Next Steps in Racial Desegregation in Education in the South

Abstract

Last November a minister, travelling from the office of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in America, and working in cooperation with the Southern Regional Council, did a pioneer job in Central Kentucky of working up local discussion groups on the schools and the courts. He had some useful pamphlets, and the names of community leaders in seven or eight smallish towns. He called at the home or the office of some leading figure in each place, pamphlets under his arm, said who he was, and asked if the person he was calling on would be willing to get a few people -together, white people and Negro people, to talk about the matter of what the Court might decide, and how to meet the problems that would come up. Usually the local person said about this: I've known the issue was coming; we haven't done a thing about it. If you'll get me ten or a dozen of those booklets I'll call together some people, and we can sit down and talk about what it will mean in this town. That's the beginning, in any neighborhood. WThat was done in Kentucky has since been done by Church leaders or others in Southeastern Virginia, and in Central North Carolina, and in UpCountry South Carolina, and all over Alabama, and is to be done in many other parts of the South. So far the National Council has been joined in the effort by the Congregationalists, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and by a few others. Still other denominations have taken on similar programs, differently managed. Through every Southern town there runs a creek, and no bridge across the creek. Yet if you stand by the creek and listen you can hear a stream of traffic coming towards it from both sides; traffic that will need to get across. The first little group of local people, white and Negro, who get together somewhere in a Sunday School or in someone's home, and make friends on the issues about the schools, and find the local facts, will have thrown a log across the creek. And what timid people first tip over, the school board can go across on, and then the teachers, and the PTA's, and the children and ultimately the parents as the citizen body. Operation logacross-the-creek is no great splash as a program, but it is putting out the logs, and getting people to cross. And except for what planning has been done in the offices of school officials, it is nearly all that has been done in many Southern communities. And it's a pretty good way to work; asking people just to try to reach understanding in their own town, and figure out ways to meet a changing situation. It is being done in the belief that there is only one situation in which race prejudice dissolves.' That's when people of similar cultural and educational background, of different groups, work together on a matter of common