TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94HT0022> <title> Mar. 9, 1970: Turn-Around on Integration </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1970s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Turn-Around on Integration March 9, 1970 </hdr> <body> Suddenly, in a shift that could prove historic, the nation has faltered in its determination to grapple with the toughest moral and political dilemma of the postwar era: how to ensure justice for its blacks and tranquility among its races. The momentum created over 16 years by stern courts and forceful federal officials to eliminate segregated Southern school systems has been slowed. The first hesitant steps toward racial balance of Northern schools have been thrown off stride. The nation, at least temporarily, seems to be retreating on the sensitive and highly symbolic issue of school integration. Signs of the uneasy new mood were everywhere last week. The South's most segregationist Governors were so emboldened that Georgia's Lester Maddox felt free to flaunt his racism in the restaurant of the U.S. House of Representatives. He passed out replicas of the ax handles he had used to bar blacks from his Pickrick Chicken House in Atlanta; when challenged by Michigan's Representative Charles C. Diggs Jr., he accused the black Congressman of acting like "an ass and a baboon." Alabama's George Wallace announced that he was once more running for Governor "to get our schools back from the Federal Government," and boasted that he might not have to run against Richard Nixon in 1972, because "Nixon will give us what we want." In a memorandum to the President made public last week, Daniel Moynihan, Nixon's resident liberal in the White House, suggested that "the time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of 'benign neglect'... in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades." While Southern politicians gloated, Northern liberals were in total confusion. Oregon's Representative Edith Green, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on Education, seemed to have given up on integration. "We simply cannot afford to let our classrooms turn into battlefields," she said. "We really have to go back to quality education and put our emphasis on that." Hubert Humphrey, on the other hand, charged that the Nixon administration had "sold out" black Americans and was in "full retreat on the civil rights front." Connecticut's Senator Abraham Ribicoff, whose Senate speech denouncing "rampant racism" and "monumental hypocrisy" in the North led to the first Southern Congressional victories on civil rights issues in over a decade, said he had no regrets. "I'm damn glad I made that speech," he said. "I've touched a soft nerve in America. I wanted to make America look at itself--and that's what it's doing." The Ribicoff speech put new life into last-gasp efforts by such segregationists as Senator John Stennis and Representative Jamie Whitten of Mississippi and North Carolina's Representative Charles Jonas. By playing on the racial gilt and fears of the North, they were able to muster passage in one house of amendments that seek to 1) require federal desegregation policies to be applied uniformly throughout the nation, 2) permit freedom-of-choice plans to suffice everywhere, and 3) ban compulsory busing of students to achieve integration. Although the Senate last week nullified the anti-busing legislation and killed the freedom- of-choice amendment, the earlier victories have vastly encouraged resistance to integration. Less direct but perhaps even more heartening to segregationists was President Nixon's ambiguous statement putting the onus of desegregation on the courts, opposing compulsory busing and defending neighborhood schools. Dismay and Disillusion How serious is this new hesitation about integration? Yale Historian C. Vann Woodward sees ominous parallels between what is happening now and the way in which Reconstruction failed U.S. blacks after the Civil War. "The force of the reformist zeal expends itself," he says, "and the disenchantment sets in. The leaders of the resistance are emboldened; the Negroes feel deserted. After an era of promise, they go from disillusionment to a sense of unfulfillment to withdrawal." He fears whites may again be ready to abandon blacks, especially of "black violence sets off an even deeper white backlash," and he sees U.S. race relations at a possibly critical turning point. Other observers contend that as a practical matter, the goal of nationwide school integration is dead. With anger, the New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker charged that the Nixon Administration has even abandoned integration in the South. "It was the best possible beginning on a nearly insurmountable national problem," he wrote, "and so it became the symbol of the need, the banner of intent. What the Great Turn-Around means is that there is no longer even an intent." Equally dismayed is Alan Pifer, President of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation and head of a Nixon task force on education. He claims that Nixon "has made political gain, but he has lost moral credibility. He has gone far beyond slowing desegregation down--the Administration's action has raised the basic question of whether is it willing to go ahead at all. In being equivocal and using Vice President Agnew as a kind of stalking horse to play up to the more bigoted segments of our population, he may be sowing the wind that will produce a whirlwind--it is such an explosive issue." Not that the Administration could completely turn the clock back even if it wished to do so. Explains Neil