Reading Class in the Military Dependents School,
Yokohama, Japan, 1955.
The Department of Defense could look with pride at its progress. In less than three years after President Eisenhower had promised to look into segregated schools for military dependents, the department had integrated hundreds of classrooms, inducing local authorities to integrate a series of schools in areas that had never before seen blacks and whites educated together. It had even ordered the integration of classes conducted on post by local universities and voluntarily attended by servicemen in off-duty hours.[19-87] Yet many dependent schools were untouched because Wilson's order applied only to schools on federal property. It ignored the largest category of dependent schools, those in the local community that because of heavy enrollment of federal dependents were supported in whole or part by federal funds. In these institutions some 28,000 federal dependents were being educated in segregated classes. Integration for them would have to await the long court battles that followed Brown v. Board of Education.
This dreary prospect had not always seemed so inevitable. Although Wilson's order ignored local public schools, civil rights advocates did not, and the problem of off-base segregation, typified by the highly publicized school at the Little Rock Air Force Base in 1958, became an issue involving not only the Department of Defense but the whole administration. The decision to withhold federal aid to school districts that remained segregated in defiance of court orders was clearly beyond the power of the Department of Defense. In a memorandum circulated among Pentagon officials in October 1958, Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliot C. Richardson discussed the legal background of federal aid to schools attended by military dependents, especially congressional intent and the definition of "suitable" facilities as expressed in Public Laws 815 and 874. He also took up the question of whether to provide off-base integrated schooling, balancing the difficult problem of protecting the civil rights of federal employees against the educational advantages of a state-sponsored education system. Richardson mentioned the great variation in school population—some bases having seven high school aged children one year, none the next—and the fact that the cost of educating the 28,087 dependents attending segregated schools in 1957 would amount to more than $49 million for facilities and $8.7 million annually for operations. He was left with one possible conclusion, that "irrespective of our feelings about the unsuitability of segregated education as a matter of principle, we are constrained by the legislative history, the settled administrative construction, and the other circumstances surrounding the statutes in question to adhere to the existing interpretation of them."[19-88]
Richardson might be "constrained" to accept the status quo, but some black parents were not. In the fall of 1958 matters came to a head at the school near the Little Rock air base. Here was a new facility, built by the local school board exclusively with federal funds, on state land, and intended primarily for the education of dependents living at a newly constructed military base. On the eve of the school's opening, the Pulaski County school board informed the Air Force that the school would be for white students only. The decision was brought to the President's attention by a telegram from a black sergeant's wife whose child was denied admission.[19-89] The telegram was only the first in a series of protests from congressmen, civil rights organizations, and interested citizens. For all the Defense Department had a stock answer: there was nothing the Air Force could do. The service neither owned nor operated the school, and the impact aid laws forbade construction of federal school facilities if the local school districts could provide public school education for federal dependents.[19-90]
The department would not get off the hook so easily; the President wanted something done about the Little Rock school, although he wanted his interest kept quiet.[19-91] Yet any action would have unpleasant consequences. If the department transferred the father, it was open to a court suit on his behalf; if it tried to force integration on the local authorities, they would close the school. Since neither course was acceptable, Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles C. Finucane ordered his troubleshooter, Stephen Jackson, to Little Rock to investigate.[19-92]
Before he went to Little Rock, Jackson met with officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and decided, with the concurrence of the Department of Justice, that the solution lay in government purchase of the land. The school would then be on a military base and subject to integration. Should local authorities refuse to operate the integrated on-base school, the Air Force would do so. In that event, Jackson warned local officials on his arrival in Arkansas, the school district would lose much of its federal enrollment and hence its very important federal subsidy. Nor could the board be assured that the federal acquisition would be limited to one school. Jackson later admitted the local black school had also been constructed with federal funds, and he could not guarantee that it would escape federal acquisition. Board members queried Jackson on this point, introducing the possibility that the federal government might try to acquire local high schools, also attended in large numbers by military dependents and also segregated. Jackson assured the school board that the department "had no desire to change the community patterns where schools were already in existence merely because they received federal aid,"[19-93] a statement that amounted to a new federal policy.
Jackson failed to convince the board, and in late October 1958 it rejected the government's offer to run an integrated school on land purchased from them.[19-94] Jackson thereupon met with justice officials and together they decided that sometime before 1 January 1959 the Justice Department would acquire title to the school land for one year by taking a leasehold through the right of eminent domain. They did not at that time, however, formulate any definite plan of action to accomplish the school take-over.[19-95]
It was just as well, for soon after this decision was reached the NAACP brought up the subject of dependent schools near the Air Force bases at Blytheville, Arkansas, and Stewart, Tennessee.[19-96] Air Force Deputy Assistant Secretary James P. Goode was quick to point out that there were at least five other segregated schools constructed with federal funds, situated near Air Force bases, and attended almost exclusively by federal dependents. He also predicted that a careful survey would reveal perhaps another fifteen schools in segregated districts serving only Air Force dependents. In light of these facts, and with a frankly confessed aversion to the administration's acquisition of the properties by right of eminent domain, Goode preferred to have the schools integrated in an orderly manner through the supervision of the federal courts.[19-97]