“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Finally, on the matter of AGCT scores, mention may be made of an unpublished master’s thesis by B. E. Fulk of the University of Illinois; the paper is cited by Shuey in her encompassing survey of the field.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.