Word: hewes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Until recently, Southern Congressmen who denounced the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's stringent new guidelines for school desegregation received a sympathetic hearing only from other Southerners. But Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield has now joined in the criticism of HEW, apparently in the belief that continued prodding for integration anywhere will succor a white backlash everywhere. The result of Mansfield's statement that the department is pushing integration "too fast" can only be to slow down the pace of school desegregation in the South, -- a pace that is and has always been unconscionably slow...
Although they point out that all but a handful of Southern school districts assured HEW in the spring of 1965 that schools were being desegregated, the fact is that Southern school districts have by and large preserved separate schools for whites and Negroes...
...desegregation plans that local school boards submitted to HEW prior to this year's guidelines gave any promise that dual systems of education would ever be eliminated. Even court-ordered desegregation plans -- which are still automatically acceptable under the guidelines -- simply provide that increasing numbers of Negro pupils will be allowed to transfer to formerly all-white schools, though whites and Negroes will otherwise be assigned to the same schools they have always attended...
...HEW's 1966 guidelines strike at the heart of the problem. The department has said it expects desegregation plans to work, that school districts should have a "substantial" number of Negroes in school with whites. The department has also asked that a start be made towards integrating teaching staffs, so that eventually no school in a system could be labelled Negro or white according to the racial composition of its staff...
Quite possibly, it would have been politically advisable for Mansfield to keep silent during the attacks on HEW, rather than leaping to the defense of the guidelines. But his recent statement will only encourage Wallace and like-thinkers North and South. Equally important, it will encourage continued foot-dragging by Southern school officials, who because of their own prejudice or fear of political reprisals have done no more than allow a few Negroes to transfer to formerly all-white schools...