Marian Wright Edelman

I am dismayed at those, well meaning and otherwise, who continue to discuss, analyze, and legislate school policies from every “feasible” vantage point except that of black children who have all along been, and remain, the prime victims of the lawlessness of the majority society and whose constitutional and human rights are always the first to be negotiated away. This is why Professor Bickel’s unfortunate article, “Desegregation—Where Do We Go from Here?” requires the strongest response.

What is it going to take to make him, those Stennis Amendment supporters, and all those whites who applaud the Nixon Administration’s prudent understanding of school desegregation problems, aware of the consequences of what they are doing in the name of evenhanded national enforcement and practicality? Let us be clear: Those who say that real desegregation is not attainable, or is too costly, and counsel a weakening of the nation’s efforts, are conceding that the constitutional rights of blacks are those that the white majority is willing to permit and nothing more. They are in effect saying that lawyers and their black clients and others who have sought legal redress within the system have been whistling up a blind alley, and duped all of these years.

I was a fourteen-year-old black school child in a small South Carolina town when Brown was decided. For months and months after the school litigation began, my father waited for the Supreme Court’s pronouncement that might give me the chance to escape the inferior and segregated school I was trapped in. He felt (naively) like thousands of other black parents, and repeatedly said, that getting the best possible education was the only hope of blacks getting ahead in this country. And in my South Carolina town, in that state, and in the South, that invariably meant going to white schools—not because they were white, but because they were better—they had the well-stocked libraries, the better physical facilities, the laboratory equipment, the broader curriculum. That remains, with rare exceptions, true today.

My father died May 7, 1954. The Court pronounced one week later that I was entitled to equal educational opportunity. But nothing happened. My mother was not as courageous as many black parents later on, and I graduated two years later from the new black school, “equalized” with bricks, but not books and teaching quality.

Ten years after Brown, still with great hope but a lot more realism, I moved to Mississippi, “armed” with a law degree from Professor Bickel’s great institution and seeking, among other things, to enforce school desegregation through the courts and enable as many black children as possible to attain some measure of better education. After years of case by case effort, white resistance and violence, black suffering and persistence, on-again and off-again federal enforcement, and more black suffering, but some grudging progress, it became clear that the only hope for real desegregation lay in strong and consistent federal enforcement policies (which we have never really had), with deadlines that stuck and with federal resources spent wisely to upgrade black schools so that whites could not protest being sent to substandard black schools. After all the years of effort by so many thousands of black parents and school children, and so much Southern white recalcitrance, and so little federal strength, we come to 1970 when the Supreme Court finally says desegregation must be achieved forthwith—only to be met by the Bickels and Ribicoffs playing into the South’s calculated strategy all along of holding out long enough and screaming loud enough so that the country would tire and come around to their side. Well, what about the Southern blacks who have borne the brunt of the struggle and faced frustration after frustration and who are amazingly, though with increasing cynicism, still willing to fight for desegregation? Don’t they get some say in all of this?

Those who argue that desegregation should not be pursued because it has no educational benefit for black students ignore the evidence. While the record of academic achievement is not always clear, there exists much research which shows that desegregation and compensatory education yield better academic results than compensatory education in a racially isolated setting. (An excellent summary of this research is contained in Meyer Weinberg’s “Desegregation Research: An Appraisal,” published by Phi Delta Kappa. See also David K. Cohen’s “Policy for the Public Schools: Compensation and Integration,” Harvard Education Review [Winter, 1968].) The Coleman Report and many other studies show that the racial and social class composition of student bodies is closely related to student achievement. Moreover, it is likely that the cost of building separate black quality education is going to be greater in sheer dollar terms in the long run than that required to bring about quality desegregated education. The South has never been able to build one decent educational system—how can it support two? With dwindling inner-city resources, the Northern urban prospect is equally dim.

At a time when racial polarization is increasing, it is foolhardy to perpetuate the segregated and isolated institutions which produced the hostility, distrust, and tragic attitudes which now divide our nation. Whites and blacks who attend racially isolated schools are more likely to fear and distrust each other and to perpetuate segregationist patterns and resist change. The crucial role of public schools in providing values and forming attitudes cannot be overestimated, and the need in the larger educational sense, for whites and blacks to grow and learn together must be fought for if the country is to have a future. The thinking of some that schools are mere social extensions of family and peer groups is to treat them more like fraternities than public institutions, and to downgrade their crucial societal role.

Those who say that busing is un-American, and that money could be better spent on teaching kids to read, are really complaining about who is being bused in a relatively small number of cases. Moreover, busing has a long and established history and even now, as its horrors are debated, 40 percent of the nation’s public school children ride buses to and from school.

