Numbers Game

More sobering than sermons are the statistics of the Southern Education Reporting Service, which last week added up this year's gains in Southern school integration. Negroes make up about one-quarter (3,097,534) of all Southern public school students. But only 195,625 are in integrated schools, and the District of Columbia accounts for 81,392 of them. Four little Negro girls may have desks in the white schools of New Orleans, but segregation is still total in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina, four states where 36% of the South's Negroes live. Segregation has actually gained in Florida, where the lone white pupil at one Dade County school withdrew, leaving the state with one mixed school that has 27 Negroes. In sum: only 6.3% of the South's Negro schoolchildren attend integrated classes this year. The gain over last year is a slim .3%.

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