The Bad Side of Integration

According to the Justice Department, 97% of Southern black children will attend integrated school systems next fall. For many, the experience will not be pleasant. They will find that thousands of white children have fled to new private "segregation academies." In many cases white school officials have sent public school equipment along with them. Louisiana went a step further last month by approving state financial support for private schools.

Less obvious--and more insidious--is what happens to black students and teachers in some school districts where the terms for desegregation have been determined unilaterally by local white school boards. In recent testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, five young blacks and an official of the National Education Association described a bleak pattern of "internal segregation," which produces separate classrooms, separate lunch and gym periods and even separate bells so that blacks and whites will not use the halls at the same time. In Louisiana's DeSoto Parish, buses pick up blacks at 5:30 a.m. so that white students can later ride separately. One white teacher herds all his black students into a corner of the classroom and turns his back on them while he teaches.

"Being in an integrated school is like being in a hostile jungle," Lowanda Lovette told the committee. "If you start to question any of the rules, you are called a Communist, or you are just a black militant who is going totally insane. You can't really learn." Lowanda, 17, was expelled from a newly integrated high school in Rocky Mount, N.C., after taking part in a racial melee. Two whites, charged with carrying concealed weapons, were back in school the next day. Asked if she would return to an integrated school, Lowanda instantly replied: "Not me." Tyrone Thomas told the Senators that black football players at his integrated high school in Mobile, Ala., are used to carry the ball to "about the 99-yard line." Then the white coach sends in a white player to score the touchdown. Blacks at another school were refused band instruments and told that the band uniforms were "at the cleaners."

George Fischer, president of the National Education Association, described the plight of black educators, who have been subjected to wholesale demotion or dismissal throughout much of the South. The N.E.A. estimates that at least 5,000 principals and teachers have been affected since desegregation began in 1954. The trend may accelerate during the Justice Department's current integration push. The Mississippi Teachers Association, a black group, claims that 1,500 teachers who worked in the state this past school year will be unemployed next fall.

N.E.A. field studies in Mississippi and Louisiana turned up some appalling cases. Until last summer, Fred McCoy was principal of the all-black Midway Elementary School in Natalbany, La. Integration closed his school, and he was assigned to teach a fourth-grade class at a formerly all-white school--in the morning. In the afternoon, he was expected to do janitor's chores in the school latrines. At least McCoy kept busy. A black former principal in Louisiana has been given a desk to sit at but no title or duties that he has been able to determine.

Wisdom Coleman, once principal of a high school in Greenwood, Miss., lacked even an office at the school to which he was reassigned. He was a "hall monitor." James Noah, who was head coach at all-black C. M. Washington High School in Thibodaux, La., had 16 years of successful football behind him when he was "integrated"--transferred to a formerly all-white high school and made assistant coach on the "B" team. White officials explain that there are simply not enough comparable jobs to go around, and invariably find the whites better qualified. One favorite ploy is to assign a relocated black to teach a subject in which he has no certification. Then he is closely observed and fired for incompetence.

Painted Over. Desegregation for many black students simply means schools run by hostile whites instead of sympathetic blacks. One result: a crushing loss of status for middle-class black educators, who have provided the black South with a sense of pride and leadership. A final "tragic consequence of desegregation," in the words of the N.E.A. report, "is the forfeiture of school spirit and group identity. Left behind to be stored, scattered or abandoned are trophies, pictures, plaques, and every symbol of black identity, of black students' achievements." For one black school in Louisiana, the wonders of integration were symbolized by the fate of a large mural depicting Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. When whites took control of the building, they wasted no time in painting it over.

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