Boston School Meeting

Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, Chairman of the Boston School Committee, has shown an admirable, if tardy, sense of public responsibility in agreeing to meet with the education committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people to discuss the plight of the Negro in Boston schools. The NAACP had vowed to march on School Committee offices if a meeting was not granted, and for the moment the Association has agreed to suspend all demonstrations.

Mrs. Hicks, however, circumscribed the value of her announcement by citing the possibility of public disorder as the reason for granting the NAACP's request. NAACP officials had promised any demonstration would be strictly controlled by an internal police force, as previous demonstrations have been. They could have been taken at their word in this matter, and Mrs. Hicks was only impugning the integrity of the NAACP by doubting the validity of their promise to preserve order.

There are enough other reasons for Mrs. Hicks to agree to another meeting with the education committee. Six of the 10 members she appointed to a BiRacial Community Committee to act as a liaison between the Negro community and the school committee have resigned in favor of the NAACP. And the Association can make a pretty strong case that it does have the support of a large segment of the Negro community. In addition, the NAACP initiated the whole investigation of Boston schools in June.

Even though a meeting will probably be held on Aug. 15, little hope can be held out for any real progress. The NAACP's first objective is to obtain an admission from the School Committee that de facto segregation exists in the local school system. Both Mrs. Hicks and School Committeeman Thomas Eisenstadt have already indicated they will not reverse their refusal to recognize such a charge.

De facto segregation is an extremely complex problem. Undoubtedly it exists in Boston, principally because most of the city's Negroes live in the Roxbury and Dorchester sections, and their children attend the same schools. But whether merely shuffling students from school district to school district will provide an adequate answer remains quite an open question. The problem involves other elements: discrimination in housing, which keeps Negroes in the ghetto areas; discrimination in employment, which not only limits the ability of the average Negro family to move away from the ghetto, but also has a deleterious affect on the school work of the children. And there are others.

Neither side in this matter should maintain an inflexible stand. It will require statesmanship on the part of both the NAACP and the School Committee to recognize that the problem exists and that it cannot be solved in any simple manner. What is needed in Boston is the mutual cooperation of civic officials and Negro leaders to work toward long-range solutions to these problems which admit of no easy answers. To pretend that such answers exist will only exacerbate the unrest in the Negro community, and force the whites back on the defensive in another round of destructive recriminations.