Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 33

Vol. CXIX. No. 40,895 1969 The New York Times Company Kennedy's Hearing A New Day Ends Public Segregated Schools in Mississippi HATTIESBURG, -A blast of icy air swept across the Mississippi Delta early last week, a dropping temperatures to the lowest level in years. But Forrest County school superintendent Milton Evans was not at all upset by the cold wave.

He even hoped that it would snow; if it did, then maybe he could delay the opening of schools for the second semester and thereby forestall a little longer the demise of segregation in this citadel of white supremacy. But Wednesday dawned bright and clear, if still bitter cold. And, as the yellow buses groaned over the frozen roads, carrying 4,000 white children and 1,000 Negroes to school together, Mississippi had reached a historic crossroads. Three months ago, the doom of the old way had been ordained. Acting on orders from the Supreme Court, a Federal Court ordered 30 Mississippi school districts to integrate their schools with no more delay, no more law suits, no more appeals, no more anything.

Adjustment Varies The way Mississippi adjusted to this first week of the new way varied, of course, from place to place. In districts, such as this one, with predominantly white school population, the process of bringing whites together with Negroes in public classrooms was going smoothly. But in districts where Negroes are in a majority, the public schools were being boycotted by the whites. In the city schools at Columbia, for example, classes began' The New York Times WEEKLY REVIEW REVIEW Damascus SYRIA Rebel GI Newsmen ARSTIEAM New Pattern Of Black And White Emerges In Nation WASHINGTON One of the bitter ironies of the long struggle over school desegregation is that nationwide there probably is more racial isolation in the public schools today than at the time of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, which held the dual system by law and policy to be unconstitutional. As the controversy flared anew during the last few days, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare released the results of the first national survey on the extent of racial separation in the schools and concluded that it showed a "shockingly low desegregation rate." Taken in the late fall of 1968 but still considered current, the survey was based on a sampling of 43 million students.

It showed that 61 per cent of the Negro students attended schools that were 95 to 100 per cent black, Although there were no comparable statistics for 1954. most observers believe that despite the desegregation gains in the South and some other areas, the vast increase in the population of young blacks and the mass movement of whites to the suburbs has resulted in a considerable increase in the number of Negro students in predominantly black schools. Two-Front Move Against this backdrop, the Justice Department last week moved on two fronts. In the North, it went to court in Pasadena, Calif. against de facto segregation; in the South it sought to enforce a Supreme Court order in Mississippi against part of the last vestiges of the dual system created by law.

The Pasadena case pointed up the Northern situation in which the schools follow neighborhood racial patterns, but in which civil rights lawyers say segregation is frequently abetted further by various means, usually subtle. Among many black intellectuals and militants, integration with whites is no longer a goal, but every national survey taken on the subject has shown that the majority of Negroes still prefer moving into Special Supplement to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin The US. and China Lebanon's Ordeal Subway CARS ONLY Blues Under Supreme in Yazoo City, watches. Results well; elsewhere, in a spirit of cooperation that surprised even some of the white and Negro leaders who had been working toward just that goal. There, the 1,500 white students and 900 Negroes began the new year together in school with hardly a hitch.

While a handful of pickets paraded outside, the presidents of the formerly Negro high school and the white high school spoke at a joint meeting of the student bodies, now combined. They asked for the help of the youngsters and their parents in building a wholesome system of education in their city. But in nearby Wilkinson County, Annette and Tommy Brown were the only white students from a possible 800 who showed up for classes with 2,700 Negroes, There, the mode of adjustment for the white parents is a private school, the Wilkinson County Christian Academy, one of dozens blossoming faster than cotton and a magnolias from Dixie's segregationist soil. Flawed Logic Flawed Logic "My kids got to go to school," a Wilkinson parent explained. "They can't go to school with the coloreds, so they got to go to the private one." His logic, besides eliminating the alternative of sending his children to school with Negroes, was also flawed by the absence in Mississippi of a compulsory school attendance law.

His children do not really have to go to school, and it is expected that in many of the predominantly Negro districts some white children will simply stay home. The Brown children's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Burnell Brown, are like a large portion of the state's white population. He is a logger and brings home to their rude, three-room rural house less than $300 a month.

