Private Schools: As Hard as ABC

“Do you have any Negro students?” a visitor asked the headmaster of a celebrated Eastern prep school. “Certainly,” came the reply—or so the story goes. “There’s one of them now. I don’t know where the other is, but he’s around here somewhere.”

Some of the top private schools in the U.S.—Mount Hermon, Exeter, Andover— have had Negro students for nearly a century. Others, neighborhood schools like Chicago’s Francis W. Parker and Germantown (Pa.) Friends, have been admitting Negroes when they move into the neighborhood. For most of the rest, the Negro on campus—if there was one—was the showcase star athlete, the brilliant scholar, the boy from Nigeria, or the son of a prominent clergyman. In twelve years the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students managed to place just 275 students in 46 prep schools. Says David Mallery, research director for the 700-member National Association of Independent Schools: “It is pretentious to talk about the ‘desegregation’ of independent schools, let alone the ‘integration’ of them.”

Summer Courses. In the past two months, prep schools have been trying to make such talk less pretentious. A year ago a group of 30 private boarding and day schools in the Northeast joined in hiring James Simmons, a Negro who graduated from Hampton Institute and Harvard, to scout teachers, businessmen, lawyers and community leaders across the U.S. for bright, poor youngsters—mostly Negroes. Now they are being helped in two ways: summer courses and fulltime enrollment.

Six leading Boston-area private schools* just finished a six-week experiment in teaching English and science to 250 elementary and junior high pupils from Boston public schools. Giving knowledge in big doses and small classes (ten students), the program aimed at instilling a thirst for learning that would grow during the normal school year. The same goal was behind Exeter’s SPUR (Special Program for Underprivileged Regions) plan, which brought 20 eighth-grade pupils and four local teachers from Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh to New Hampshire for classes in Exeter’s summer session. Next summer Hotchkiss School, financed by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, will play host to 100 high school students who meet the official specifications: “Any boy of intellectual promise from a poor family, with preference to boys from slum neighborhoods, and especially from segregated areas.”

Fulltime Enrollment. To get slum kids into prep schools as fulltime students, the Independent School Talent Search Program, the Rockefeller Foundation and Dartmouth have pooled resources in a pioneering plan called ABC (A Better Chance). “All kinds of money is going begging in good colleges that want Negroes,” explains Dartmouth Associate Dean Charles Dey, director of ABC. “In fact the odds are in favor of disadvantaged Negroes’ being admitted over disadvantaged whites. But the colleges can’t lower their standards, and the Negroes can’t meet them because they come from inferior secondary schools.” ABC wants to close the gap.

This summer ABC took 54 students, all but ten of them Negroes, who had been conditionally accepted this fall on scholarships at such elite private schools as Choate, The Gunnery and Groton. The condition was that they pass an intensive eight-week, catch-up tutorial program on the Dartmouth campus, which approximated the scholastic demands and social surroundings that they would face next month.

The students in the group, aged 13 to 17, got up before 7 a.m., studied math, reading and English from 8 until noon. Faculty counseling, sports, dinner and a three-hour study period filled the rest of the day until lights out at 10 p.m. At first their attention span for studying averaged only ten minutes; now it is 45. “I really don’t think these kids ever studied outside class before,” said a math instructor. “Most of them have seen High Noon five times on television.” To teach self-expression, students wrote as many as three essays a day on everything from movies and The Odyssey to the Orozco murals at Dartmouth’s Baker Library. Progress was slow, but morale was high despite tensions in the strange surroundings. One embarrassed boy had to be taught to use a knife and fork.

The star pupil was Jeffrey Palmer, 17, son of a Steubenville, Ohio, mailman, who thought that the only thing wrong with the program was that “there isn’t enough time to do everything.” Most boys shared Jeffrey’s enthusiasm, though often in the self-consciously proper style that befits prospective students at the best-mannered schools in the U.S. “Would you be so kind as to pass the butter, please?” said Earl Rhue, 15, of Bridgeport, Conn., to Wendell Hale, 13, of Birmingham, Ala. When that brought a chuckle from the dinner table, Earl had a ready Ivy reply: “A bit more decorum, please,” he said.

Nearing the end of the experiment last week, Dey was optimistic that all the students had earned their ABCs.

“We demanded a lot of these boys,” he said. “It may be touch and go for a fair number, but I hope their schools will give them some special support without being too lenient.”

* Shady Hill, Belmont Hill, Milton Academy, Roxbury Latin, Browne and Nichols, Noble and Greenough.