Mrs. Hicks' Victory

Boston's School Committee elections produced only one real surprise: the enormous vote received by the Committee's Chairman, Mrs. Louise Day Hicks. With 128,00 votes, she ran far ahead of even Mayor Collins. Between eighty and ninety per cent of those who voted for School Committee gave one of their five votes to Mrs. Hicks.

The size of her vote can be interpreted as either a routine endorsement of a popular and well-publicized incumbent or as an overwhelming mandate for the policies Mrs. Hicks and three of the other four Committeemen have pursued. In the first case, the result may be attributed to apathy or ignorance; in the second, to bigotry.

Surely most Boston voters have heard of Mrs. Hicks and know what she stands for. Since she refused, in the face of NAACP demands, to admit that de facto segregation exists in the Boston, schools, she has received extensive publicity. She has consistently emphasized her opposition to the NAACP and to every attempt it has made to integrate the sixteen predominantly Negro schools in Boston.

The results of the election suggest that Mrs. Hicks had profited by her opposition to Negroes' demands. When she first ran for School Committee two years ago, she finished with 40,000 votes. Arthur Gartland-the only member of the School Committee who has been willing to consider NAACP demands-ran only 1000 votes behind her then. Last week Mrs. Hicks increased her lead over Gartland; she had 128,000 votes to Gartland's 56,000.

But it is difficult to call Mrs. Hicks' victory an unqualified mandate for bigotry. Mrs. Hicks seems to want less to harm Negroes than to ignore them-in a way which will give her' maximum publicity. Her reply to the NAACP was not a refusal to take action (in fact, the School Committee made a few minor concessions), but a denial that any problem exists at all. Perhaps many white voters supported her so that they could continue to ignore the problem, or simply because of the familiarity of her name.

Whatever the reasons for her large plurality, Mrs. Hicks had her own interpretation. "The people of Boston," she said, "have given their answer to the de facto segregation question." There can be no doubt about what her statement means: de facto segregation and its attendant evils will continue to exists in Boston schools. Students in Negro schools will receive a poorer education than they ought to, because Boston voters gave Mrs. Hicks and her cohorts such large numbers of votes.

Committeeman Arthur Gartland fortunately won reelection, although by an undeservedly narrow margin. He will again be the only member of the Committee willing to concede the existence of de facto segregation. If Gartland continues working to make transfer policies more liberal and to improve the quality of education in the predominantly Negro schools in Boston, he ought to receive better treatment from the city's voters in 1965 than he did last week.