Desegregation: The South's Tense Truce

GOVERNORS and mayors barring the schoolhouse door, hostile police, screaming and sometimes violent white mobs, ingenious legal barriers--these have been the autumnal rites in the South since the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. No more. This fall some of the South's most recalcitrant school districts have ceased resistance to the legal requirement that racially separate educational systems be abolished.

With some tension but remarkably little disorder, through last week at least, the South took its biggest step yet toward total desegregation. This term, another 900 of the Old Confederacy's 2,697 school districts are bowing to the inevitable. Now 94% of the region's school systems can be officially classified as desegregated. Nonetheless, because of residential patterns and other factors, perhaps half of the 3,100,000 black pupils in the eleven states will continue to attend schools that are either all black or predominantly so. As the experience in Northern cities has shown, legal desegregation does not necessarily result in integration, the actual mixing of races in schools. The next battle will be over how much--if anything--a community is required to do to assure racial balance in individual schools and classrooms. Here the South is making yet another stand.

Gubernatorial Escort. The fact that this fall's changes leave some issues unresolved does not diminish the milestone quality of 1970. Worn down by 16 years of legal and political maneuvering, many white Southerners are now prepared to compromise and try integrated education. Basic attitudes toward blacks may have changed little, but pragmatic considerations are overshadowing them. Thus the few Southern leaders who continue to rant racism get less of a hearing than before. Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, for example, denounced the "Gestapo" from Washington and urged parents to ignore their children's transfers to desegregated schools. He got some followers in Stockbridge, but authorities there insisted that the children attend their assigned schools. Attempted white boycotts in Augusta, Ga., and Richmond, Va., failed.

Most Southerners seemed relieved that the strife was over. In Richmond, where 13,000 of the city's 50,000 pupils are bused to school, Republican Governor Linwood Holton set an example of calm compliance. He personally escorted Daughter Tayloe, 13, to her ninth-grade classroom in the newly integrated John F. Kennedy High School. "It's always hard for a child to change schools," said Holton, whose two other children also attend biracial schools. "But my children go where they are assigned."

So did a great many others. In Greenville, Miss., where attitudes tend to be more extreme than in the upper South, most of the city's 10,124 students moved quietly into schools that had been desegregated through a pairing plan drawn up by a local biracial commission. At Macon, Ga., all but 2,000 of the system's 33,000 children showed up for the opening of classes in once segregated schools. And in Houston, blacks and whites went to school together--while Mexican Americans, who resented being classified as white instead of "brown," stayed out in protest.

Throughout the South, federal officials were conspicuous by their absence. The Justice Department, responding to President Nixon's orders and the South's resentment of outsiders, kept most of its lawyers in Washington. The rest of the Administration lowered its silhouette accordingly, as if to make the unpleasant process of desegregation as palatable as possible. White House aides said that the Government will crack down on individual abuses, but that it would have been unwise to provoke white animosity with large numbers of federal observers. The Government has kept its word. When white parents in Talladega County, Ala., defied a desegregation plan and occupied local classrooms to keep their children in a white school, the Justice Department promptly brought suit to end the takeover.

Meanwhile, the President expressed cautious satisfaction with the peaceful process of desegregation so far. In a statement issued from San Clemente, he praised local communities for making the transition a smooth one and commended the nation's news media for their "constructive reporting" of the historic change.

The results of last week's desegregation varied widely from community to community. In districts where they constitute the majority, whites tended to remain in the schools--and in control. Columbia, Miss., a rural community of 7,500 where whites outnumber blacks three to one, completely integrated its 2,200-member student body by the simple expedient of assigning all children in the same grade to the same school. Other districts were more cautious. Schools in Mississippi's Rankin County desegregated their buildings but not their classrooms. Authorities in Lamar County, Ga., yielded to the sexual fears of white parents; blacks and whites are together, but boys and girls are now segregated.

White Exodus. In districts where blacks are in the majority, the situation is different. Unhappy about their minority status, many whites are abandoning the public schools to the blacks, who thus find themselves resegregated in formerly white schools. The white exodus could spell disaster for the public schools; whites who control the state legislatures are unlikely to vote appropriations for schools no longer attended by their constituents' children. Further, the white flight is likely to continue. Past experience has shown that once black enrollment passes about 35%, the racial balance shifts rapidly, with the result that all whites leave the school. Four years ago, there were 500 whites in the Hollandale, Miss., public school system. Last year there were 155, and now the system is all black.

Many of the whites who have fled the public schools have found refuge in the South's growing network of private "segregation academies." More than 450 private schools have been established in the region. Some are broke; others have substantial financial backing. The Citizens Council School Foundation, which last fall had 500 white students in three schools, now accommodates 5,000 children in 188 classrooms in 94 buildings.

