Education: Take It Easy

Acting as though they were discovering and uncovering a pile of dirty linen, four segregationist members of a congressional subcommittee last week launched a windy investigation into Washington’s schools. It was no secret to anyone that the D.C. schools, which started integrating two years ago, were having their troubles. But the committeemen, headed by Georgia’s Representative James C. Davis,* were clearly out to make a national noise about integration—and they made some noise.

I Gotcha. His ground well prepared in advance, Subcommittee Counsel William E. Gerber of Memphis, a tough-looking, cigar-chewing product of the Crump machine, started digging for the kind of pay dirt that makes headlines. Presenting President C. Melvin Sharpe of the District board of education with a stack of papers and statistics he had not had a chance to read, Gerber started firing leading questions (and got his witness so befuddled that he once stated he agreed with Gerber’s “testimony”), finally pried out an admission that “present events indicate if we had been more moderate we would have succeeded better.” “Do you recall anything in the Supreme Court opinion,” Gerber prompted, “that required immediate integration?” “No,” said Sharpe. “I gotcha,” Willie Gerber said.

Diligently Gerber laid on the record the results of some citywide achievement tests (which he and his staff had broken down by race) given eighth-graders in October 1955. The comparative scores only confirmed a known fact: that socially depressed and inadequately educated Negro youngsters are still several grades behind their white contemporaries in educational adaptation and achievement. In the light of these facts, prodded Gerber, “your advice to other areas of the country would be to take it easy?” Replied Witness Sharpe quietly: “Yes.” And is it not true, said Gerber, that proponents of integration were “all wrong” when they estimated that the single system would reduce costs (operating expenses rose by more than $3,000,000 between 1953 and 1955). “That’s right,” said Sharpe.

Weil-Known Facts. What of the social problem? By week’s end, teachers and principals had paraded before the subcommittee citing instances of student disorder and violence. Of each witness Gerber asked whether the number of pregnancies in their particular school had increased since integration (in many cases they had). He also extracted testimony about molestation of white girls, about thefts and fights. But not all the testimony bolstered the subcommittee’s thesis that integration is a proven failure. After Hugh Smith, white principal of the formerly all-white Jefferson Junior High School (now 55% Negro) had testified on falling academic standards, Gerber asked if he had not originally “thought well of integration.” “I still do,” said Smith firmly. He added that successful integration would probably take a decade, but that conditions are already improving.

Throughout, the subcommittee called on no top school administrators to defend integration, asked none of the testifying teachers to suggest improvements. If the hearings demonstrated anything in their dreary recitation of well-known facts, it was simply that Negroes have suffered educationally and culturally in comparison with whites, and that the gap must be closed before they can compete on equal terms in the schools.

* At the Democratic Convention at Chicago, Davis’ name was put in nomination on the first ballot by last-ditch segregationists, some of whom never switched to Stevenson.