The controversy over busing obscures all the other ways to desegregate schools, particularly in small to medium-sized cities, North and South. Busing is not the way, but one of many to bring about desegregation. And it is extremely simplistic to juxtapose the cost of busing with the cost of compensatory education. National per pupil cost for busing is $42 a year. Raising per pupil expenditures for instruction significantly enough to have impact increases expenditures by $600 to $1000 per pupil per year. Teaching children to read must consider the cost of reducing class size by half, training and hiring more teachers, and providing extra classroom space for smaller classes.

Professor Bickel’s basic allegation that substantial desegregation causes “tipping” and leads to resegregation of schools, thus frustrating the ultimate objective, is too easy an analysis. While it is often true that once a school reaches 50 percent black, it tends to become all black very rapidly, this is neither inevitable nor accidental nor caused solely by desegregation. School officials often permit the quality of education to decline as a school becomes substantially black, thereby causing many whites to leave. Other school practices causing resegregation include permitting extensive overcrowding, failing to provide the special educational programs to deal with problems arising in racially desegregated schools, and permitting the decline of a quality teaching staff. These practices, combined with patterns of black migration to the cities and the growth of the black population in formerly white neighborhoods, have all contributed to resegregation.

To claim as Professor Bickel does that good faith implementation of Brown occurred in certain border state cities, and that desegregation still did not work, taking Baltimore as an example, is patently incorrect. Baltimore is a prime example of how a border state city school system maintained segregation after 1954. In that city, an open enrollment policy, an earlier version of the now discredited freedom of choice, existed except where schools became overcrowded. But different standards of overcrowding were used for white and black schools. White schools were districted when Negroes began moving into the surrounding neighborhood, while black schools were not districted and permitted to become extremely overcrowded. When districting was done by school officials, it often maintained segregated schools in racially mixed neighborhoods. It was a masterful plan which maintained basic segregation while permitting token numbers of blacks into formerly while schools.

If school boards put in the effort to accomplish desegregation that they have expended to maintain segregation, resegregation would not necessarily occur, and real desegregation might even be accomplished. And if political leaders and scholars counselled whites to comply rather than sympathized all the time with their “terrible plight,” the trend could be reversed.

Finally, to say that we should not vigorously pursue Southern school desegregation because we cannot achieve Northern desegregation is ridiculous. That is like saying because we cannot convict every criminal we should prosecute no criminals. Legal rights have been established in the South. Millions of black children’s educational futures depend on them. To abandon them is morally indefensible and tragically defeatist. Let Professor Bickel and Senator Ribicoff go South and tell Southern black school children and parents that “we won’t help you because we are not helping your brothers up North.” While the Bickels and Ribicoffs may technically claim they do not advocate abandoning Southern desegregation efforts, that is the practical impact of what they have said and done. The Bickel piece and the Stennis Amendment are simply another in a long line of excuses to cloud the real issues and to renege on outstanding commitments already made. They have done a disservice to black and white school children by diluting the efforts on behalf of Southern black children to achieve equal educational opportunity and setting a national tone of retreat. Who can believe that Senator Stennis really cares about what happens to black children in the North? Who has raised cries to double the resources of the Justice Department and HEW compliance staffs to finance a major national push against discrimination? Where is the political pressure for quadrupling the funding of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to help poor and minority children gain a fair deal?

A great disservice has been done that will not quickly pass. For again we blacks are shown how flimsy our position is. I can only beg and hope that the Senator Mondales of this world will multiply and that the now silent leaders will come forward to challenge the best in us—not the worst. We do not defuse the George Wallaces by selling our principles and becoming more like them—we defuse them by clear and resounding repudiation with a national tone and policy that makes it clear that the Constitution is not a political football. For surely whites cannot now expect, once again, blacks and Mexican-Americans and Indians and Puerto Ricans to respect a Constitution they render so cheap.

Alexander M. Bickel

A great deal of the critical response to my article on schools has substance as well as fervor, but is not properly addressed to me. Many of my critics see only two positions—theirs, and another that I am supposed to share with Senator Stennis. They are mistaken. They come to their error out of the experience of a decade and a half of fighting Southern segregationists, and out of the memory of how an earlier Reconstruction was defeated and nullified in 1877 by the politically motivated capitulation of the North. The experience is mine also, and I deeply respect those, lawyers and others, who fought and are still fighting as foot soldiers in the trenches, rather than, like myself, as support troops. I recognize, moreover, the danger of another Compromise of 1877. But those who read me more calmly will know that I proposed no capitulation, and advocated no equivalent of the notorious Compromise. I had and have distinctly in mind the need to avert both.