Sullivan, Massachusetts state education commissioner: "Neither the Congress nor the President can overturn a Supreme Court decision. We still have the Constitution and state laws. The job is still to be done. I'm not going to be intimidated by the President." Yet those who have fought the long, difficult, sometimes dangerous fight for racially balanced schools can only feel abandoned. They can point to the efforts of Attorney General John Mitchell and HEW Secretary Robert Finch to extend desegregation deadlines. They can cite the open revolt of about 60 Justice Department civil rights attorneys over the slowdown. Also on the record is the firing of Leon Panetta, HEW's top enforcer of integration guidelines. Panetta complained bitterly: "We gave him [the President] new guidelines on July 3 and the Stennis amendment on Lincoln's birthday; what will we do for Washington's birthday--shoot ten blacks?" That kind of wild hyperbole illustrates the bitterness of many liberals toward the Administration's actions on race issues. But these complaints are unfair, or at least unwarranted as yet. Certainly, there has been a deliberate chilling of integration fervor. There are ominous signs. But there is no evidence that the Administration has any intention to desert integration as a national goal. The liberal concept that it is best to assimilate minorities mainly through the public schools was in trouble long before Nixon took office. Advances and Retreats The essential impact of Administration moves so far has been to create a climate of uncertainty and indecisiveness. As one Northern Democratic Governor describes this: "We don't know the right thing to do or what people want done. But we all have an uneasy feeling that what we have been doing hasn't produced results, and of we can think of anything else to do we ought to try it." Already, this vacuum is producing contrasting results. Last week the school board of Rochester, N.Y. met privately and tentatively agreed to carry out a plan for total integration of the city's 46,000 students, 35% of whom are black. The scheme, which included the busing of more than 16,700 students, was backed by more than 60 civic groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and Junior League. It was hailed by New York State Higher Education Commissioner Ewald Nyquist as "a beacon for the rest of the country." Three days later, amid rising national agitation over integration, the board met publicly and killed the project by a 3-to-2 vote. In Georgia's Houston County, school officials were trapped between federal court orders to desegregate immediately the faculty and students of its 23 schools and a law signed last week by Governor Maddox outlawing any transportation to achieve racial integration. Federal Judge W.A. Bootle quickly issued an injunction against any delay-- and the country smoothly initiated its integration plan. Not a single parent arrived to protest when Perry Grammar School, for example, increased its black enrollment from 5% to 40% and added six black teachers. "I like to think of what we're doing today as in a gallant Southern tradition--doing what's best for our children," said one white mother. Under Court Order Integration moved ahead too in South Carolina's Darlington County, where Mrs. Agnes Davis, a white mother of eight expressed what may be a more prevalent view. "We hated to send them," she said of a son and daughter who went off to newly integrated Black Pine Junior High. "But their education comes first. As long as I can get gas to drive them, though, they're not going to ride no nigger bus." Yet there are instances of rising resistance to court orders. Many residents of Charlotte, N.C. feel outraged by an order of Federal Judge James McMillan to bus more than 10,000 children among its 23 white and ten black schools. Actually, Charlotte had moved quickly toward a better balance, but not quickly enough to suit the court. Yet students representing all of the high schools issued a plea to their parents arguing that "dissention and resistance to the law and to human rights can only destroy our schools and our community." Perhaps no community feels as aggrieved as Los Angeles, where Superior Court Judge Alfred Gitelson has ordered the vast city (52 miles long and 20 miles wide) to allow none of its 583 schools to have an enrollment more than 50% black. One attorney estimates that this would require 5,000 extra buses to transport 250,000 children daily. Gitelson scoffs at all such huge estimates as "merely an exercise in mathematics." Yet the plan does seem impractical, and City Councilman Marvin Braude just could be right when he calls it "a disaster for our community." In a typical if oversimplified anti- integration complaint, he argues that "you just can't solve all the inequities in our society by putting the burden on small schoolchildren." Given the Administration's current stance, Los Angeles too hopes to be rescued by the President if higher courts do not modify the order. The confusion caused by the Administration's ambivalence on integration is best documented by the beleaguered community of Pasadena, Calif. It was one of the first non-Southern school districtIso be sued by the Justice Department for deliberately perpetuating de facto segregation--school imbalances resulting from residential racial patterns. Federal Judge Manuel Real found that Pasadena had failed to carry out integration plans and must act to eliminate segregation. School officials risked community wrath by deciding not to appeal the decision. But School Superintendent Ralph Hornbeck is understandably irritated. "It seems impossible to meet the court's criteria without