ABSTRACT

Possibly the commonest judgment held about school integration is that intense conflict is unavoidable because, as is true of most racial issues, Negroes want a good deal and whites are too prejudiced to give it to them. It seems to us that this statement contains four factual errors. First, intense conflict is avoidable. Our own data indicate, for example, that some of the northern cities experienced only a brief flurry of picketing, and school desegregation in the South is so tame as to be uninteresting. Second, the statement makes the assumption that conflict is to be expected when a racial issue is raised. In fact, many racial issues have been raised and resolved in northern cities without a battle. As we said in the Introduction, war is news and peace is not. Hence national publicity was given to Governor Wallace’s 1964 “northern campaign,” to the Cadillac and Bank of America employment demonstrations in San Francisco, to such “non-events” as the World’s Fair stall-in (New York), and to such demonstrations of white prejudice as the repeal of open occupancy by referendum in California. But this is hardly a fair picture. For example, the Gallup poll has indicated that white voters support President Johnson’s civil rights legislation; fair employment and fair housing legislation have been passed in a number of states (and an attempt to prevent Illinois fair housing legislation failed to get the question onto the ballot). Our data indicate that the civil rights leaders are not in general asking for anything that whites will object strongly to. We have observed that civil rights leaders must often be content with little more than token integration plans, and if they have not been content, they have at least been quiet about it. And we have seen that bussing Negroes into white schools 351is now common practice in most of our cities with at most a short-lived white backlash.