VII
The second of the South’s principal arguments, related to anthropological considerations but of more immediate application, may be termed the argument of practicality: Even if it be true, as the liberal social anthropologists insist, that there is no innate cultural or intellectual inferiority in the Negro race as such, the plain fact is that here and now, there are immense differences in the educational achievements and apparent aptitudes of the two races; and these differences, especially in small rural communities, make true integration of public schools an impossibility. Beyond this, the educational needs of white and Negro children in the South, in terms of the lives they will lead and the employment they predictably will find, are quite different; and these differences, especially in the small counties, create formidable problems of curriculum. Finally, the temper, and prejudices, and feelings of the white taxpayers, who overwhelmingly bear the bulk of public school costs, simply cannot be discounted altogether; political realities have to be considered, and grave thought must be given, as a practical matter, to the social upheaval that inevitably would accompany massive desegregation of public schools in those areas of the South where Negro populations are greatest and traditions of racial separation are most deeply ingrained.
As Otto Klineberg points out in Characteristics of the American Negro, efforts to test the intelligence or the educational aptitude of Negro children go back a long way. In 1897, G. R. Stetson gave memory tests to fourth- and fifth-graders in the District of Columbia; the Negro pupils, who averaged a year and a half older than the whites, proved superior in memorizing three out of four stanzas of poetry. Truly is it said that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, for Stetson’s findings of 1897 represent one of the very few such inquiries in which Negroes have scored higher than whites. Since then, an exhaustive series of tests almost invariably have produced data pointing just the other way.
In 1913, A. C. Strong studied white and Negro school children of Columbia, S. C., and found the colored children mentally younger. The following year, B. A. Phillips reported on an analysis of twenty-nine white and twenty-nine Negro children who had been equated in terms of home environment, and found such a difference in mentality between the two groups that he wondered if they should be instructed under the same curriculum. In 1916, G. O. Ferguson tested white and Negro pupils of Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Newport News, Va., and found the superiority of the white group indubitable. In this same study he attempted further to classify the Negro subjects according to skin color (pure Negro, three-fourths Negro, mulatto, and quadroon), and found a plain correlation between higher scores and lighter skins.
Intelligence testing by racial groups was launched on a large scale with World War I. As an aid to military authorities, three separate tests were devised. The first, known as Army A, never was very widely used; it contained some four hundred items and featured two tests, of immediate memory and cancellation, which proved to be impracticable. Analyses of findings were made, however, by Ferguson and by Robert M. Yerkes, of 10,276 Negro soldiers and 38,628 white soldiers tested on Army A at Camp Lee and Camp Dix. The median score among Negro recruits ranged from 14.8 at Lee to 53 at Dix, the white recruits from 116 at Lee to 171 at Dix.
In an effort to devise a more useful test, a committee of five psychologists, led by Yerkes, was appointed by the American Psychological Association in April 1917. They put together tests that came to be known as Army Alpha and Army Beta. The tests, which brought together the most advanced psychological knowledge of their day, still are widely respected by psychologists forty-five years later. Henry E. Garrett, professor emeritus of psychology at Columbia University, has said of them that “owing to the size of the groups and the lack of special selection, the army test data yield probably the fairest and most unbiased comparison of Negro and white intelligence which we possess.”
The Alpha test was divided into eight sections, testing the examinee’s ability in following directions, arithmetic problems, practical judgment, synonyms and antonyms, disarranged sentences, completion of number series, analogies, and general information. The psychologists’ committee realized, however, that because of its heavy reliance upon literacy and cultural factors, the Alpha test would tell Army examiners little about the intelligence and capacity of recruits whose schooling was limited and whose cultural background was poor. Hence the Beta test was devised, as a nonlanguage test on which all illiterates could compete equally.