compulsory busing," he explains. "Now all at once we have the President, the Congress, and the chief attorney for the Justice Department saying they don't approve of busing." Hornbeck has written to Nixon asking for clarification "so that we may know which of the laws of the land are really the laws of the land." He has also written to Governor Ronald Reagan, who has blasted busing, asking him "to share your wisdom with us so that we may fulfill the requirements of the courts and laws of the nation without using buses." In the beginning of the nation's march toward equality-- a march begun in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal"--the path was simpler to follow. It was not hard to distinguish hero from villain when President Eisenhower dispatched Screaming Eagle paratroopers to keep Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus' National Guardsman from blocking the admittance of nine black children to Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. Nor was it hard to choose sides after viewing the twisted faces of white housewives snarling at four frightened black children trying to desegregate New Orleans' grade schools in 1960. President Kennedy neatly federalized Governor Wallace's guardsmen out from around him when Wallace tried to prevent racial mixing in Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville and Tuskegee in 1963, leaving the Governor to sputter: "I can't fight bayonets with my bare hands." Some Success The unsettling reality now is that increasing numbers of authorities are beginning to wonder whether all the agony was worthwhile and whether integration is still a valid goal. Many Southerners can contend with some justification that skepticism is rising only because the North is beginning to feel the integration squeeze. Yet it is true that in few places in the nation is integration an unqualified success. Ironically, it seems to be progressing more smoothly in much of the supposedly racist South than in many non-Southern communities that pride themselves on racial enlightenment. Often the South's desegregation amounts to tokenism; half of the 2,779 school districts in eleven Southern states are technically desegregated, but only 18% of the region's black students actually attend school with whites. But where it has been well tried, as in east Texas or northern Georgia, there has been relatively little friction after the initial cultural shock has worn off. Politicians are, however, again arousing passions, private white academies are proliferating, and resistance to more integration is growing. Such calm advice as that of Alabama Superintendent of Education Ernest Stone is sorely needed. Says he: "If they'll let me keep the public school system, I'll crawl on my belly and eat grass and crow until doomsday." Studies of Southern integration show that black children profit academically from the experience. Black students in a tenth grade in Rome, Ga., were tested in 1965 and found to be performing at seventh- through ninth-grade levels. A test of succeeding groups of black tenth-graders in 1968 after integration showed they were either at grade level or only one year behind. White students in the mixed schools performed at eleventh- and twelfth-grade levels both years. Thus they had not slipped, but blacks had gained. The Berkeley Example The most highly regarded large-scale integration effort outside the South has been the complete integration of the Berkeley Public Schools. Begun voluntarily, the plan has met little community opposition, was completed in 1968, and still has the unanimous backing of the school board. It involves large-scale busing, including the transfer of 3,800 elementary pupils of both races and on both directions--some from affluent hillside homes into ghetto areas in the coastal flatland. The busing costs $270,000 a year, involves an average ride of 20 minutes each way. Berkeley's conservative Mayor Wallace Johnson thinks that any vote on the program today will carry by at least two-thirds majority. Yet no one considers the project a complete success-- at least not yet. Racial tension still runs high at the two junior highs and in the high school. At Martin Luther King Junior High, students break down into four groups: the blacks, the straight whites, the hippie whites and Mexican-American Chicanos. The lines are rarely crossed. The noon-hour dance is dominated by blacks; the groups eat separately. There have been interracial fights and class disorders. "It's becoming anarchy," complains a woman math teacher. "Teachers have to defend themselves and not the kids--that's ass-backwards." Annabelle Hall, a white hippie-type student, is disillusioned. "Last year I really tried to mix," she says. "But it doesn't work. Someone has to suffer--you can't get a school together in a day. But why did I have to come along just as integration is beginning?" Author-Educator Herbert Kohl (36 children) has studied the Berkeley program and concedes that "no one deep in his heart believes that this is really working yet." But he contends that it will as soon as teachers and students get over their jitters and concentrate on education; he expects the system to develop new techniques for stimulating learning among children of diverse backgrounds. Slow-reading blacks are getting remedial help, and one study indicates that black tenth-graders who had been in integrated schools for three years earned higher average grades than those there only one year. There has been no serious conflict in the elementary schools, and Assistant Superintendent Harold J. Maves believes that integration works best when started at the lowest grade levels. He believes