The
racial integration of American schools was achieved through the
judicial activism of Supreme Court justices who have no authority under
the United States Constitution to create laws. Only Congress can
legislate, though it has no authority over education in States.
Bernhard Thuersam
Chromatography in Public Schools:
No
one has yet constructively and pragmatically defined what “integration”
in the schools requires.
Enough survey work has been done to show that
Negro parents, like white parents, are more interested in the quality of
education than in the chromatic proportions of the classroom. Yet in
every city so much emotion is spent weighing the numbers, the
percentages, the admixture of black and white, that Negro leaders have
convinced far too many of their own people that Negroes sitting together
in one classroom retard each other’s education.
In
cities like Washington DC, where 80% of children in public schools are
Negro, or areas like Manhattan, where 69% are Negro and Puerto Rican,
“integration” could be achieved only by the most mechanical and
arbitrary importation of white children from distant areas.
So
in the name of “integration” some Negro leaders, notable in Los Angeles
and New York, are demanding that white children be transported into
Negro slums to achieve proper chromatography.
Few Negro leaders in New
York dare denounce the idea publicly for fear they will be blasted by
others of their race for being against “integration.” Meanwhile white
parents can be tormented by a magnificently emotional appeal:
“Integration means your kids will be forced on buses and shipped to
Harlem with all those illegitimate and backward kids.”
The
kind of confusion set up by the word “integration” as applied to
education is best reflected in a conversation with a bitter young Negro
student leader in Chicago who began by listing as his No. 1 demand of
American society” separate but superior education for Negroes – if we
could get it.”
Then,
after increasingly emotional talk for an hour, he took up the matter of
cross-busing white children into Negro districts and said: “The white
kids got to pay for what their parents did to us.
Even at the age of 6,
they got to pay – because they’re going to pay one way or the other.
Besides, it will be good for them.”
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