Integration: The Sorry Struggle of I.S. 201

All the tough problems of U.S. North ern school integration — the ironies of good intentions and painful misunder standings, the subtleties of trying to ig nore skin color while trying to take it into account, the vain hope of having schools that serve both slums and middle-class neighborhoods— welled up last week in New York City’s Harlem.

Looking back, there is not much doubt that New York City’s Board of Education should have built its new In termediate School 201 somewhere else than right in the middle of darkest East Harlem. The Supreme Court ruled twelve years ago that segregated education is inferior education, and I.S. 201 never had any real possibility of being integrated. But there the school is—the city’s finest, an architectural gem and potentially an academic joy. Common sense might seem to suggest accepting this separate-but-better education. Instead, many parents of I.S. 201 schoolchildren decided (as one sign put it) that HARLEM HAS BEEN BETRAYED, and with stormy picketing kept the showcase school shut for five days.

Compromise. The sorry struggle to open I.S. 201 oscillated from comedy to pathos to chaos. In a belated effort to keep an earlier promise that at least 20% of the students would be white, school officials last summer sent 10,000 leaflets into Queens and The Bronx, extolling the $5,000,000 school’s virtues and inviting white students to enroll. Windowless, air-conditioned and soundproofed, the building would create an ideal learning environment. It would have one teacher for every 24 students, extra teachers for tutorial work, offer independent study, foreign languages and musical-instrument instruction. Not a single white family signed up to send kids to Harlem.

Advised that integration was impossible, angry Negro leaders demanded complete control over I.S. 201 (which teaches Grades 5 through 8). “We want a black principal and black teachers for our black children,” one mother shouted through a loudspeaker outside the school. On opening day, other, quieter Negro mothers led their children to the school and were turned back by Negro pickets. School Superintendent Bernard Donovan compromised, agreed that a neighborhood council could “screen” school personnel, even though the city school board cannot legally delegate its hiring and firing powers to laymen.

That could have ended the fuss, but more militant Negroes pressed their demand that a Negro principal be named to present “the proper image.” Donovan yielded again, announced that a transfer had been requested by white Principal Stanley R. Lisser, a respected administrator who had deliberately taken on Harlem assignments for ten years.

Lisser’s exit under pressure brought on a well-deserved counter-revolt. All but two of the 55-member I.S. 201 faculty—including its 26 Negroes—refused to teach under anyone except Lisser. Assistant Principal Beryl Banfield, a Negro named to replace him, indignantly declined, because, she said, “I object to being chosen on the basis of color, not competence.”

Threats. With all sides in an uproar, Lisser, buoyed by teacher support, said he wanted to withdraw his resignation. Donovan accepted the withdrawal, and pleased teachers reported for work. Negro leaders charged that they had been “doublecrossed,” tried to block Lisser’s entry into the school, fought with police.

Some of the nation’s top Negro radicals eagerly jumped into the dispute. Stokely Carmichael, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, showed up with his black panther sweater and a sign: IN THE SOUTH, IN

THE NORTH, WHERE IS JUSTICE? Harlem CORE Leader Roy Innis threatened violence. “If I were Mr. Lisser, I would not come here—it might not be safe for him.” But 453 out of the 560 enrolled children finally entered I.S. 201 past pickets who shouted “Uncle Tom!” at Negro teachers.

The irony of I.S. 201 is that educators have long urged neighborhoods to take a greater interest in schools—but the interest in 201 had degenerated into a mere concern about color. This was discrimination in reverse, and a precedent civil rights groups would hardly endorse elswhere. As New York’s highest Negro school official, Assistant Superintendent Margaret S. Douglas, put it: “All our civil rights organizations” would fight “if the situation were reversed and white parents in a white school were turning down a Negro principal just because he was Negro.”