that friction will fade as the youngest children move into junior and senior highs. Another community that acted in integration is the affluent Chicago suburb of Evanston, which has a wedge-shaped neighborhood of mainly lower-middle-class blacks. The community began planning for integration in 1963, later used computers to retain neighborhood schools as much as possible while bringing Negro enrollment in each school to roughly 24%, which is the black representation in the city. The plan, involving the busing of only 1,300 students out of 11,000, went into effect in 1967. Now Evanston is in an uproar, partly over the whole experiment and partly because of the abrasive personality and integration zeal of Superintendent Gregory C. Coffin, a blunt New Englander hired in 1966 to carry out the program. Police have used Mace to break up fistfights in school-board audiences; the husband of a woman board member pulled a knife on a black heckler. By a 4-to-3 vote, the board decided to terminate Coffin's contract at the end of this school year; an opposing slate of board candidates promises to keep him if they are elected. Contends Coffin: "The more active I became and the more friends I made in the black community, the more I lost in the white community. I had scarcely a neighbor left who would speak to me." Riverside, Calif., the first city of more than 100,000 population to carry out a full-scale plan for racial balance, has had better luck. A relatively conservative community 55 miles east of Los Angeles, it responded to black pressures following the Watts riots in 1965. Blacks boycotted the schools, and the board proposed an integration plan. Under it, three segregated schools were phased out and their black students sent to other schools to provide about an 18% black enrollment at each. Teachers received sensitivity training, and volunteers were recruited to serve as liaison between the schools and the community. The district applied for federal funds and has launched 23 special programs, ranging from Head Start preschooling to a Neighborhood Youth Corps. A Promising Outlook Integration in Riverside has been uneventful and well accepted. In the schools, the races seem to be gradually getting more friendly. Academically, white students have shown no decline in achievement and blacks only marginal gains. After four years of integration, however, some of the top black students have achieved nearly perfect reading scores. For some blacks, therefore, concludes Mabel Purl, Director of Research for the district, "the lid is off and those who can profit most are motivated to do so." Would parents prefer a return to segregated schools? The district polled parents of elementary school pupils and found that 85.6% of the whites, 85.7% of Mexican Americans and 93.&% of the blacks wanted no such thing. None of these experiences provide clarion examples of the benefits of racial balancing. There are in line with many other studies indicating that blacks make substantial if unspectacular academic progress in an integrated school. The longer they remain and the sooner they begin, the greater their advance. The controversial Coleman report on "Equality of Educational Opportunity," issued by the U.S. Office of Education in 1966, emphasizes that the educational interests of a student's peers are a much greater influence on his achievement than are the economic and physical resources put into a school. But Sociologist James Coleman, who directed the study, warns that integrated schooling is "not necessarily the most efficient means for increasing lower-class achievement." He suggests that the nature of schools ought to change, that they should be mere "home bases" from which students would use the entire community for learning. A New York State study concludes that blacks gain if they do not constitute more than 30% of a class--meanwhile, whites do not slip. It also shows that the integrated school is more effective for blacks than is the segregated school. Contrary to longtime liberal thinking, integration does not necessarily lead to more harmonious relations among races. Some studies show that it can actually polarize groups and strengthen entrenched stereotypes. This is especially true at the higher grade levels, where attitudes are more difficult to change. Yet it is precisely at the lowest age levels that integration runs into its toughest obstacles in all of the emotional--but not always irrational--arguments about busing and neighborhood schools. In some cases, it can be argued that "busing" has become the same kind of code signal for veiled anti-black sentiment as is "law-and-order." It would be desireable if each child could walk to school and if parents would take an informed interest in their local school. In reality, however, 30% of all U.S. public school children ride buses anyway and find it no great handicap. "Riding the yellow school bus is as much a symbol of American education in 1970 as the little red schoolhouse was in 1900," says a report of New York City's Center for Urban Education. The anti-busing epithets are really aimed not at the bus, but at transferring a child to a different neighborhood or to an inferior school or to be mixed with blacks--or all three. Massachusetts Commissioner Sullivan sees "something damn strange" about the logic that allows a mother to put her three-year-old on a bus to nursery school but insists that he is "too young" to ride a bus to kindergarten at the age of five. The rides should, of course, be moderate in length and comfortable; some children in Riverside get portable cassette recorders so they can listen to music as they travel. Pros and Cons of Busing Such