The average score of the white soldier on the Alpha test was 59, that of the Northern Negro 39, and that of the Southern Negro 12. The better educational equipment of the whites presumably might account for some of this astonishing difference, without considering any questions of innate ability at all. But this superior equipment did not figure on the Beta test. And on Beta, the whites averaged 43, the Northern Negro 33, and the Southern Negro 20. Analyzing these Beta findings in one study of men tested at Camp Grant, M. R. Trabue concluded that the average Northern Negro recruit had an ability to learn new things about equivalent to that of the average eleven-year-old white boy, and the average Southern Negro recruit a mental capacity at the nine-year-old level.
Notably, the figures on Negro “overlapping” were not significantly different for the two tests. It was found that only 27 per cent of the Negroes exceeded the white average score on Alpha. On Beta, the figure was 29 per cent. As Dr. McGurk has pointed out, if the Negroes’ comparatively poor scores were entirely a consequence of social and economic differences, a lessening of these differences should have produced, in the Beta test, a corresponding increase in the Negro overlap. Put another way: “An improvement in cultural opportunities should result in an improvement in the capacity for education. If cultural opportunities are not important in determining capacity for education, improving the cultural opportunities will have no effect on capacity for education.” And Dr. McGurk, it should be remembered, is a Villanova social scientist who has devoted a lifetime to research in this field.
The massive statistics of the World War I tests have served as grist for the mills of a hundred psychologists and social anthropologists. Those of the equalitarian school have done some curious things with the figures, in a strained effort to prove that significant differences in racial scores are related solely to environment and not at all to heredity. The student who inquires into the literature scarcely can pick up an equalitarian book that does not offer the following table:
| Southern Whites and Northern Negroes, Army Tests, 1918 | |||
| Whites | Negroes | ||
| State | Median score | State | Median score |
| Mississippi | 41.25 | Pennsylvania | 42.00 |
| Kentucky | 41.50 | New York | 45.00 |
| Arkansas | 41.55 | Illinois | 47.35 |
| Georgia | 42.12 | Ohio | 49.50 |
Klineberg, who used this table in his 1944 work, says the comparison shows that Northern Negroes “are superior to the white groups from a number of Southern States.”
Taken at face value, that is certainly one conclusion that might be drawn, at least as to four Southern States, but the figures merit a closer look. What Klineberg did, as Garrett has shown, was to take the four Southern States where the white medians were lowest and compare them with the four Northern States where the Negro medians were highest. Beyond demonstrating that Negroes in some Northern States scored higher than whites in some Southern States, this widely reproduced table tells us little. Moreover, Klineberg—and Montagu, and Benedict, and others who are so fond of this data—do not present the figures from the four Northern States that might truly have significance in terms of local problems of public education. Garrett, whose computations of medians differ slightly from Klineberg’s, puts the data together in this fashion:
| Number Tested | White | Negro | ||
| State | White | Negro | Median | Median |
| Pennsylvania | 3,089 | 498 | 64.6 | 41.5 |
| New York | 2,843 | 850 | 64.0 | 44.5 |
| Illinois | 2,056 | 578 | 63.0 | 46.9 |
| Ohio | 2,318 | 152 | 66.7 | 48.8 |
Garrett then makes the self-evident point that Negroes in these four States scored as far below white soldiers from the same States as they scored below whites in the country as a whole. The student who wants to dig more deeply into these World War I findings will find them fully reported in professional literature. Audrey Shuey’s The Testing of Negro Intelligence summarizes the data and provides an extensive bibliography of work done on the figures.
It is curious that so much labor has been spent on the World War I figures, and relatively so little on the more up-to-date data from World War II and Korea. Yet from one point of view this is not so curious either: In the thirty-six years between 1917 and 1943, the American Negro experienced prodigious gains in educational, cultural, economic, and social opportunities. Surely, it might be thought, these gains would have been reflected in some significant improvement in his military test scores. No such improvement can be detected. Nathaniel Weyl has summed up the facts:
“A comparison of Army General Classification Test (AGCT) scores of white and Negro enlisted men in military service in March, 1945, shows that 6.3 per cent of the whites, but only 1.0 per cent of the Negroes, were in Group I (very superior) and that 39.7 per cent of the whites, but only 7.4 per cent of the Negroes, were in the first two (better than average) categories. On the other hand, only 26.9 per cent of the whites, as contrasted with 77.7 per cent of the Negroes (more than three-fourths of them), were in the two bottom (inferior and very inferior) groups.”
