INTEGRATION FOREVER?

By JAMES S. KUNEN

African Americans have been debating the merits of separatism vs. integration for a hundred years, since W.E.B. Du Bois took Booker T. Washington to task for saying that the races could best work together apart, like the fingers on a hand. The argument flares and dampens but never dies. So what's surprising is not that it's flaring up again but that it's flaring up in the N.A.A.C.P., where integration has been the defining principle since the organization was founded by blacks and whites in 1909.

For the N.A.A.C.P. to revise its stance on integration is as likely as, say, the Sierra Club's changing its position on wilderness preservation. But the minority of N.A.A.C.P. members who believe that integration is undesirable or--in cities led by black elected officials--unnecessary will be casting a longer shadow than usual as the organization meets for its annual convention in Pittsburgh this week. N.A.A.C.P. elders prefer to see the airing of these ideas as a therapeutic exercise. "What we're trying to do is give these people respect, let them voice out their frustration, and then we state our position and move on," says Melvin ("Skip") Alston, president of the N.A.A.C.P.'s North Carolina state conference.

But these dissenting voices in the N.A.A.C.P. reflect a growing view in the broader African-American community that resources poured into desegregation might be better spent on improving the predominantly nonwhite schools most black children attend. In the past few years black school officials from Seattle, Washington, to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., have called for the end of--or simply ended--busing. That's because a new generation of African Americans sees the whole enterprise of desegregation coming to nothing as whites move to suburbs that the courts have put beyond the reach of busing orders. Only a third of black students now go to majority-white schools--a higher degree of segregation than existed 26 years ago, when the Supreme Court first upheld mandatory busing. In these circumstances, the N.A.A.C.P.'s. insistence on school integration appears antiquated to many young blacks--a situation that an organization with a median age approaching 50 can ill afford.

So when the New York Times reported that N.A.A.C.P. chairman Myrlie Evers-Williams expected the delegates to consider modifying the organization's position on integration, the news of an impending controversy became self-fulfilling. Evers-Williams, widow of the murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, maintains she was misquoted. "Any advocacy organization must be open to discussion," she says. "But I see no changes coming about. It is an organization that still believes in integration."

But apostate members like Kenneth W. Jenkins would welcome any attention to their position that the N.A.A.C.P. should concentrate on schools in black neighborhoods. Jenkins was formally removed from the presidency of the Yonkers, N.Y., branch by the national N.A.A.C.P.'s directors last year because he had proclaimed that "busing may have outlived its usefulness." In Yonkers segregated schools have been eliminated. But that outcome came years into litigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the N.A.A.C.P., which has cost the city about $37 million in legal expenses. And today black and Hispanic students still test two grade levels below their white schoolmates.

Jenkins has suggested that Yonkers and the N.A.A.C.P. put the battle behind them, sit down as partners and try to figure out how to improve public education for everybody. "This thing is not working," he says. "The idea is not to make bus companies rich. The idea is to enrich the educational opportunity of every kid going to public school. I support integration, but I don't think integration is the goal. The goal is quality education." Jenkins, 36, acknowledges that his perspective comes in part from not having lived through the battles that followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. "The people who were there...saw kids having to get marched into a school building by the National Guard. They saw a Governor standing in the front door. They felt things that I can't comprehend."

If murmured support for separate-but-equal education is growing more audible within the N.A.A.C.P., it may be because so little progress has been made since those historic days. Says Ted Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: "You're beating your head up against the wall until it's bloody. At some point you have to ask, 'Should I continue to beat up against this wall?' To ask that question is not a terrible thing."