Mrs. Hicks And the Schools

Last week it was obvious the battle was over. The Boston School Committee, threatened by the loss of $6.3 million in state financial aid for last year and a much larger amount for this year, had decided to capitulate and draw up a plan, acceptable to the state board of education, for the relief of racial imbalance in the city's public schools. Last Monday night the committee voted on the plan and sent it up to the State House.

It seems likely that the state will approve the plan, release the funds, which according to a court order would have been distributed to the Commonwealth's other cities and towns in the spring, and provide additional financial aid for the construction of new imbalance-alleviating schools. But before the School Committee accepted the plan at its Monday meeting, Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, School Committee member, defender of the neighborhood school and possible candidate for mayor, got up and read a 17-page statement denouncing, the committee's plan.

For Mrs. Hicks the approval of the Committee's new plan, which includes busing programs and construction proposals, meant the end of a four-year battle to keep the School Committee from acknowledging, in any way, the harmful effects of racial imbalance.

The picture of Mrs. Hicks, with her tiny, timid, tense voice, reading a speech full of resolute bitter language is not a pleasant one and is probably not one which she herself enjoys. But Mrs. Hicks has come to know great power and she realizes that to increase it she must continue her attacks on the reformers and arguments on behalf of the status quo.

Had things been a little bit different in the spring of 1963, Mrs. Hicks might never have delivered the speech she gave Monday night, and might not even be sitting on the School Committee today. But in 1963, during the second year of her first School Committee term, Mrs. Hicks was chosen committee chairman, hence titular head of the entire school system. She had been elected to the Committee in 1961, considering herself a reformer. Recently she told an Atlantic reporter that she had run for the School Committee because of a long family interest in civic affairs (her father was a prominent Boston judge and for years she was his law clerk) and the relative quietness of the School Committee. In the 1961 campaign there was no mention of the problems of Negro education and Mrs. Hicks campaigned on promises to pay attention to educational rather than political problems and to restore Boston Latin School to greatness.

In late May, 1963, Mrs. Hicks was the featured speaker in a program in Roxbury's Freedom House. It was here that she had, somewhat unexpectedly, her first encounter with complaints about Negro education in Boston. The meeting was being conducted by Paul Parks, vice president of a group called "Citizens for Boston Schools" who were interested in reforming the Boston School Committee. The "Citizens" usually endorsed candidates for election and Mrs. Hicks was one of those considered.

At the meeting, Parks, who was also a member of the education committee of the NAACP, read a report based on Boston School Department records which showed that Negro schools were overcrowded, that cost per pupil in Negro schools was below the citywide average, and that reading test scores of Negro pupils were below the already low Boston median. The NAACP also requested a hearing with the School Committee which was granted and held on June 11, 1963. The meeting consisted of talks about the inadequacy of facilities for Negro children and ended with the promise of another meeting.

The next day, however, a group of private citizens and representatives of social work and civil rights organizations announced a proposed boycott of the Boston Schools suggested for June 18. The School Committee met with leaders of the proposed boycott to try and avert it, but negotiations broke off when the School Committee, under Hicks's leadership, refused to sign a statement admitting the existence of "de facto segregation" in the Boston public schools. According to one Boston political observer this is where the trouble began. "In their insistence on a de facto segregation statement the NAACP failed to realize," he says, "that Louise is a lawyer and a politician. For her the phrase de facto segregation connotates deliberate discrimination, which was not the case in Boston."

Mrs. Hicks was insulted by the charge of de facto segregation and when an NAACP staffer had taken a statement she had issued, then revised it and released the revised copy to the Boston papers without informing her, she lost all faith in local civil rights groups. She even refused to let the School Committee meet with any group wishing to discuss de facto segregation. Surprisingly this new hard line policy proved very popular with the voters, especially in lower middle class and working neighborhoods.

By the beginning of the campaign in September, Mrs. Hicks recognized the vote-getting value or her stand and expanded her refusal to discuss de facto segregation to include a ban on talk of racial imbalance. In November, she led the ticket. This victory re-enforced her feelings on the righteousness of her stand and opened her ears to talk of higher office. Since then Mrs. Hicks has successfully exploited every chance to draw attention to and exacerbate the strife between herself and Boston's Negro community.

Last June 16 she showed up at a graduation ceremony in the predominantly Negro Patrick Campbell School. A near riot broke out at the graduation when a Negro minister, the Rev. Virgil Wood, jumped up on the platform and shouted "Hitler" while waving his fist at Mrs. Hicks. The very next day, as Mrs. Hicks well knew, was Bunker Hill Day, a public holiday in the working class neighborhood of Charlestown. Mrs. Hicks received the loudest applause given to any politician in the Bunker Hill Dav Parade.

Friends of Mrs. Hicks who think she will run for mayor suggest that her operations on March 16 be watched closely. March 17 is St. Patrick's Day and that means another parade.