Mr. RIBICOFF. Mr. President, … The Senator from Mississippi introduced his amendment following a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report last January showing widespread segregation in public schools in both the North and South.

In the South 70 percent of the black children attended schools that were 95 to 100 percent black. In the North the total was 50 percent. The HEW report also showed that a majority of the schools in the 10 largest population centers are black. In 18 cities, 60 percent or more of the blacks attend schools that are almost totally segregated.

There are those who argue the difference between de jure and de facto segregation. The Senator from Mississippi has argued that if segregation is wrong in the public schools of the South, it is wrong in the public schools of all other States. On this statement the Senator from Mississippi is correct. Therefore, I will support the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. STENNIS) in his second amendment, designed to apply the guidelines for desegregation uniformly across the whole Nation.

Mr. President, the North is guilty of monumental hypocrisy in its treatment of the black man. Without question, northern communities have been as systematic and as consistent as southern communities in denying the black man and his children the opportunities that exist for white people.

The plain fact is that racism is rampant throughout the country. It knows no geographical boundary and has known none since the great migration of rural blacks after World War II.

The institutional roots of racism—which depersonalize our prejudices and make it easier for us to defend them—are as deeply embedded in the large metropolitan communities of the North as they are in the small rural communities of the South.

Perhaps we in the North needed the mirror held up to us by the Senator from Mississippi, in order to see the truth. If Senator JOHN STENNIS of Mississippi wants to make honest men of northern liberals, I think we should help him. But first we must be honest with ourselves.

Our problem is not only the dual systems of education which exist 16 years after the Supreme Court struck them down in 1954.

The more fundamental problem is the dual society that exists in every metropolitan area—the black society of the central city and the white society of the suburb.

Massive school segregation does not exist because we have segregated our schools but because we have segregated our society and our neighborhoods.

That is the source of the inequality, the tension and the hatred that disfigure our Nation.

The truth is that we cannot separate what has happened in the central cities from what has happened in the suburbs. Black migrants to the cities were trapped in poverty because the whites who fled to the suburbs took the jobs with them and then closed the door on the black man.

The implications of this are obvious.

We cannot solve our urban crisis unless we include the suburbs in the solution. We can talk all we want about rebuilding the ghetto, better housing, tax incentives for job development, and massive funds for education. Hopefully, we may even do this.

But improving the ghetto is not enough.

One reason is that it fails to offer to the black man something we have heard much about in this chamber recently: Freedom of choice. The black man must have the freedom to choose where he wants to live, where he wants to work, and where he wants to send his child to school.

If he wants to remain in a central city, he should be helped. But a man should not be condemned to a ghetto when opportunity exists elsewhere.

The second reason why improving the ghetto is not enough is because the opportunity—the jobs and the housing—are in the suburbs.

According to the Suburban Action Institute, a nonprofit agency located in White Plains, N.Y., 80 percent of the new jobs created in large metropolitan areas during the past two decades are located in the suburbs.

Yet the black and the poor remain in the central city, either unable to take advantage of them or able to take advantage of them only at great personal inconvenience.

Studies by Prof. John Kain of the Harvard University Department of Economics estimated that in Chicago as many as 112,000 blacks would leave the central city if they could choose a home near their place of work. In Detroit, Professor Kain put the figure at 40,000.

How much more sensible, both in terms of economic growth and simple humanity, it would be to open up our suburbs to the black and the poor, so that they live near their places of employment.

Many will argue that the blacks no longer want integration. And whenever a black man says this, you can almost hear the sigh of relief in the suburbs. Many Negroes may not want integration. But many will. And our responsibility is to provide access to that opportunity. The suburbs are the new America. That is where the private economy is moving. That is where our growing population will be housed. We cannot exclude millions of Americans from that growth because of the color of their skin or the size of their income.

How shall we proceed? In the first place, we should encourage private industry to take a major leadership role. They have as much at stake as anyone.

Suburban Action Institute estimated that a year ago the unfilled suburban jobs across the country totaled 250,000. These could have provided work for many unemployed or underemployed central city residents. But where were they to live?

American industry could make an enormous contribution. First, it could hire men and women from the central city to work in its new suburban plants. Second, it could use its taxpaying potential to obtain from the suburbs low-income housing for those central city workers it is hiring.

I do not underestimate the difficulties of this. I suggest it to point out that there are voluntary paths we can travel in order to begin seriously solving the racial crisis in this Nation.

There is also a role for the Federal Government. We can develop a more useful concept of impacted aid to schools. We can provide special funds for those suburbs, towns, and school districts that provide housing and employment for blacks from the central city. If achieving such a breakthrough requires beginning with limited numbers, we should consider this, as long as the numbers are large enough to be meaningful. The key point is not ideological purity. It is social growth.

The Federal Government should also review its urban policy and all its urban programs, to learn whether they are all aimed at rebuilding the ghetto, or whether they contain any incentives to include the suburbs in the solution of our urban problems. If not, we should devise new programs.

The Federal Government also should refuse to locate Federal facilities in suburban communities until guarantees are received that housing will be provided for low-income people who work for that Government agency. In the past, the Government has decided to move and then tried to help its employees after the fact. This places an unfair burden on the low-income worker, who is usually black.

But what shall we do about the immediate situation that is before us—the segregated schools in both North and South?

It seems to me that our objective now is to provide the best education we can under the circumstances. We know that much of the money Congress appropriated for ghetto schools has been diverted and misspent. And as for those who say we do not know how to teach ghetto children, how do they know? Have they ever tried, Mr. President?

There are experimental schools throughout this country that are teaching black children—with great success. Harlem Prep is taking dropouts off the street, and placing them in an informal and supportive school in which the students set the pace. These “dropouts” are now in college.

Other experimental programs are in progress, and have much to tell us about new developments in teaching, curricula, and student motivation.

We should be spending more time understanding and supporting these kinds of developments.

We seem to have lost sight of the fact that the purpose of education is to help the child.

Let us start talking about education that way—and concentrate on building the system around the needs of children, not forcing children to meet the needs of the system.

Source: Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (Conn.), “Elementary and Secondary School Education Amendments of 1969,” Congressional Record 116, pt. 3 (February 9, 1970): 2891–92.