"'We just couldn't afford a private school," Mrs. Brown said, explaining her children's presence at the public school and articulating the essence of the problem that faces the private schools. Even with local, state and Federal assistance, public education is having enormous finan- Beirut MEDITERRANEAN SEA LEBANON ISRAEL The Nation The New York Times (by Gary Settle) its schools last week. Above, school while a Negro child uncertain: in some areas, all went for new "private academies." and the strain caused by the competition between private and public education will emerge from the same kind of leadership that was responsible for successful integration in Columbia, for instance, and other places such as Yazoo City, whose balanced black and white population in the schools, was an exception to the general trend. Vigorous Campaign In Yazoo City, with, approximately 2,000 students from each race, the schools opened Wednesday with most of the whites present after a vigorous campaign toward that goal was waged by leading white and Negro residents.

But in communities that have not generated this type of local leadership, there are serious problems. In Wilkinson County, the superintendent of public schools, Barnard Waites, is sending his third grade daughter to the private school and condemns Mr. and Mrs. Brown publicly for "exposing their children" to the all-Negro environment at the Wilkinson County Training School. At Petal, one of the schools in Mr.

Evans' district, a group of people calling itself the Citizens for Local Control of Education is protesting student. transfers to a previously all-Negro school. So, as the first week ended, the pattern seemed clear and the events of the next few months, most agree, will depend almost entirely on the responses made by local and state leaders. But, after years of legislation and litigation climaxed by the recent Supreme Court decision that deleted "all deliberate speed" from its mandate for integration, it is of little comfort to Negroes and liberals in the South that there are still hundreds of black children in Mississippi who must go to school in all-black classrooms. The difference now, of course, is that it is legal.

Said Charles Evers, the Negro mayor of Fayette, "If the white kids don't want to go to school with us, let them grow up ignorant- we did." -JAMES T. WOOTEN the larger society. It was complaints by blacks in Pasadena that led to the lawsuit. In the South, there is much less disdain among Negro leaders for integration, partly because the Negro schools there especially have been inadequate. All this raised the question, once again, of what the Administration is doing to fulfill what Robert H.

Finch, Secretary of H.E.W., called a "commitment to equal and education for all children nation." quality, This could not be easily ascertained, because this Administration speaks with many voices. President Nixon himself has called for a middle of the road course of enforcing desegregation, and the Justice Department's move for delay has brought the political result desired by many In the Administration that is, many Southern whites now blame the courts not the President, for forcing integration, Tax Exemptions In the face of the Mississippi troubles, Mr. Finch disclosed last week that he and others in the Administration were asking the Internal Revenue Service to find some means of denying tax exemptions for the makeshift private schools that are now proliferating in the South, a step that would do much to discourage them. Mr. Finch conceded, however, that it was a difficult matter that would require much work.

Involved is an enforcement burden the service has not been anxious to assume. Considerable work and complications might be encountered, for example, in deciding which of the many private schools in the nation a are fostering segregation. Further, it was not considered likely that the Nixon Administration would take a step that the Johnson Administration refused to take despite the pleadings of influential Negro leaders and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Some trends seem clear enough, however. One is that Executive enforcement under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the fund cutoff provision, will soon be H.E.W.

is now working with only about 300 districts to achieve compliance under Title VI. The remainder of the 4,500 districts in the South and border states have either met the legal requirements or are under court order. The Administration's policy is to shift to the courts wherever possible a process that was considered too slow when the 1964 law was passed, but 8 process the Administration says is more humane because it does Another Crime Buster Tries to Break the Mafia in New Jersey "Is he okay?" Those three words are practically a password among politicians and policemen in New Jersey. You hear that question about a cop in Atlantic City, about a purchasing agent in a Jersey City hospital, about an assistant prosecutor in Essex County, about an important state Senator in Trenton. "Is he okay?" An "okay" guy is one who isn't going to cause trouble, a "reasonable" man who knows something is going on but is either in on it or.

has learned that it's wiser to look the other way and keep his mouth shut. Something bad has been going on in Jersey for a long timeevery once in a while someone who isn't okay talks about it. The latest to speak out is Frederick B. Lacey, the United States Attorney for New Jersey, who has said: "Organized crime, in the vernacular, is taking us over. For rotten dollars mohsters have been able to corrupt not penalize the children by denying funds.