In World War I, Weyl continues, the Negro overlap on the combined tests was 13.5 per cent—that is, 13½ Negroes in 100 scored as well as the average white man. By the time of World War II, the overlap had dropped to 12 per cent, and if the scores of mental rejects are included for both races, to only 10 per cent. Still more embarrassing to the equalitarians, their precious comparisons of World War I between Northern Negroes and Southern whites tend to dissolve in the findings of World War II. Weyl summarizes a comparison between Negroes examined in the First Command Area (New England), where Negroes had the highest median, with white recruits examined in the Fourth Command Area (Southern), where white medians were lowest. Some 34 per cent of the Southern whites made scores of superior or very superior; only 9 per cent of the Northern Negroes were in these brackets.
Finally, on the matter of AGCT scores, mention may be made of an unpublished master’s thesis by B. E. Fulk of the University of Illinois; the paper is cited by Shuey in her encompassing survey of the field. Fulk obtained data on 2174 white and 2010 Negro enlisted men examined by the Army Air Force Service Command. He then correlated their AGCT scores in terms of the years of education they had experienced. It may well be true that the Negroes here tested had attended poorer schools than the whites; but to persons interested in understanding some of the real and practical problems of school desegregation, Fulk’s tabulations will be rewarding (see page 78).
If the formidable gaps shown by those figures do not persuade the South’s critics of the difficult problems implicit in welding together two country high schools, one white, the other Negro, perhaps no evidence would persuade them. Yet abundant other evidence is widely available.
| Years of | Median | Median | |
| Education | White | Negro | |
| 0 | 82.45 | 59.35 | |
| 1 | 91.20 | 58.40 | |
| 2 | 88.45 | 57.75 | |
| 3 | 91.20 | 57.60 | |
| 4 | 90.65 | 59.80 | |
| 5 | 90.35 | 54.65 | |
| 6 | 87.95 | 59.60 | |
| 7 | 85.40 | 64.45 | |
| 8 | 94.50 | 69.25 | |
| 9 | 100.70 | 73.35 | |
| 10 | 102.50 | 78.95 | |
| 11 | 107.95 | 85.95 | |
| 12 | 109.20 | 93.05 | |
| ———— | ———— | ||
| Total | 95.10 | 68.95 | |
Dr. Shuey has put the facts together in a book that cannot be overlooked by serious students of the desegregation problem. She is head of the Department of Psychology at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. Her massive labors have had a stunning impact upon the more idealistic advocates of immediate integration. Here in cold statistical tables, unwarmed by subjective opinion, she has summarized more than forty years of investigation into Negro intelligence. These are not her findings; they are the findings of scholars who have done original or independent research. No matter how these findings may be explained away (and the NAACP has retained a committee of psychologists now seeking desperately to explain them away), the figures speak tellingly of the problems that educators must face in mixing the two races massively in the same classrooms.
The literature discloses that at the preschool level, there is a marked but not unmanageable difference between white and Negro aptitudes. A typical Stanford-Binet test of five-year-olds, for example, may turn up a median of 112 for white children, 95.8 for Negro children. The gap is dismayingly wide, but it can be coped with.
Thereafter, as the children move into upper grades, the tendency is for the gap to grow steadily greater. Dr. Shuey made an analysis of 101 tests given to Negro elementary-school children from one end of the country to the other. Some of these tests were given by Negro psychologists, in an effort to improve the rapport between examiner and subject. In other investigations, careful efforts were made to equate the home backgrounds of white and Negro subjects. All told, the 101 investigations cover findings on 51,000 colored children, and provide 310 comparisons for relative standing of colored and white. “In 297 of the comparisons,” Dr. Shuey notes, “the colored children scored the lower; in 144 they were lower than the white norms.”
