The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
These teachers have other objections, too. As the record of hearings
before a House subcommittee in 1956 makes vividly clear, many white
teachers are simply appalled by the sexual mores and the violent
attitudes of some of the Negro pupils in desegregated schools. One
witness after another appeared before the committee to testify
to the inordinate amount of time that had to be spent simply in
maintaining discipline. Adolescent sex urges, volatile enough under
any circumstances, are further complicated by the novelties and
tensions of intimate interracial association in halls and classrooms
and toilets. Philadelphians still recall grimly the incident at Shaw
Junior High School in 1956, when a Negro gang gathered outside the
school to insult and annoy pupils as they left the building. Three
teachers who came out to remonstrate were attacked and severely
beaten. The white principal of another Philadelphia school, who had
watched the deterioration of his school from an “honors” institution
of high scholarship into a second-rate vocational factory, was quoted
in _U. S. News_ in 1958: “Many of these youngsters are not adequately
motivated for learning. They have no home to speak of, nothing to
encourage them once they leave the school grounds. They’re here
simply to occupy their time until they’re old enough to go out and
get a job--if they can find a job.”
These are among the arguments of practicality the Southerner would
advance against compulsory desegregation of his public schools. He
is not prepared to chop logic, or to engage in casuistic debate on
the why of the world that he lives in. He knows that with the best
will in the world--and in his fashion, he more often than not has
great good will for the Negroes of his community--he cannot quickly
elevate the Negro’s home environment appreciably. Overnight he cannot
put books and magazines in Negro living rooms; he cannot inject
generations of cultural background with some magic hypodermic needle;
he cannot deliver to the Negro, as he would loan him a hoe or give
him an overcoat, the social graces, the community of experience, the
heritage of generations, the accumulation of business, professional,
and civic understanding that necessarily must figure in the educative
process. Time presses, and the school bell rings, and on April
mornings the honk of the school bus, like the voice of the turtle,
is abroad in the land. He has to do what he conceives to be best for
his child _now_, to prepare that child for the society he predictably
will live in tomorrow. And he does not accept the idea that racially
mixed classrooms, over a long period of years, in the context of
the only society he knows, will provide a workable, desirable, or
pleasant experience for sons and daughters who are dear to him.
Maybe, he says doubtfully, maybe some time in the future....
IX
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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