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Desegregation's Tortuous Course: Washington: Showcase of Integration
- Abstract
FOLLOWING the collapse of Virginia’s “massive resistance” to public school desegregation in the face of adverse court decisions, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., took to the airwaves to state his case against racial integration. He addressed some of his comments “to those who defend or close their eyes to the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere.” A week earlier, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas told his constituents that children locked out of Little Rock’s closed Central High School could lose an entire year of schooling, if need be, and “still be educationally ahead of students in integrated Washington, D. C.”
Ever since President Eisenhower voiced the hope in 1954 that integration in the capital would be a “model” to the nation, Washington’s school system has been a whipping boy for segregationists. Two years ago a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, devoted a 16-page tabloid section to desegregation in the District of Columbia and concluded that Washington is “a city of seething unrest: a chaotic area of flux and movement, uneasy and unstable…. It is a city where many white families who remain, imprisoned, hesitate to talk for fear of violent reprisal.” More recently, a hate sheet published in Inglewood, California, told its readers that “in Washington’s integrated schools, armed police now patrol the halls to protect white students and teachers from Negro jungle violence. Slashings, knifings, assaults, indecent exposures, and sex incidents are so rampant throughout the District’s integrated system that white students are virtually deserting the schools en masse.”
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