Congress, Not Negro, Blamed for DC 'Mess'

Ten years ago, the city of Washington was the showpiece of integration, the model that proved that racial harmony could be achieved in a school system.

Today, the city's role has been reversed. It is the segregationists who now cite Washington as an example to back up their argument. George Wallace summed up the argument when he told his Harvard audience that "Integration just doesn't work. In Washington they integrated the schools and now they have a school system that's a disgrace. All the whites are feeing to the suburbs. The place has an awful crime rate. There was a race riot there not long ago...."

Sadly, it was the Wallace line that was emphasized when the country's newspapers and magazines suddenly discovered Washington this summer. The crime statistics for the District were quoted ad nauseam. The rickety schools and the high dropout rate were cited again and again, and attention was always called to the fact that the schools were 35 per cent Negro in enrollment. No less than six major magazines, plus the New York Times, ran lengthy articles emphasizing crime in the District and the city's racial problems.

Capitol Offense

Since Washington, with Negroes making up 55 per cent of its population, is the only major U.S. city with a Negro majority, it was inevitable that segregationists should begin citing it one day as an example of "the Negro's inability to govern." For the District of Columbia is, undeniably, a mess. Just who is responsible for the mess is another question. To begin with, the mess has very little to do with crime. Reporters find it exciting to present accounts of visitors being robbed "within sight of the Capitol dome," but it is still true that of the twelve largest American cities, Washington had only the seventh highest crime rate per capita. The crime rate is on the rise in the District; it is also going up in the other eleven cities.

But more importantly, it is a gross misstatement to say that Washington's schools are poor, or that its government is a failure, because most of its citizens are Negroes. For the most part, the city's Negroes cannot be made out to be the cause of its problems. The schools are poor because there is no money to repair them and to pay decent teachers' salaries. The city is poorly administered because its particular form of government insures that it will be so.

For the District of Columbia is governed by the Congress of the United States, a body which is disorganized enough when it is governing a nation and impossibly awkward when it it stoops to concerning itself with the affairs of a city. Perhaps 70 per cent of the Congressmen pay no attention at all to the District's problems; they are too busy with other things to consider the flood of city laws which flows through the Houses regularly. How can a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, preoccupied with the problems of Vietnam, be expected to worry over the D.C. budget, or a new welfare program or a bill to legalize the sale of ice cream cones in Washington? The matters are naturally left to the Committees on the District of Columbia. And the House District Committee is completely dominated by Southerners.

Paradox

It is an amazingly paradoxical situation; the only city is the U.S. with a Negro majority is governed by Southern whites. "It's as if the U.N. had sent the South Africans to run the Congo," District officials say when they are sure no one is listening. It is these men--John McMillan of South Carolina (the chairman), Howard Smith of Virginia (the veterau of the Rules Committee), John Dowdy of Texas, George Huddleston of Alabama, Basil Whitener of North Carolina, John Bell Williams of Mississippi, and so on through a lengthy roster of Southerners, who year after year prevent the passage of a bill to give the District self-government. During each Congress, the Senate, whose District Committee is dominated by liberals, invariably passes a bill to give the city home rule. And during each Congress the home rule bill bounces into its familiar pigeon-hole in the House District Committee, never to emerge again. McMillan never even bothers to hold hearings on the legislation.

So the Congress of the United States goes on legislating for the District of Columbia. Perhaps this is one way in which Washington's Negroes are responsible for their own misfortunes; Southern members of the House District Committee, resentful of giving money to an integrated and 85 per cent Negro school system, refuse to provide enough money for the schools. They regularly chop the District's budget far below the levels recommended by the President and the three District Commissioners, the men who theoretically run the city, but who actually are little better than ambassadors to the District Committees.

No Solution

There seems to be no solution to the District's governmental problem; home rule is out of the question as long as the Southerners command a majority on the House District Committee. Some Washingtonians have suggested, only half-jokingly, that the city secede from the Union in order to draw attention to its problems. And this in perhaps the most realistic solution proposed so far.

Congress's mode of governing the District seriously limits the action the city can take towards meeting its problems. But Washington's problems are not by any means all administrative. The city's Negro population has gained a great deal over the last ten years, but it demands a good deal more justifiably, and many of its demands are extra-governmental.

The gains have been formidable. In 1953, public accomodations were integrated by order of the commissioners, probably the most daring act they have ever performed on their own. The next year District schools were desegregated by the Supreme Court decision. Slowly but steadily Negroes picked up more and better jobs. The government began to integrate its own jobs and to encourage its contractors to do the same.

