Desegregation: A Case Study

With the nation's children trooping back to school after summer vacation, Time magazine compiled a statistical report card in its issue of September 19, 1955. For once the victims of bad marks were not the children. Time was grading the progress made by various Southern states toward integrating their white and colored schools. Of the 17 states affected by the Supreme Court's desegregation decision of May, 1954, only Missouri rated an "A."

Many Southerners would hasten to condemn such a marking system as unfair. "Missouri has none of the problems of desegregation which shackle us," they would say. "It is a border state. Even in its big cities, like St. Louis, the proportion of white to colored children is still large. How would you like to send your child to a Mississippi school, where the Negro children far outnumber the white?"

At first the attitude of these Southerners seems reasonable. Even in St. Louis, where the greatest proportion of Missouri Negroes live, most schools have a majority of white pupils. But not all. One that does not is the Eugene Field School, which, up until this fall, had only Negro students. Now, along with 860 colored children it has 40 white children. Its principal, Mr. Fay Everitt, and all its teachers are still Negroes.

Of the 40 white children at Field, however, ten have recently moved into the neighborhood. The other 30 come from relatively poor families, which could not afford private schools. The many other white children of the area seem to be deliberately shunning the heavily-Negro Field school. It appears, instead, that they are choosing a school where they are in a majority, in this case the nearby Clark school, where the white-colored ratio is 2 to 1. Our objecting Southerners ease back in their chairs. "We told you so," they say.

The motives of this neighborhood's white children, however, differ from what our Southern group suspects. When the St. Louis Board of Education ruled, in compliance with the Supreme Court's decision, that the city's elementary schools would integrate this September, it had to construct completely new school districts. But it gave all children the option of continuing in their old schools in spite of the new districts. Before this fall's integration, the white children in the Field neighborhood had all gone to the segregated Clark school. Most of them, naturally, wanted to continue there, not because Clark now has a smaller proportion of colored students than Field, but because their friends are still going there.

That a desire to avoid the Field school was not the motive which kept children at Clark is shown by the situation at Field itself. The ten children new to the Field neighborhood could not go to Clark due to the new districting laws, but the 30 former Clark pupils could easily return to their old school. To date, none of them have. No conflicts between colored and white children have occurred. Moreover, the principal, Mr. Everitt, reports that the majority of colored children does not browbeat the few white children. Their relationships are straight-forward and easy-going. White parents have joined the Parent-Teachers Association. And, according to Mr. Everitt, more and more white children will attend Field each year. In the case of the Field School our Southerner's claim that white children cannot learn naturally and happily in a predominantly colored school breaks down.