reasoning cannot influence anti-busing crusaders like Senator Stennis, who recently warned that children would be "boxed up and crated and hauled around the city and the country like common animals." In Orlando, Fla., 900 white parents jammed a school board meeting to vent their anger at a busing plan. Protested one mother: "I live a block from Rocklake School, and I can hear my child laughing as I'm hanging clothes. Why is she going to be bused away?" Blacks, on the other hand, are getting a bit weary of the busing controversy, since they are the ones most often moved- -right past that white neighborhood in Southern cities. Or they watch white children bus off to their private academies. "When I was a kid walking to school, that bus with white kids used to ride right on by me," says Mayor Charles Evers. "Now we're glad to be on the bus and even driving it." The neighborhood school concept is deeply ingrained in the American tradition. People do buy homes near desireable schools and have a right to resent it if their children cannot attend them. The locally elected school board is a manifestation of the desire of Americans to control education at the closest possible level. When enlightened parents do care about their school or school board, their concern can be highly beneficial. Blacks in big cities like New York are fed up with the inability of their children to learn in ghetto schools and are demanding local control so that they can improve teaching. Obviously, whites have every right to that same power. Yet there is much mythmaking here. Most parents feel totally unqualified to advise on fundamental matters of teaching methods, curriculum and personnel. They exercise a strong-- often negative--influence only on budgets. The quality of school board personnel is highly erratic; most boards confine themselves to board money matters and selection of superintendents, all too often choosing the aging but popular athletic coach. The slicing of the nation into 20,000 school districts permits local control, all right, but it also creates vast differences in the financial support and the quality of education; many white children, as well as black, suffer from this inequity. The proliferation of neighborhood schools is a relatively recent luxury of urban America. They rarely have the libraries, nurses, and teaching aides that larger, consolidated schools can afford. This is no handicap to middle-class whites because their children have comparable resources at home, but because black homes often lack such aids, says Sullivan, "the black child get short-changed again, and this is a point that white America misses." However strong or shaky the arguments on these controversies, reality suggests that whites will not yield their neighborhood preferences unless assured that their children will benefit rather than suffer from the schooling at the end of any bus ride. So far, integration has not provided that guarantee. By slowing integration and especially by opposing busing, President Nixon is taking a hugely popular position. There are means to integration--if the desire does exist and can somehow be tapped. Given political leaders determined to overcome the current opposition, the achievement of reasonably balanced enrollments throughout the nation would still be difficult but not technically impossible. Even the desirability of the process could be heightened; the Federal Government could entice communities to integrate by providing funds for better schools. School tax rates keep climbing, and relief would be welcomed. Money could also be pumped into summertime and other tutorial programs to help blacks overcome their backgrounds and make the shift to integrated schools easier for both races. Metropolitan school districts could be created to break across the lines now separating black and white neighborhoods. This is already done to handle sewers, transportation and regional planning. Larger districts afford advantages in financing and the efficiency of more centralized facilities and staffing--as the whole drive toward rural school consolidation demonstrates. That, too, involves expanded busing, but is now widely accepted. Placing schools along the fringes of segregated neighborhoods could minimize travel for whites and blacks and avoid sending either group into totally foreign environments. A similar device now being set up or planned in 35 U.S. cities is "the educational park." It involves a central campus to which all of a district's pupils would travel--again affording economies and the possibilities for superior libraries and teaching facilities as well as integration. The idea is proving most appealing to cities having between 100,000 and 500,000 population. Pittsburgh has modified the concept by planning five new "great high schools," all designed to serve large, racially diverse areas. Some integration can be achieved by redrawing school district lines. It can also be aided by pairing formerly all white and all black schools so that each contains half the usual grades and also half the enrollment of both of the previous schools--provided pairing does not force whites to flee the area. New York City envisioned a "linear" school concept, in which schools would be strung out over a new expressway and the highway would provide rapid transportation between mixed neighborhoods. The idea was abandoned when expressway plans fell through. No single solution exists for total racial balancing; a mixture of techniques is almost always demanded. But despite serious practical difficulties, the problem is not really unmanageable. What is chiefly at stake is a matter of will. The basic question is whether