'White Noose'

This year even the "White Noose," the exclusive suburban belt that rings Washington, has firmly slipped to some extent. The President's order barring discrimination in federally assisted housing let Negroes move into the suburbs for the first time.

But the progress made so far has been laughably small compared to what remains to be done. Few of the suburbs have been integrated, and none of those that offer the best housing and schols. Dean Rusk's neighbors in suburban Spring Valley had to sign restrictive covenants forbidding the sale of their houses to Negroes or Jews. (Rusk made a special agreement which excepted him from signing the covenant.) Even the more attractive sections of Washington proper still exclude Negroes, although the number of discriminatory areas in the city is small now.

The second great problem in jobs, which are still largely segregated. The government has taken on more Negroes, but most of them still labor in low-pay, low-status jobs. Hany complain that although they have remained in the very lowest government service classifications, they have trained whites who have risen to the highest levels.

The large private firms are worse; although most of the department stores now employ Negroes in "high visibility" positions (since Negroes make up so much of the buying market, this is not unsound policy), many industries still refuse to budge. Julius Hobson, the President of Washington CORE, explains that "we picket a company and they take their one Negro out of the stockroom and put him on display to show that they're integrated. Then the pickets leave and he goes back into the stockroom."

But Washington's greatest problem is still its schools. The racial balance so carefully fostered in 1955 has now been altogether eradicated. Vast influxes of Negroes have crowded the tiny classrooms beyond the limits of their capacity, yet there is no sign of improvement. The same schools which in 1955 held slightly less than 104,000 pupils now must provide for more than 126,000, and there have been few new schools built.

The overcrowding and the poor school conditions compared to those in the excellent schools in Maryland and Virginia, have been the major causes of the whites' desire to have their children in suburban schools. The number of Negroes in District public schools, however, is unquestionably a factor, and that number is growing every year. In 1955, the year after the city's schools were integrated, 58,936 Negroes were going to school with 44,897 whites. Since that time Negro enrollment has almost doubled to 112,000, more than 85 per cent of the total, while white enrollment has halved to 22,000.

Ninety-four thousand of the Negroes attend schools in which 90 per cent or more of the students are Negroes. 27 schools have no white students; on the other hand, three schools have no Negroes and 1 others are more than 90 per cent white. The well-balanced school racially is rare indeed.

Washington's future is not promising; there are too many unsolved problems, too many problems whose solution can only be taken on by as unwilling Congress, to create any optimism about the situation. The signs of a virulent white reaction to the renewed civil rights activities of CORE the Afro-American newspaper, and other militant elements, are already visible.

There is only one thing that will give the district a chance to solve its own problems and that is home rule. The chances of its passing in the next Congress seems incredibly slim; even a Republican takeover in the House would leave the Southerners with eight or nine of the 24 seats on the committee, and a sympathetic agreement with the conservatives who dominate the Republican side.

Yet it now seems that only in the unlikely eventuality of the city's being granted self-government will the racial conflicts be stilled.

Race Riot

Washington got a taste of what may be to come last Thanksgiving Day when 50,000 spectators crammed into the District of Columbia Stadium to watch the annual city championship football game. It was a close, exciting contest until the fourth quarter, when St. John's, a predominantly white parachoial school, scored two touch-downs to go out ahead of the 99 per cent Negro Eastern High School.

With a few minutes left in the game, a frustrated Eastern tackle, thinking he had been pushed by a St. John's player, went almost berserk and had to be restrained by three teammates There was fighting on the field for the rest of the game while St. John's cheer-leaders cried out "Back to Africa." As the game ended, several hundred Eastern fans rushed across the field and up into the St. John's section. Perhaps they meant to start a fight, or perhaps they did not. In any case, pushing matches started at the exits, and a full-scale race riot ensued. Gangs of Negroes roamed through the parking lote yelling "Get the whites," while whites were trying desperately to get away. An hour later, 100 police brought order to the chaotic scene. Forty people were injured seriously and 14 jailed.

No one in Washington has forgotten the Thanksgiving Day Massacre," as the riot was quickly dubbed. The Afro-American and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell both took the opportunity to predict that the District would have "a fantastic race riot," as the Afro put it, if Negro living condition did not attempts are made to integrate a city as an example of what happens when attempts are made to integrate a city which is largely Negro.

If Washington's rulers fail to learn their lesson from the Stadium riot, the militants' predictions may well come true, and the riot may be dwarfed by other, greater ones. And there are very few signs that the District's Southern lords are willing to take the affair as anything but a demonstration of Negro barbarism. If they do not, and if living conditions for the city's Negroes do not improve soon, Washington will be in trouble.