The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
All this has to be considered practically in terms of curriculum
planning, guidance, teaching emphasis, and the like. Nothing very
significant is accomplished, really, in offering physics or calculus
to rural Negro boys who intend to drop out at the ninth-grade
level and go to work farming or cutting pulpwood. Negro girls who
realistically expect to find employment in a tobacco stemmery,
a laundry, a bakery, or in domestic service have educational
requirements materially different from those of their white
counterparts. The impatient theoretician, unwilling even to attempt
to understand a social order he so thoroughly disapproves, doubtless
will be repelled by this line of reasoning. But the reasoning has a
way of making sense in rural county seats.
A point is made of the exceptional Negro students. What of them?
Why should a brilliant and ambitious colored youngster be held
back by the relative ineptitude of his typical colored classmates?
My answer is that he should not be held back, and I believe that
in the course of time, this will be the answer of the South as a
whole. When colored students appear who demonstrate the intellectual
ability to compete at top levels with their white counterparts, I am
wholly agreeable to any plan that would bring them, by transfer, to
the finest high schools for miles around. Virginia has just such a
program slowly formulating in its plan of “Freedom of Choice.” But I
would suggest that one consequence of such transfers of exceptional
children, in the foreseeable future, would be to deny the slower
Negro pupils the example and stimulation of superior students
of their own race. The tendency would be further to reduce the
achievement levels of the colored schools as such. But I would leave
such decisions to the pupils and their parents themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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