A consortium of Mississippi banks, two of them led by members of a presidential advisory committee on school desegregation, has loaned the Citizens Council $600,000 to operate schools in the Jackson area. Even the Federal Government seems to be cooperating. The Internal Revenue Service has granted tax-exempt status to any school that declares an open-admissions policy. IRS accepts such declarations on trust. Only eleven schools, all of which have refused to sign such meaningless statements, have been denied the tax preference.

Few of the academies are having trouble finding students. Nearly 400 youngsters are enrolled at Greenville's Washington County Day-School, a new private facility scheduled to open next week. Many parents register their children as a hedge against possible trouble in the town's public schools. "A lot of people have told me they intend to come register at the public schools until they see how things go," explained Greenville Superintendent William B. ("Bert") Thompson. "If they see the situation is all right and the discipline good, they'll forfeit the fee to the academy. It's like insurance."

Club Klan. Few of the segregation academies charge less than $40 a month tuition, and only a handful of blue-collar whites can afford such fees. As a result they feel that they are being deserted by their wealthier neighbors. Greenville Lawyer J. Wesley Watkins III believes that their resentment is justified. "The poor white people have been listening to the leadership all these years, and were told to cool it," he says. "Now the 'country-club klan,' as we call them, have pulled out on the poor whites and run for the private schools."

The elimination of dual school systems has reduced the number of teaching and supervisory positions, costing many black educators their jobs or senior status. Columbia and Madison County, Miss., summarily fired 24 black teachers at the end of the last school year; Greenville reshuffled 21 athletic coaches when it desegregated its system. One black teacher in Pearl, Miss., who is trained in English and Spanish has been assigned to teach home economics in a newly unified system. Unequipped for the job, she expects to be fired for incompetence.

Some black students are equally unhappy, considering desegregation as it now operates a threat to their identity. In some cases, it is. Pairing--in which one school houses lower grades and the second school handles senior classes--usually results in the absorption of the black schools by the white, eliminating not only the black institutions but their records of athletic and scholastic achievement. Some blacks fear studying under white teachers. "They grade differently," says Tanya Puckett, a Nashville, Tenn., senior. "Negro teachers will skip over a chapter and not hold you responsible for it. With white teachers, if you miss a test, that's it. I'm afraid I might not graduate." Whites taking over a previously black school in Thibodaux, La., promptly painted over murals that showed Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. And whites continue to treat blacks with condescension. Greenville School Superintendent Thompson says desegregation will work only if the blacks "keep their mouths shut and don't get pushy." Otherwise, says Thompson, he will "inherit an empty shell."

Some black teachers have also been harassed by those white students who seem determined not to adjust to the new situation. Parents in Mississippi's Washington County have sent their children into class with portable tape recorders to gather evidence against black teachers they consider incompetent. White students in Greer, a suburb of Greenville, S.C., openly mimic the accent of a black English teacher.

What both blacks and whites object to most is busing. Black parents resent the fact that it is usually their children, not whites, who are bused to achieve integration. White parents whose children have long been bused to avoid integration now object to their being bused to mixed schools. Those whose children now attend neighborhood schools resent their being transported farther from home to help balance schools racially.

Most major cities in the South--and in the North, for that matter--have adamantly refused to adopt the massive school busing plans necessary to compensate for residential segregation. Few are likely to do so voluntarily. Nashville has won a lower-court reprieve from a busing program pending a Supreme Court decision on its constitutionality. Schools in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C., were denied a similar stay by Chief Justice Warren Burger. They will open this week, ten days late, under a plan requiring two-way busing--and under protest.

Political Fallout. Such confusion is understandable. Although it has outlawed de jure, or officially sanctioned segregation, the Supreme Court has thus far declined to rule on de facto segregation resulting from housing patterns. The high court has failed to set rules defining exactly what a school system must do about producing integration. The Nixon Administration's policy is to go only as far as the court leads. This fall may produce new directions. The court last week agreed to hear half a dozen cases, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg, at the beginning of the October term. Among the matters to be considered are the extent to which the courts can order busing, the constitutionality of state antibusing statutes and the degree of governmental responsibility to promote school integration.

The implications of the court's decision will be important to both the South and the North. Court support for integration would force the North to take action to eliminate the de facto segregation that prevails in such cities as Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It would also eliminate the excuse for further delay in the cities of the South. The political fallout from such a decision could be devastating if it comes before the November election. Convinced that local officials have betrayed them by enforcing court-ordered desegregation plans, Southern voters are already in the mood to turn out whoever happens to be in. Court decisions in favor of busing or integration are likely to enrage them further. The first victims of their anger will be local liberals and moderates who have carried out the desegregation plans. Republicans running for Congress may suffer too. Encouraged by his go-slow policy on integration, many white Southerners looked to Nixon to deflect still longer the devil of desegregation. Now they feel that he has gone back on his promise to treat the South like the rest of the country.

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