Integration: Cooling It in the Schools

“It has been so quiet that I’m afraid to say anything,” commented a Chicago school-board member, foreseeing that schools would open without racial clashes. Knock-on-wood optimism was the prevailing mood among local officials last week, as the first of 41.2 million American public-school children bustled into classrooms for the 1964-65 term. Having obstreperously demanded more integration and better schools in boycotts and demonstrations over the past year, responsible Negroes are now mostly satisfied with quiet but significant improvements all over the country—and they do not want to stir up more white resentment before the election. Among Negroes, the word is to “cool it”; the protests over integration are coming from whites.

“Gains Already Made.” It is in the big cities of the North, with their impacted Negro slums, that the easing of pressures is most urgent—and visible. Detroit has spent two-thirds of a $90 million bond issue on new and improved schools in Negro neighborhoods. A biracial committee quietly formed in Cleveland has won a six-month moratorium on demonstrations for that city’s new school superintendent, to give him “time to implement his program.” In Los Angeles, an energetic new urban-affairs director named Sam Hammerman has brought about a close understanding between civil rights groups and the school board.

Oakland is giving its teachers lectures on anthropology, psychology and sociology to help them comprehend the Negro position. In Englewood, N.J., scene of violent Negro protests in 1962 and 1963 but 100% desegregated since then, Superintendent of Schools Mark R. Shedd reported: “We’ve turned the corner.” Even in Boston, where the school board still refuses to admit that the system harbors de facto segregation and Negroes are restive, a state-appointed advisory committee gives promise of finding solutions. San Francisco Negro Leader Terry Francois says: “There is a growing feeling in the Negro community that more time and effort ought now to be devoted to implementation of the gains already made.”

White Boycott? But planned integration of the classrooms has not proceeded without white opposition. Last month Chicago finally agreed to experimental “clusters” of schools that draw students from white and Negro neighborhoods. When the plan’s author, University of Chicago Sociologist Philip M. Hauser, visited the city’s Bogan district to explain the project, he was greeted by 200 white pickets, who hooted and cursed him from the audience. In riot-rocked Philadelphia, the school board plans to bus Negroes from overcrowded slum schools to white schools that are half-empty as a result of a big Roman Catholic school-building program. Whites are preparing a suit to block the proposed bussing on the ground that the $220,000 annual cost would be a waste of taxpayers’ money and Negroes threaten to boycott if the bussing is blocked.

In the nation’s biggest school system, two citizens’ groups, claiming a combined following of nearly 1,000,000, have sprung up to challenge the New York City board of education’s policy favoring integration. One, calling itself the Parents and Taxpayers, is led by a formidable woman lawyer, Mrs. Rosemary Gunning, who vows: “We’re not going to have totalitarian decrees forced down our throats.” P.A.T. & Co. mobilized 15,000 mothers on a sleety day last March to descend on city hall and sent 500 women swarming onto the floor of the state assembly.

Last week a state supreme-court justice rejected a P.A.T. petition to force, in effect, a referendum on the board’s plan to integrate ten schools this year by “pairing.” P.A.T. promptly threatened a white boycott of the schools on opening day next week—a move that would counterpoint the Negroes’ paralyzing one-day boycott last February.