Dr. McGurk’s analysis of the professional literature in this field closely parallels Dr. Shuey’s report. Between 1935 and 1950, he has stated, sixty-three articles appeared in professional journals of psychology dealing with Negro-white test-score differences. In all sixty-three of them, the average test score of the Negro subjects was found to be lower than the average test score of the white subjects with whom they were compared. Six of these investigations are regarded by McGurk as especially significant:
1. A study of a group of Canadian Negroes and whites in 1939 by H. A. Tanser. The Negro children tested were the descendants of slaves who had escaped from the South prior to and during the Civil War. Their social and economic opportunities had been generally equal to those of whites in the area. Yet the findings of three standard psychological tests administered to children in grades 1-8 found the Negro averages far below the white averages at every age and every grade. For the total groups, only 13 to 20 per cent of the Negroes overlapped the white average, and in no case did the overlap exceed 20 per cent.
2. A study of white and Negro children in a poor section of rural Virginia, done by M. Bruce in 1940. In order to eliminate the factor of social and economic differences, the author first administered a test of socio-economic status, and then paired off her subjects so that each member of a pair, one Negro child and one white child, had the same socio-economic score. Negro overlapping on three separate tests ranged between 15 per cent and 20 per cent.
3. A study by Dr. Shuey of white and Negro college students in New York, in 1942. Again, the Negro and white students were first given socio-economic tests in order to pair them off. The Negro overlap amounted to 18 per cent. Of this investigation, Dr. McGurk says: “Considering that this was a highly selected group of college students, such low overlapping is surprising. It does not lend credence to the belief that socio-economic factors are responsible for the Negro-white differences in psychological test performance.”
4. A study of white and Negro kindergarten children in Minneapolis, 1944, done by F. Brown. The test scores found a 31 per cent overlapping. (At very early ages, overlap always is greater because tests deal more with performance and with sensory-motor responses, and less with verbal skills).
5. A study by T. F. Rhoads and associates of white and Negro children at the age of three. This was a very detailed study, in which each of the subjects was clinically examined from birth until the time he was administered a psychological test. Socio-economic factors were reported to be generally equal for the entire group of subjects. The overlapping amounted to 30 per cent.
6. A study by McGurk himself of Negro and white high school seniors in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Again, Negroes and whites were matched for social and economic status by pairing a white subject with each Negro subject so that both members of a pair were identical or equivalent for fourteen different socio-economic factors. These students then took a test composed half of “cultural questions,” and half of “non-cultural questions.” McGurk’s finding: “In spite of the equivalence of socio-economic factors, 29 per cent of the Negro subjects overlapped the average total score of the white subjects. This is almost identical with the overlapping reported in the Alpha and Beta tests of World War I. There is hardly any question about the socio-economic superiority of this 1951 group of Negroes when compared with the Negroes of World War I. Yet, relative to white subjects, the intervening improvements in social and economic opportunities of the Negroes had not improved their psychological test performance at all.”
In 1953, Dr. McGurk published an additional study in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, “On White and Negro Test Performance and Socio-Economic Factors.” Here he reclassified the subjects of his 1951 study, in order to compare the 25 per cent of each race who might be regarded as a “high group” and as a “low group” in terms of socio-economic factors. Rearrangement of the data made no difference. It became apparent that socio-economic factors had not made the two groups equally proficient in psychological tests. “The average score of the high Negro group was very much lower than the average score of the whites of equivalent socio-economic status. In terms of Negro overlap, only 18 per cent of these Negro children of excellent socio-economic background obtained test scores that equalled or exceeded the average white score.”
Assuming that the liberal social anthropologists are right in what they say, that social and economic forces are of paramount importance, McGurk comments, “There should have been no differences between Negroes and whites in any of these comparisons. As it actually turned out, the difference between Negroes and whites is much greater when both groups are of high socio-economic status than when the racial groups are of deprived socio-economic status.”
