Hope for Integrated Boston Schools

The Boston School Committee is at it again. For more than two years, four of the five members of the Committee have refused to admit that any de facto segregation or racial imbalance exists in Boston's schools. They have refused to conduct serious discussions with leaders of civil rights groups. Martin Luther King's march today will reiterate the unheeded demands of two massive school boycotts. The School Committee has taken no steps to redraw school district lines or to locate new schools so as to reduce the number of children attending predominantsy Negro schools. The programs they have instituted to allow transfers from school to school, and to provide compensatory education in racially imbalanced schools, have been perfunctory and largely ineffective.

Even more disturbing than the School Committee's unwillingness to end racial imbalance has been its strident, irrational response to criticism. Led by Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, the majority of the Committee has articulated and given sanction to the originally casual prejudices of many white Bostonians. As a result, popular opinion has been inflamed against Negro rights demands, and Mrs. Hicks and her like-minded colleagues were reelected with wide margins in November, 1963.

The insults and derision with which Mrs. Hicks last week greeted the report of the state Advisory Committee on Racial Imbalance and Education came as no surprise. The eminence of the men who prepared the Report--among others Cardinal Cushing, former Attorney-General Edward McCormack, and four college Presidents--did not deter Mrs. Hicks. Neither did the appended sixty pages of research papers, which described the educational harm done to both Negro and white children by racial imbalance. Nor was the majority of the School Committee impressed by the raw statistics--the student bodies of 29 Boston schools are more than 75% Negro--nor by the detailed suggestions which, if put into practice, would drastically reduce racial imbalance by next September.

There is little chance that these recommendations will be followed by the present School Committee. Mrs. Hicks in attacking the report characteristically seized on the suggestion that some Negro students be bused to other schools. In fact, this was only one of the Report's recommendations, and the state Committee stressed that the only busing it proposed was temporary, and to nearby schools.

The Advisory Committee insists that it remains open-minded on specific possible solutions, while Mrs. Hicks and her three henchmen have made it all too clear that, they will remain as close-minded--and open-mouthed--as ever.

It should by now be clear that the elimination of racial imbalance in Boston's schools is imperative, "because," as the Report's title states, "It is right--educationally." It should also be clear that racial imbalance in Boston can be almost entirely ended, both feasibly and inexpensively, and that the Boston School Committee, so long as it can exploit white voters' fears and hatreds, will not, take the initiative.

The Boston NAACP, citing a precedent in Spring-field, this week filed a suit to force the School Committee to end de facto segregation. But the Springfield case is under appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court does not appear likely to rule racial imbalance by itself unconstitutional. Furthermore, obtaining a court order takes invaluable time.

A more certain solution lies in the Report's suggestions for state action. The Advisory Committee asks for state legislation requiring the redrawing of school districts and the location of new schools in such a way as to eliminate racial imbalance. Such a law would also empower the state Commissioner of Education to withhold funds from cities and towns which do not comply.

Besides this stick, the Report recommends a carrot: increased state aid for programs specifically intended to cut down racial imbalance. Because the Commonwealth already provides a substantial portion of local school budgets, and because the Boston School Committee is continually short of funds, both the carrot and the stick are likely to have a significant effect.

Laws embodying the Report's recommendations have not yet been drawn up. The Advisory Committee calls for the creation of an ad hoc committee to draft the legislation. If the ad hoc committee is formed immediately, it may be able to submit legislation to the General Court this session. And if a bill is enacted, there is every reason to believe that the evils of de facto legislation can be substantially lessened before the year is out.