The Spreading Boycott

"A fizzle!" scoffed James B. Donovan, president of New York City's Board of Education. "A whoopee success!" cried a Negro leader. Such were the wildly opposing verdicts last week as almost half of New York's 1,000,000 public-school children--464,362, to be exact--stayed home during a one-day boycott protesting de facto segregated schools. Allowing for hooky players and the normal 100,000 absentee rate, it was still the biggest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history.

But what did it gain? Can such huge protests really improve Negro education? What are the prospects for new boycotts in other Northern cities?

Rising Offensive. By short-term accounting, boycotts have won nothing whatever. The Boston boycott last June was sparked by the refusal of the city's school-committee chairwoman even to recognize the existence of segregation. Result: whites overwhelmingly re-elected her last November. Chicago's huge (225,000 absentees) boycott last fall was aimed, for similar reasons, at removing School Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis. Result: white-supported Willis is stronger than ever. New York's boycott protested the supposed shortcomings of the schools' extensive new integration plan. Result: the plan stands unchanged.

Nevertheless, the rousing numerical success of New York's boycott fueled a rising Negro offensive throughout the North. In Cleveland, after a week of racial violence, 800 bussed-in Negroes were fully integrated at some mostly white schools, and a threatened boycott called off. Negro militants--many of them wildcatters opposed by oldline Negro organizations--scheduled more boycotts in Chester, Pa., Cambridge, Md., and Wilmington, Del. The big targets later this month are Boston and Chicago, to be coupled with a possible second boycott in New York. Although some Negro politicians oppose the proposed boycott in Chicago, the nation's most visible Negro leader, Martin Luther King, last week gave the boycotters "my moral support and deepest sympathy."

Pressure & Progress. Most whites in New York deplored the boycott as a misguided pressure tactic, likely to backfire. But New York Negroes contend that pressure has won them impressive gains since 1955, when the

Board of Education began retreating from the "neighborhood school" to the recognition that a concentration of Negro pupils, although caused by housing patterns, is of itself an educational handicap.

By "permissive zoning" and other measures, New York has since bussed or shifted thousands of Negro children to mostly white schools. The new plan aims to pair about one-fifth of the city's mostly Negro schools with nearby mostly white schools, so that all children of some elementary grades attend one school and all children of other elementary grades attend another. Moreover, it envisions smaller classes, more Negro teachers, more pre-school instruction to give Negro children a better start, and an end to culture-biased IQ tests and to the short class days caused by multiple sessions. In short, it will put New York ahead of any other major city.

What produced all this was the threat of a boycott, starting last summer. Yet the new plan, made public before the boycott, was scorned as "not enough" by Negro leaders, now convinced that pressure gets eventual action. Inflamed by the fuel-on-the-fire bluster of Board President Donovan ("This is not a board of integration or a board of transportation"), they went ahead with the boycott. Pushing it hard was Organizer Bayard Rustin, who, the day after the boycott, attended a cocktail party at the Soviet U.N. mission--thus rousing suspicion about his links to Communism (Pacifist Rustin says he belonged to the Young Communist League from 1938 or 1939 to 1941).

But the boycott's real impetus was something deeper: the Negro's passion to let off steam about everything--jobs and housing, as well as schools. As School Superintendent Calvin Gross analyzed it, "This was the first opportunity for every Negro and Puerto Rican to express--with social approval--everything he feels under his skin about prejudice and discrimination."

Where does this leave real integration? "The new plan is the best we can come up with," says Gross. "I only wish everyone understood what it's going to take to put it through." The key limiting factor is white reaction. When the names of the paired white schools are released next month, whites may well respond with lawsuits and their own boycott--tactics that whites have already used recently. Gross is pessimistic; wryly dropping into education jargon, he says: "The quality of 'interpersonal relationships' around here is just awful."

Separate but Superior? The danger in New York is the loss of what Gross desperately needs--biracial pressure for more city and state money to upgrade and integrate the schools without wrecking them. Currently blinded by emotion, whites and Negroes will sooner or later have to consider genuine educational ideas. Where bringing about total integration seems unfeasible, as in New York, the most realistic idea is "compensatory" schooling for culturally isolated children.

Low-income Negro families are often run by working mothers without husbands. The consequent lack of adult models particularly handicaps Negro boys, who fall into psychological troubles that few schools can handle. Ideally, the segregated schools of central Harlem and Brooklyn could take over many parental functions, providing extensive guidance as well as teaching of the highest order. Negro extremists insist that such ideas are euphemisms for "separate but equal." More moderate Negroes disagree. "Raising the quality of education is the first and unavoidable step in realistic integration," says Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, who calls mass bussing "irrelevant, emotional and diversionary."

If this idea ever gets across, it may provide New York with what sociologists call a "superordinate goal"--the kind of overriding common interest that unites hostile groups when they find themselves in mutual danger. Meanwhile, says Calvin Gross, "I'm afraid things are doomed to get a lot worse before they get better."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.