Further analysis of McGurk’s 1951 study in terms of the “cultural questions” and the “noncultural” questions totally disproved the notion that cultural questions on these intelligence tests unduly hold back the Negro in his performance. Taking the cultural questions alone, it was found that 24 per cent of the high Negro group overlapped the average scores of the high white group. On the noncultural questions, where it might have been expected that the Negroes would do better, they did worse: Barely one out of five of the high Negro group overlapped the high white group. Comparing the two low groups, McGurk found that the low Negro group actually had an insignificantly higher average score than the low white group on the cultural questions, with an overlap of about 55 per cent. On the noncultural questions, the average of the low white group was significantly greater than that of the low Negro group. There was an overlap of about 29 per cent.
McGurk has summed up his conclusions in this fashion:
Regardless of our emotional attachment to the school desegregation problem, certain facts must be faced. First, as far as psychological test performance is a measure of capacity for education, Negroes as a group do not possess as much of it as whites as a group. This has been demonstrated over and over.
Next, we must realize that, since 1918, the vast improvements in the social and economic status of the Negro have not changed his relationship to the whites regarding capacity for education. This is not to say that this relationship cannot be changed; it says merely that it has not been changed....
Thirdly, as far as our knowledge of the problem goes, the improvements in the social and economic opportunities have only increased the differences between Negroes and whites. This is because such improvements have been given to both racial groups—not only to the Negro—and the whites have profited the more from them. This serves to emphasize the former statement that a fruitful approach to racial equality cannot follow the lines of social and economic manipulation. There is something more important, more basic, to the race problem than differences in external opportunity.
Dr. McGurk’s conclusions, it should be said in fairness (even in this partisan brief), have been widely denounced by his equalitarian colleagues. Following publication of his 1956 statement in U. S. News & World Report, eighteen social scientists united in a rebuttal assertion that “given similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is about the same.” And in the Spring 1958, issue of Harvard Educational Review, William M. McCord, an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University, and Nicholas J. Demerath, III, of Harvard, a senior student, returned to the attack on McGurk.
In my own view, the rejoinders of McCord and Demerath are remarkably feeble. The investigations they cite, in an effort to refute McGurk’s conclusions, provide no refutation at all. Their own study of “predelinquent” and normal boys in Cambridge-Somerville, Mass., is so affected by subjective evaluations that it contributes little to an objective appraisal of conditions that confront school administrators elsewhere. (They attempted to establish a correlation between the boys’ intelligence and their social class, parental education, “home atmosphere,” and “personality of the boys’ fathers”; other factors dealt with the subjects’ homes—cohesive, quarrelsome, quarrelsome-neglecting, or broken—and whether the boys’ fathers were loving, passive, cruel, neglecting, or absent.) In any event, most of their elaborately tabulated findings tend merely to support McGurk’s own conclusion that at the lowest social levels, white and Negro test scores are not significantly different.
The evidence put together by Shuey and McGurk is solid, dispassionate, unbiased, overwhelming; it cannot be disregarded—not, that is, if one wishes to gain any real understanding of the problems that confront local school boards over much of the South. To pull the general figures down to a single, specific case study, consider the findings of some tests administered in Dallas in 1954-55. There more than 1600 Negro pupils and almost 5700 white pupils were tested in the first grade on their general readiness for learning—on their ability to pay attention, follow directions, handle crayons and pencils, understand and use language, and so on. These were the findings:
| Number of | Per cent | Number of | Per cent | |
| Negro | Negro | White | White | |
| Children | Children | Category | Children | Children |
| 15 | .92 | Superior | 576 | 10.14 |
| 105 | 6.47 | High Normal | 1,503 | 26.50 |
| 299 | 18.43 | Average | 1,814 | 31.96 |
| 677 | 41.71 | Low Normal | 1,391 | 24.50 |
| 527 | 32.47 | Poor Risk | 392 | 6.90 |
In sum, 37 per cent of the white first-graders scored in the “high normal” and “superior” groups, against only 7 per cent of the Negro first-graders. At the other end of the scale, 31 per cent of the white pupils scored in the “low normal” and “poor risk” groups, against 74 per cent of the Negro pupils.
