The Progress of Integration in the Phoenix Schools

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Those who understand the district system of school support will understand the explanation that in Phoenix there is the Phoenix Elementary District Number one which is one of the twelve elementary districts that compose the Phoenix Union High School and Phoenix College District. Each of these twelve elementary school districts, and the Phoenix Union High School and Phoenix College District, is a separate and autonomous governmental unit with the power to tax and with its own separate board of education and superintendent. The Phoenix Elementary District Number one is the largest of the twelve elementary districts. It has a total of 23 school plants and in the spring of 1955 graduated 1199 from the eighth grades or almost twice as many as the next largest of the elementary districts making up the Union High School district. Phoenix Elementary Number one, before desegregation, had three large Negro schools. Two of the other elementary districts had Negro schools, but few Negro students are living in the other nine elementary districts. In the last few years since the outlawing of restrictive covenants, some Negroes have bought homes outside of the traditionally Negro areas and little colonies of Negroes are developing outside of the former Negro residential districts. In a few places individual Negroes have bought homes in areas. Children from these homes did attend the segregated Negro schools, however. Thirty-Aive years ago the Phoenix Union High School district had no Negro high school and Negro and white attended the one Phoenix Union High School. The state law from the time of statehood has required children of African descent to attend separate elementary schools, though in very small schools a screen around the desk of a Negro child was ruled to be separation in terms of the law. Such a separation has not occurred for many years. State laws always permitted Negro and white to attend the same high school but provided that, when there were twentyfive Negro in a high school, the district could vote to establish a separate Negro high school. The law required, however, that provisions in the Negro school should always be the same as those in the white school. It is amusing to contemplate that any one could ever believe that conditions can be provided for twenty-five that are equal to the facilities provided for several hundred in another plant. But the people who made such laws in Arizona had come from states with experience in piously making such meaningless statements into laws affecting Negroes.