Beyond Tokenism

Despite ballyhooed breakthroughs and a carload of court decrees, the Deep South's resilient resistance to school integration has been remarkably effective: only 21% of the 2,980,000 Negro school children in eleven Southern states actually sat in classrooms last year with whites. As the school year began last week, however, that kind of tokenism showed evidence of crumbling, and its end seemed in sight.

In Hayneville, Ala., School Superintendent Hulda Coleman (sister of the man who is charged with the Aug. 20 murder there of Civil Rights Worker Jonathan M. Daniels) presided briskly over the uneventful enrollment of four Negro pupils. In Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were slain a year ago, nine Negroes attended the Neshoba County schools. When a white boy threw a pop bottle at a Negro girl, Principal Prentice Copeland promptly paddled the troublemaker's bottom, put him on probation and made him apologize. Despite taut racial tensions in Bogalusa, La., where violence occurred recently, hesitant Negro children followed their determined mothers into once all-white schools as police held off spectators. In Gainesboro, Tenn., Peggy Williams, 13, not only became the first Negro in the town's elementary school, but her 30 white classmates elected her president of their eighth-grade home room. In Atlanta, the Rev. Martin Luther King's children, Yolanda and Martin Luther King III, who had previously attended all-Negro public schools, integrated Atlanta's Spring Street public school. "Several parents welcomed us and said how happy they were to see us," said Mrs. King.

Shifting the Burden. There were practical considerations behind this year's surge in integration. Some school districts simply got tired of trying to fend off the courts. But the main reason was that many districts desperately need federal help to keep their schools going --and the 1964 Civil Rights Act says that they cannot have federal money unless they integrate the schools.

Thus, to qualify for the $764 million that Congress is expected to make available to Southern public schools this year, about 1,700 of the region's 1,950 districts submitted integration plans that were acceptable to U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. Roughly half of these districts took the easy way by adopting "freedom of choice" plans, under which Negroes are to designate the school they wish to attend. These plans have been attacked by civil rights groups because "freedom of choice" places the burden of initiative upon local Negroes--who have to buck intense white pressure--rather than putting the responsibility on school officials.

Keppel's office agrees, may reconsider these plans next year. Of all districts that submitted acceptable plans, however, almost 90% gulped hard and prepared to integrate all twelve grades this fall, while the rest accepted the four-grades-a-year minimum policy set by Keppel.

"Just Do Nothin'." That still left plenty of areas of resistance. More than 100 districts made no effort to qualify for federal aid, and 120 others submitted plans that will have to be upgraded to satisfy Keppel.

The holdouts are concentrated in the rural black-belt sections of Louisiana, where only a fourth of the state's districts have qualified, and in North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi, where roughly a third have complied. Mississippi's Amite County, for example, is 60% Negro. The residents there spurned more than $50,000 in federal cash, voted to raise their school tax to offset the deficit. "The Nigras," insists School Board Attorney J. D. Gordon Sr., "are well satisfied with their schools." Across town, a member of the leaderless Negro community, Baptist Minister M. D. Smith, agrees: "Everyone I know is perfectly satisfied with the present situation."

There will be other places that will try, as Amite School Board Chairman Colville Jackson puts it, to "just do nothin'." But integration is moving at a stepped-up pace. Late this month, Commissioner Keppel expects to have a head count on just how many Negroes are in previously all-white Southern classrooms this year. He optimistically predicts that the number will be ten times that of last year--in all, perhaps as much as a fourth of the South's Negro schoolchildren.

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