For another specific example, consider the findings in Virginia among pupils of an older age group. Over a period of five successive years, between 1949-50 and 1953-54, the State Department of Education administered the Iowa Silent Reading Test to all eighth-graders in the Virginia public school system. This is a standardized achievement test in reading, employed by school systems throughout the country to discover certain facts of immediate, practical importance to classroom teachers: How well do the children read? How well do they understand? The tests in Virginia were given in May of each year, when all of the children had a grade placement of 8.8 (eighth year, eighth month). Scores on the Iowa test are calibrated to match the grade placement, so that a pupil who scores a reading-grade equivalent of 8.7 would be one month retarded in achievement, and a pupil who scores a reading-grade equivalent of 8.9 would be one month advanced in achievement.
This is what the Virginia tests found in May 1954, the month of the Brown decision (findings were not significantly different in the four preceding years): The median white child in the county schools was about half a year behind the achievement level he should have reached; he was reading at a level of 8.3 (eighth grade, third month). But the median Negro child in the county schools was reading at a level of 6.2 (sixth grade, second month). The top one-fourth of the white children (75th percentile) were reading at a level of the tenth grade, third month, or better; but the top one-fourth of the Negro children were not even at the 8.8 level—the 75th percentile among the Negro pupils was found at 7.5.
Scores on the Virginia tests were higher in the city schools, but among the Negro pupils, not much higher. In the cities, the median white eighth-grader was found to be reading at a level of the ninth grade, second month; the median Negro eighth-grader scored 6.5. In less statistical language, this means simply that in terms of reading skills, which are the foundation of all other academic skills, Virginia’s white eighth-graders as a group were found in 1954 to be from two years to nearly three full years ahead of the Negro eighth-graders as a group. Subsequent tests, administered on a more limited scale since 1954, have shown no material change.
Now, how is one to organize a viable public school—a completely desegregated school—under such conditions as these? If one is the superintendent of schools in the District of Columbia, one can cope with what Dr. Carl F. Hansen has described as “the enormous educational problem of upgrading large numbers of educationally handicapped children” by a variety of devices: Squads of psychiatrists, platoons of remedial-reading instructors, a “four-track” system, and the like. And if one spends enough money, and has enough pupils and buildings to permit some shuffling around among schools, and pays salaries high enough to keep some of the most competent teachers in the country, one can accomplish a good deal. But how many rural counties in the South, where the total school population may number only 2000 or 2500, can possibly apply the drastic remedies found necessary in Washington?
Consider the schools of Washington, D. C. The capital is the showcase of the nation in terms of desegregation. If genuinely “mixed” schools are to work anywhere, they should work best in the District of Columbia, where every factor combines to produce the most favorable opportunity: The political climate of a Federal administration anxious to achieve integration, the immense resources of a lavish school budget, the cultural amenities freely available to all children as an adjunct to learning, the absence of racial discrimination in employment, the untypically high incomes and job status of many Negro families. It is entirely reasonable to assume that pupils in the Washington schools, as a group, should not be merely average, or slightly above average; they should in fact lead the entire country. Moreover, it seems a fair assumption that the exodus of white families from the District has tended to leave behind those white children who in general are less able mentally and more nearly on the Negro’s cultural level. If Negro pupils are to show up well anywhere, they should show up well here. The facts indicate nothing of the kind.
