I have attempted to set forth two practical objections to school desegregation in the South, and especially in the rural South--first, the demonstrably lower levels of aptitude and achievement on the Negro’s part, and second, the demonstrably different opportunities and occupations for which most colored pupils realistically must prepare themselves. A third difficulty involves the teaching staffs. The massive desegregation of Southern schools predictably would have a catastrophic effect upon the thousands of Negro men and women who now enjoy, within their race, relatively high status and relatively good incomes as public school teachers. In many areas of the South, as I have said, attitudes are changing and softening, as white parents discover there is a level of token desegregation that is not intolerable to them. This tendency, I feel certain, will increase year by year. But I cannot yet foresee the day, in the greatest part of the South, when white parents by and large will accept Negro teachers and Negro principals over their children. This would demand one more subtle and unwelcome shifting of gears; it would carry the social revolution beyond the point of an uneasy “equality” of pupils in a classroom, and would make the white child subject to Negro masters. The efforts of a Federal court to compel employment of Negro teachers who would preside over heavily “mixed” classrooms would be bitterly resented, and the resentment would manifest itself in wholesale withdrawals and school abandonments. I venture the flat prediction, on the basis of personal conversations with white families who have moved out of Washington, that this difficulty would be seen as a last-straw condition. But the alternative to the employment of Negro teachers in massively desegregated schools is to discharge the Negro teachers and to replace them with white teachers. This would be cruelly unfair; but in any unhappy election between preserving the jobs of some Negro schoolteachers and preserving a local school system itself (which involves preservation of the good will of white parents and taxpayers), the jobs will go.