Too Fast?

Until recently, Southern Congressmen who denounced the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's stringent new guidelines for school desegregation received a sympathetic hearing only from other Southerners. But Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield has now joined in the criticism of HEW, apparently in the belief that continued prodding for integration anywhere will succor a white backlash everywhere. The result of Mansfield's statement that the department is pushing integration "too fast" can only be to slow down the pace of school desegregation in the South, -- a pace that is and has always been unconscionably slow.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act says that desegregation "shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance." The obvious intent of Congress was to exempt de facto school segregation in the North, while seeing to it that federal funds were cut off from Southern school systems segregated by law. The Southerners maintain that schools back home are no longer segregated -- they are merely "racially imbalance," and "racial imbalance" in the South is just as legal as "racial imbalance" anywhere else.

Although they point out that all but a handful of Southern school districts assured HEW in the spring of 1965 that schools were being desegregated, the fact is that Southern school districts have by and large preserved separate schools for whites and Negroes.

The education writer for the Birmingham News was not far off when he wrote recently of a mythical district whose 1965 desegregation plan "would admit a Negro child to a white school in 1975, providing that the child brushed its teeth immediately before coming to school every day, had an IQ of 185 and was examined thoroughly each morning by the school nurse to determine if it had contracted venereal disease during the night."

Few, if any, of the desegregation plans that local school boards submitted to HEW prior to this year's guidelines gave any promise that dual systems of education would ever be eliminated. Even court-ordered desegregation plans -- which are still automatically acceptable under the guidelines -- simply provide that increasing numbers of Negro pupils will be allowed to transfer to formerly all-white schools, though whites and Negroes will otherwise be assigned to the same schools they have always attended.

The result has been that the burden of desegregation in the South rests with Negro parents, who must seek to have their children transferred, and with the children themselves, who must every day face the harassment of white classmates.

HEW's 1966 guidelines strike at the heart of the problem. The department has said it expects desegregation plans to work, that school districts should have a "substantial" number of Negroes in school with whites. The department has also asked that a start be made towards integrating teaching staffs, so that eventually no school in a system could be labelled Negro or white according to the racial composition of its staff.

No less astute a politician than Gov. George Wallace of Alabama realized that this last provision could be used to stir up whites who would get red around the collar at the thought of Negroes teaching their children. At the Governor's urging the Alabama legislature passed a law prohibiting Alabama school districts from promising to comply with the guidelines.

It is clear that Wallace is hoping for another eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the federal government. And it is equally clear that Senator Mansfield, in this election year, does not want to see more intra-party feuding over integration. Wary of a white backlash vote, Mansfield is not about to defend federal integration requirements in the face of warnings by Wallace that, "The people of this nation will not long tolerate this trifling with the safety and security of their children."

Quite possibly, it would have been politically advisable for Mansfield to keep silent during the attacks on HEW, rather than leaping to the defense of the guidelines. But his recent statement will only encourage Wallace and like-thinkers North and South. Equally important, it will encourage continued foot-dragging by Southern school officials, who because of their own prejudice or fear of political reprisals have done no more than allow a few Negroes to transfer to formerly all-white schools.

If school integration is proceeding "too fast," that is certainly news to the pitifully small number of Negro children who are now permitted to transfer out of all-Negro schools, and who must face intimidation daily if they choose to do so.