The District of Columbia desegregated its schools in September 1954, following the Supreme Court’s opinion the preceding May. In October 1955, after a year of experience with desegregation, the Stanford Advanced Reading and Arithmetic Tests were given to some 4600 eighth-grade pupils in the Washington public schools—1600 white pupils and 3000 Negro pupils. The findings in Washington almost exactly paralleled the findings in Virginia: Two-thirds of the Negro children were found to be reading at the sixth-grade level or below (21 per cent of the Negro eighth-graders, indeed, were reading at the fifth-grade level, and 22 per cent were reading at the fourth-grade level). Only 12 per cent of the white eighth-graders were at the sixth-grade level or below, and 54 per cent of the white pupils were at the tenth-grade level or above.
Shocked officials of the District of Columbia plunged headlong into remedial programs. Their herculean labors have been reported widely and sympathetically. At once, the four-track system was devised, and pupils systematically were assigned to (1) an honors program, (2) a general college-preparatory program, (3) a program for pupils not planning to go to college, and (4) a remedial basic curriculum for slow-learning pupils. One effect was to achieve a very substantial resegregation, for the great bulk of those on tracks 1 and 2 turned out to be white pupils, and the great bulk of those on tracks 3 and 4 turned out to be Negro pupils. The resegregation process was helped along materially by Washington’s younger white families, who fled the District by the thousands. In 1950, Washington’s schools were almost evenly balanced, 50-50, in white and colored enrollment; ten years later, white pupils constituted 20 per cent, Negro pupils 80 per cent, of the enrollment. Remedial classes for slow learners, in which teaching specialists work with groups averaging no more than eighteen per class, have been swiftly stepped up; there were seventy-four such classes in 1954; the number grew to 225 in the 1959-60 session. The reading-clinic staff increased from twelve to thirty-two in that period of time, and a special Division of Pupil Appraisal more than doubled with the addition of a dozen school psychologists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. New batteries of achievement tests were administered every year.
At the close of the school year in 1959, five full years after racial discrimination had been obliterated from the Washington schools, Dr. Hansen released some figures on how things were going. To the integrationist Washington Post, reporting happily on the data, things were going marvelously well: “District pupils’ performance on standardized tests this year topped last year’s scores in 15 of the 27 subjects tested, School Superintendent Carl F. Hansen reported yesterday.” The cheery tone of the Post’s story was somewhat belied by the glum figures themselves. Washington’s sixth-graders had managed to achieve median scores in spelling, language, and arithmetical computation exactly matching—no more—the national norms for these three sixth-grade tests. Medians on the other twenty-four tests were below national norms, in some instances by as much as a full year. Ninth-graders who should have scored a median of 9.4 (ninth year, fourth month) in computation and paragraph meaning scored 8.3 and 8.4 respectively. Dr. Hansen’s report on tests at the third-grade and fifth-grade levels has special interest:
| National | District Median Scores | |||||
| Grade | Subject | Norm | 55-56 | 56-57 | 57-58 | 58-59 |
| 3 | Paragraph meaning | 3.5 | 2.3 | 2.5 | 2.9 | 3.1 |
| 3 | Word meaning | 3.5 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 3.1 | 3.1 |
| 3 | Spelling | 3.5 | 2.5 | 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 |
| 3 | Arith. reasoning | 3.5 | 2.4 | 2.8 | 2.8 | 3.2 |
| 3 | Arith. computation | 3.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.9 | 3.2 |
| 5 | Paragraph meaning | 5.1 | 3.8 | 4.1 | 4.3 | 4.2 |
| 5 | Word meaning | 5.1 | 4.1 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.4 |
| 5 | Language | 5.1 | 4.2 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.4 |
| 5 | Spelling | 5.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.8 | 4.5 |
| 5 | Arith. reasoning | 5.1 | 4.2 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.5 |
| 5 | Arith. computation | 5.1 | 3.9 | 4.1 | 4.6 | 4.1 |
It should not escape notice that the Washington children whose median scores are shown in the foregoing table never had known a day of legally segregated schooling. The Negro pupils here tested never had suffered the school discrimination likely to affect their hearts and minds in a fashion never to be undone. These pupils, on the contrary, had had the benefit of all the special attention that could be given them by a school administration frantically eager to demonstrate the glories of integration. No resource of guidance and special teaching, no visual aid or teaching technique had been denied them. Yet there are the scores: Not a single test in Washington’s third and fifth grades produced a median equal to the national norm. The fifth-graders, backsliding, did not even equal fifth-grade scores the preceding year.