there is a national will to push on with school integration. Recent events make this highly doubtful. Writing in the New Republic, Yale Professor Alexander Bickel argues that, for whatever reason, whites consistently leave schools as they become highly integrated, and the result is resegregation. Integration, he contends, "creates as many problems as it proports to solve, and no one can be sure that, even if accomplished, it would yield an educational return." In his view, it may prove more effective to improve black schools than to move students. It can always be argued that until white attitudes change, blacks must turn inward, control their own educational destiny, create the kind of power that commands respect and will enable them to meet whites on more equal ground. Black separatists are indeed taking that route, although the majority of blacks prefer to join whites now in those better white schools. The separatist path also has its illusions. Money still matters in education, and it still seems to follow whitey. In the long run, polarization may prove more destructive to race relations than the current incidence of friction in integrated schools. Blacks are emerging from white schools and colleges in increasing numbers, are often eagerly sought for good jobs, and want those advantages now, The self- help, go-it-alone tactic is a far slower and more difficult process. The Need for Leadership The facts of today's multiracial society argue that whites may benefit just as much over the long run by suffering the short-term agonies of integration now. "There is simply no acceptable future for American society in segregation," argues John H. Fischer, president of Columbia's Teachers College. "I cannot see how a child can be prepared for a multiracial world if he is brought up in segregated schools, black or white." A national desire to integrate, of it is there, will not prevail without what Fischer calls "firm moral leadership--and that is what we are not getting. We will pay for it." Although President Nixon has not yet provided that needed leadership, his aides insist that he will speak out when the time is right. "He's waiting for this fever to cool a little bit," explains one assistant. "It is suggested that he doesn't have any gut sympathy with the civil rights case. That may be true, but the gut thing can get you into an awful lot of trouble. This may be the time for reflection and figuring out the next move rather than a time of breast-beating or recrimination. When we start going backward massively, it's because things have got to be unfair or soon as unfair by an awful lot of people who are asking themselves, 'What the hell is happening to me?'" Indeed, it is entirely possible that Nixon's sharp political sense tells him that public passions against massive integration are running high enough to produce a vast rupture of race relations of pushed further just now. He apparently feels that if he were to utter now the kind of moralistic rhetoric and vast promises that Lyndon Johnson employed as President, he would only make matters worse. There are many angry lower-middle-class whites who live on the raw frontiers of neighborhood and school integration. They feel that they are bearing an unfair share of the nation's racial burdens; unlike the upper middle class, they cannot afford to seek escape in the suburbs if their schools turn racially tense. Their taxes go up; they see blacks closing in on their jobs. Nixon aides claim that these people would react violently. There is no real evidence that tempers were running that high. In many areas of the South, at least, integration actually seemed to be progressing coolly, if reluctantly, until the segregationists decided they could take heart from the Administration's ambiguous position. Nixon's Attorney General Mitchell told Time Correspondent Dean Fischer last week that he feels moving on desegregation is a case of "you're damned if you do and you're dammed if you don't." He said he hoped that "all the de jure districts will be desegregated by September." The Administration's whole aim is "to get the schools desegregated, but to do it with the least possible disruption. That's hard to do in a highly charged atmosphere." This suggests that Nixon should use his effective new command of the television forum to alter the atmosphere. Housing and Jobs It is entirely possible that school integration will not become a realty until there are sizeable numbers of blacks with incomes, and therefore neighborhoods, comparable to those of whites. If so, progress on jobs and housing must be made urgently and not at the slow, generation-to-generation pace still envisioned by many complacent whites. So far, the President has pulled back on effective voting rights for blacks and moved modestly on equal employment efforts. There is no sign of a drive against segregated housing. Nixon aides concede that he has no long-range plans to aid blacks. They say he is playing the situation day by day. There is no doubt that the President's tactics are good politics, that much of white America may be weary of black demands, weary of being lectured, weary of the pressure of history and conscience arguing for sacrifice to enable blacks to catch up. School integration certainly is not the desideratum, the panacea, for America's racial problems that it was once conceived to be. But it has become a powerful symbol for progress in the efforts to solve the nation's most critical domestic problem. For the President to abandon his role of leader of all Americans in this area is not only bad policy but almost surely, in the long run, bad politics as well. </body> </article> </text>