Despite the Mississippi ruling by the Supreme Court, the Justice Department still is asking in other pending court cases that the final desegregation step for largely Negro districts be delayed until next fall, in conformity with the timetable set under Title VI. If all of this comes off perfectly, however, racial isolation will not have been ended. Southern cities, for example, have met the legal requirements, then followed the Northern pattern of de facto segregation. In Atlanta, where 78 per cent of Negroes were in all-black schools in 1968, some two dozen schools have changed from white to integrated to black due partly to the white migration from the central city. This type of segregation was at issue when the Justice Department suit against the Pasadena Board of Education came to trial last week.

The Department charged that aside from segregation growing out of the racial composition of neighborhoods, the school board had resisted integration in all levels of the school system, a charge the board denied. There are six similar cases across the country in which the department is seeking orders to integrate faculty and classrooms, and the department says more will be filed. Everyone agrees, however, that under the best of circumstances it would be a long time before suits of this Lind could have an impact on the big city school systems, even if the courts should rule de facto segregation per se is illegal. Serious Doubts Court orders, Mississippi integrated whites enter a formerly all-Negro throughout the state were whites abandoned public schools cial difficulties, not only in Mississippi, but all over the country. A private school, without the benefit of funds from any of these sources or some kind of substantial endowment, is destined for even larger problems.

If the state provides funds, as the Mississippi Legislature is now considering (through property and personal income tax deductions), the private schools will be vulnerable to attack in the courts, just as they will be if they refuse to accept the Negroes who, in several areas, plan to try to enroll in them. The private schools, many predict, will soon succumb not only to these pressures but also to the inadequate level of education their meager budgets will necessarily provide. "When the kids who go to them get out and can't get jobs or go to college, then they'll send their kids back to the public schools," a teacher in Jackson said last week. But the private schools, called "seg" schools by the Negroes, have served a function that social scientists refer to as "creative disorder." Just as energetic social and civil rights campaigns tend to drain off aggressive energies in city ghettos when tensions are high and riot is imminent so the private schools have provided disgruntled whites in Mississippi with an alternative to violent resistance. Scattered Incidents There were scattered incidents that smacked of the old 1 ways.

A reporter was chased out of one town by several young toughs and a television correspondent was harshly rebuffed by several people he approached for interviews in another town. But generally there was no violence and Federal officials who had gathered in Jackson to guard against it said they had absolutely no evidence of any planned, organized resistance by such groups as the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Councils. The consensus among liberals and moderates in the state--and there are a number of them--is that the eventual solution to Mississippi's education problems Then what is to be done? Mr. Finch said one answer is to take additional steps to improve the inner city schools and make them centers that everyone wants to attend, not escape. But this only raised a series of new questions that have not been answered.

The first is how will this be done. The Administration has serious doubts about the effectiveness of compensatory education and is going slow in that area. Title I of the 1965 Education Act, to enrich schools in disadvantaged areas, is under review because it has been widely misused. The funds have been spread around to the wealthy as well as the poor. And Mr.

Finch has resisted a Congresssional move to pour $1-billion above the budget into education programs this year, partly because his department does not know how to spend it wisely. These kinds of contradictions and dilemmas continue to pile up into a mountain of evidence that public education indeed is in a crisis. -JOHN HERBERS officials in various governments. Organized crime will not even go into a community unless and until it has bought protection against raids and arrests." Strong words. But other prosecutors have used the same kind of words in the past and after they spoke out they were thrown out.

The list of frustrated and fired state prosecutors in Jersey includes John J. Winberry in the 1940's and Nelson Stamler in the 1950's who were both humiliated when they proved to be serious investigators finding out too much about local alliances between organized crime and politics, Even Frank S. Hogan, the tough District Attorney of Manhattan, was burned when he once got involved in New Jersey. That was in 1948, when Hogan made a case against a rackets who was depositing at $200,000 a week courier, in New York banks from the receipts of a gambling casino run by Joe Adonis in Lodi, N. J.

Mr. Hogan turned his information over to the prosecutor of Bergen County. That was the end of that and the Jersey prosecutor later explained that his detectives could not find the casino, a placed called Costa's Barn. Newspaper photographers, however, had no trouble finding Costa's, a huge Quonset hut on Route 6 (now Route 46) the principal highway through Bergen County. Despite the state's history of winking at organized crime, particularly at gambling, Mr.

Lacey and his 21 Assistant United States Attorneys believed that they could, in his words, "break the back" of organized crime in the Garden State. With the help of evidence collected by an Essex County grand jury, Mr. Lacey's men got off to a promising start, winning indictments in separate cases against Mayor Hugh J. Addonizio of Newark (Continued on Page 2).