Desegregation of Southern schools reached a turning point, I said, about two years ago, when courts and HEW made the transition from the effort to disestablish dual school systems to the active promotion of integration. The Supreme Court has not yet told us that total integration of pupils of both races, in disregard of neighborhood lines and other considerations, is the law of the Constitution. The law is in flux. The question is what it ought to become. The question that I discussed, whatever Senator Stennis may have in mind, is not whether we ought to renege on the desegregation that has been accomplished, or let up in the effort to accomplish it in parts of the South where it is not yet a reality, but where do we go from there?

I agree with Mr. Panetta, with Professor Tyack, with the less temperate Professor Orfield, and with others, whose comments have yet to be published, that desegregation has worked in the South and has produced many stable situations. I would do nothing to disturb this achievement, and I would, as I said, carry the task of desegregation to completion in the South. I agree also that some hopeful attempts at integration—racial dispersal—have been made in special places elsewhere in the country, and I would not disturb these either. But I question any generalization drawn from these few hopeful attempts.

Obviously I make a distinction, as many of the replies to my article fail to do, between segregation and racial imbalance, and a corresponding one between desegregation and integration or racial dispersal. Segregation is the separation of children of different races in the public schools by law or intentional administrative action. Desegregation is the disestablishment of segregation. Racial imbalance is just what it sounds like, and its causes are found in conditions that school law and school administrators have not createdand cannot help. Integration, aimed at curing racial imbalance, is the mixing of children of different races in the public schools by law or intentional administrative action. In order to be satisfied that segregation has been honestly disestablished in a place where it has in the past been imposed by law, it may be necessary to require some visible mixing of the races in the school. But it remains true that to require integration is quite something else.

I have argued that integration is, under present circumstances, impossible of achievement on a national scale; that attempts to impose it, in the South as elsewhere, often produce the perverse result of resegregation; that a rising segment of Negro leadership no more wants it imposed than do many whites; that it often amounts to the mixing of the black lower class with the white lower class, which is educationally useless, so far as we know, even though the mixing of the lower and middle classes might have some uses; and that, therefore, integration ought not to have the highest priority in the allocation of our human, political and material resources. That is what I have tried to say—about integration, not desegregation—and I do not believe I have been successfully contradicted. I may add that I am not alone among students of the problem in saying what I do, and that I have myself been saying it for nearly a decade.

I realize that the debate about where to go from here may somehow—any straw will do—enspirit certain unreconstructed Southerners who would like to return to where we started from 15 years ago, and may consequently dispirit Southern moderates, whose fidelity to law in arduous conditions over the same period has been a tremendous national asset, I think, therefore, that the law of desegregation should be reaffirmed by Congress. I believe also that the continuing process of desegregation would benefit from an attempt to stabilize the law and clarify it, so that those who would still resist desegregation cannot make allies by claiming that what will ultimately be imposed is necessarily racial dispersal. To these ends, I have cooperated in drafting a bill with Representative Richardson Preyer of North Carolina, a former federal judge, and one of those Southerners whose career has been marked by fidelity to law, and by personal commitment to the moral precepts that the law embodies.

As Professor Charles Hamilton wrote in these pages, government ought to support—not merely permit—the education of children in desegregated situations. And it ought to exert itself to improve the quality of education. The bill I speak of would create a national right in any public school pupil to transfer from a school in which his race is in a majority to one in which his race is in a minority. Transportation, if needed, would be provided at public expense. Secondly, the bill would commit the federal government to the equalization of educational opportunities and facilities. Thirdly, without disturbing the authority of federal courts and of HEW to measure the good faith of a desegregation performance, the bill would define the end result, which in a term used by the Supreme Court but left by it undefined, is called a unitary school system.

In general, a unitary school system would be achieved either by a genuine neighborhood zoning of school attendance areas, or by mixing the races in the schools in a ratio that, within a substantial permissible range, bears a relation to the proportion of one race to the other in the total school population in a district. Voluntary efforts by school boards to achieve better racial balance would, of course, be permitted, as would efforts to forestall resegregation of the schools, and the concomitant hardening of the lines of residential segregation. North or South, once a school system has reached—or has for a half century been in—a unitary state, federal courts and HEW would retain jurisdiction to pursue and cure any measure, however covert, to achieve in whatever degree any forced separation of children in the schools solely on the basis of race.

Segregationists, says Professor Hamilton, “must be fought at every turn. But in our determination to defeat them, let us not devise plans that are dysfunctional in other serious ways. The principle is a free and open society, and we can pursue several realistic routes to its achievement.” That is what I believe.

Source: Marian Wright Edelman, “The Debate over School Desegregation” New Republic, March 21, 1970, 26–30.