ABSTRACT
The year 1960 marked the beginning of a process of desegregating the National Education Association (NEA) and its affiliates that would take almost two decades to implement completely. This chapter suggests that more careful attention was necessary in relation to several specific issues in planning and implementing merger process. What Applegate referred to as guidelines were modeled on some “Criteria for Evaluating Merger Agreements” that had been developed initially in 1965. At the NEA Executive Committee meeting in October 1968, the criteria became the official standards to be used to evaluate fairness of remaining mergers. The criteria for merger adopted by the NEA in 1968 affected the situation in six states where merger had not yet taken place: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina. In conformity with guidelines for merger adopted by Representative Assembly, the white associations in Mississippi and Louisiana were expelled from the NEA in 1970 because of their failure to approve a merger agreement.
