What About the North?

What About the North? Mississippi's courtly Senator John Stennis is fond of saying: "If it is the law in the South, it is the law outside the South." Like many of his fellow Southerners, Stennis is upset by what he considers the unfair treatment of his region by the Federal Government. To a large extent, his chagrin is understandable. Ever since the Government began its efforts to do away with school segregation, it has aimed its heaviest legal guns at the eleven Southern states, virtually ignoring educational segregation in the North.

Segregation is almost as widespread to the north as to the south of the Mason-Dixon line. According to a 1968 study by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 61% of all black students in the U.S., excluding Hawaii, still attend schools that are 95% or more black. Most of them, of course, are in the South, where 77% of all blacks at tend predominately black schools and only 18% go to schools with white majorities. But in the remaining 38 states and the District of Columbia, almost half of all blacks attend schools that are at least 95% black, while only 28% go to schools where whites constitute a majority.

Segregated Capital. Of all non-Southern school systems, none is more segregated than that of the nation's capital. Whites have virtually abandoned Washington's public schools, and as a result 89% of the city's black students attend nearly all-black schools. Running a close second is Chicago, where 85% of the black children go to school largely with other blacks. The situation is little better in other large cities. Eighty percent of Cleveland's black children attend segregated schools, as do 76% of Baltimore's black youngsters and nearly 60% of those in both Philadelphia and Detroit.

Unlike Southern school segregation, which is the result of official policy, segregation in the North is less purposeful and harder to correct. In most cities, segregation came about accidentally, only to be perpetuated deliberately. In Chicago, where educational separation is the result of segregated housing patterns, whites have voted down repeated attempts to achieve desegregation by pairing schools or redrawing district lines to break down ghetto walls. In Boston, the insistence of local whites on maintaining "neighborhood schools" and their refusal to approve even intracity busing programs have helped keep schools in white areas white, those in black areas black. In Pasadena, Calif., and Waterbury, Conn., both of which have been sued by the Justice Department, school officials are believed to have carefully gerrymandered district lines to maintain segregation in city schools.

Shortage of Remedies. The Federal Government has done little to remedy the situation, partly because it has few legal weapons with which to fight. "There has been no court decision to my knowledge that you have to break up a de facto segregated school district," says Attorney General John Mitchell. The Justice Department also lacks the physical means to move against segregation in the North. There are only 21 lawyers, including supervisory personnel, in the Civil Rights Division's education section, and they must cover the South as well as the North. Nor is the Department of Health, Education and Welfare any more capable, since it too must divide its manpower between the North and South. As a result, the actions of both departments have been few and hesitant. Justice has filed only seven suits against Northern school districts in the last two years, five of them under the Johnson Administration. HEW has investigated only some 60 school departments in the past two years, and has sent letters of noncompliance to only six.

There seems little reason to believe that the situation will improve. The Nixon Administration has demonstrated no readiness to push for tougher laws, shown no desire to deploy any massive manpower resources. Ironically, Stennis, admittedly more interested in relieving pressure on the South than in achieving desegregation in the North, offers a chance for change. He is threatening to push a bill that would make existence of a black-majority school within any largely white system prima facie evidence of segregation. His move, which could mean a loss of federal funds for racially imbalanced school districts, needs both Northern and Southern support if it is to pass. Neither is likely to be forthcoming.

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