived backgrounds." Thus, the South's Negro population, largely ill-taught by ill-taught colored teachers, gets not only less schooling but worse schooling than whites.

The most significant point that emerges from Potential's pages: the rest of the U.S. has little right to damn the South's separate and unequal public school facilities for Negroes. In some parts of the North, many schools with Negro student majorities were found to be almost as inferior to neighboring whites' schools as their respective Southern counterparts. Main underlying reason: residential segregation of Northern Negroes.

Glass Schoolhouses. One school superintendent in the North, whose district drew mostly Negro students, estimated that less than 1% of his generally underprivileged charges (including the white minority) had, after completing the eighth grade, I.Q.s of 120 or above. "In the upper middle-class white suburban community, about 30% of the student body would have an I.Q. of 120 or above . . . Often these schools in predominantly Negro neighborhoods are in serious disrepair, are staffed by inexperienced teachers [preoccupied with] the maintenance of discipline." In short, "equal" facilities are frequently as much an illusion in the North, where segregation in effect occurs as a neighborhood phenomenon, as in the South, where segregation is the tradition and custom.

Last week the director of Columbia's Human Resources Project, Economist Eli Ginzberg, hopefully looked to all U.S. citizens for signs that the Negro will soon start his climb from social and academic darkness: "The more emotional the issue, the more important it is to get the facts before the public. Americans are a pragmatic people and usually respond well to the facts." Aside from clearly implying that the North should look into its own glass schoolhouses before tossing many more stones at Dixie, Potential's compilers see the South's own greatest peril in the possibility that its "enlightened moderate leadership . . . may permit extremists to take control" of the desegregation issue. Hopes The Negro Potential: "Directing the inevitable process of desegregation, [Southern moderates] will cut the ground from under extremists in both North and South, and will provide a firm foundation for the development of the full potential of white and Negro alike."

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