It is perhaps needless to dwell further upon the findings of intelligence and achievement tests beyond commenting briefly upon some of the flimsy efforts the equalitarians make to discredit them. One objection is that the Negro child has no “motivation” to do well on them; but at the younger age levels especially, this is pure conjecture. It also is complained that frequently the tests are administered to Negro children by white examiners, and that an essential rapport thereby is denied them; but this was not true of the tests in Washington, and it has not been true of many other investigations. The most frequent objection is that tests tend to compare white and colored children of unequal social and economic background; but abundant evidence is available of investigations in which subjects have been “paired” by every imaginable criterion, and almost without exception these tests show the same lamentable contrasts in white and Negro scores.
Otto Klineberg has attempted to dismiss all the findings: “Until and unless the same education is given to both races, comparisons will be unfair.” But it manifestly is impossible to give the same education to any two groups. All that one can do is to provide the same textbooks, the same teaching aids, teachers with the same degree of education, and physical facilities generally comparable—but even then, identity of total educational opportunity could not possibly be achieved. The various tests now being administered in school systems across the country are as fair and objective as competent psychologists and educators can make them; and the bleak, undeniable fact, confirmed repeatedly in school districts both North and South, is that colored children regularly score at lower levels than the white children of their communities. Thoughtful students of the difficult problem before the South will comprehend what the evidence means in terms of the real and practical obstacles to welding together white and Negro schools in rural areas below the Potomac.
Other very real difficulties merit reflection also. The disputations of social scientists cannot be considered in a vacuum, nor the findings of achievement tests treated as so many punched cards for an IBM machine. These are children we are concerned with, white and Negro alike, and the fact is (I do not argue the goodness or badness of the fact; I merely cite its existence) that white and Negro children in the South have many quite different educational requirements. The essentially dual and separate society of the South cannot be dissolved overnight by court decree. For years to come in the South, the practice of law and medicine, the handling of banking and finance, the sale of stocks and bonds, the management of large retail and wholesale enterprises, and the administration of commerce and government will continue to be overwhelmingly restricted to white persons. This is not to say that many able Negroes are not engaged in these fields now; they are, and their number is increasing, but they are conspicuous exceptions. In rural areas especially, where professional and business opportunities naturally are severely limited, the realities of adult opportunity are even more striking.
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.
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.
This line of discussion brings us to a fourth practical difficulty that would accompany massive desegregation in the South: the predictable difficulty in employing white teachers for racially mixed classrooms. New York, Philadelphia, and Washington have run into this constantly. Dr. Hansen has disclosed in the Teachers’ College Record (October 1960) that Washington’s school system employed 579 temporary teachers in 1954-55. By 1959-60, this number had grown to 1250. “It is difficult,” he concedes, “to find white teachers psychologically prepared to take jobs in predominantly Negro schools, with the result that the source of applicants tends to become more and more restricted.” And if Washington has this problem, with the high salaries and fringe benefits and physical facilities and cultural amenities it can offer a prospective teacher, what may we reasonably expect at the branch-heads?
One of the problems in this area, acknowledged even by Otto Klineberg, is the language barrier that so often baffles a white teacher in attempting to communicate effectively with a Negro child. “Obviously the Southern Negro speaks English,” says Klineberg in Characteristics of the American Negro, “but equally obviously, his English is not similar to, or the equal of, the English spoken by the average white.” Many other observers have made the same point. The Negro inflection, pronunciation, word-choice, and accent are quite different; and in the case of the South Carolina gullah, these characteristics make speech almost incomprehensible. White teachers, with jobs widely available to them, simply would rather not get involved in this.
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....