All the tough problems of U.S. North ern
school integration — the ironies of good intentions and painful
misunder standings, the subtleties of trying to ig nore skin color
while trying to take it into account, the vain hope of having schools
that serve both slums and middle-class neighborhoods— welled up last
week in New York City's Harlem.Looking back, there is not much doubt that New York City's Board of
Education should have built its new In termediate School 201 somewhere
else than right in the middle of darkest East Harlem. The Supreme Court
ruled twelve years ago that segregated education is inferior education,
and I.S. 201 never had any real possibility of being integrated. But
there the school is—the city's finest, an architectural gem and
potentially an academic joy. Common sense might seem to suggest
accepting this separate-but-better education. Instead, many parents of
I.S. 201 schoolchildren decided that HARLEM HAS
BEEN BETRAYED, and with stormy picketing kept the showcase school shut
for five days.Compromise. The sorry struggle to open I.S. 201 oscillated from comedy
to pathos to chaos. In a belated effort to keep an earlier promise that
at least 20% of the students would be white, school officials last
summer sent 10,000 leaflets into Queens and The Bronx, extolling the
$5,000,000 school's virtues and inviting white students to enroll.
Windowless, air-conditioned and soundproofed, the building would create
an ideal learning environment. It would have one teacher for every 24
students, extra teachers for tutorial work, offer independent study,
foreign languages and musical-instrument instruction. Not a single
white family signed up to send kids to Harlem.Advised that integration was impossible, angry Negro leaders demanded
complete control over I.S. 201 . “We
want a black principal and black teachers for our black children,” one
mother shouted through a loudspeaker outside the school. On opening
day, other, quieter Negro mothers led their children to the school and
were turned back by Negro pickets. School Superintendent Bernard
Donovan compromised, agreed that a neighborhood council could “screen”
school personnel, even though the city school board cannot legally
delegate its hiring and firing powers to laymen.That could have ended the fuss, but more militant Negroes pressed their
demand that a Negro principal be named to present “the proper image.”
Donovan yielded again, announced that a transfer had been requested by
white Principal Stanley R. Lisser, a respected administrator who had
deliberately taken on Harlem assignments for ten years.Lisser's exit under pressure brought on a well-deserved counter-revolt.
All but two of the 55-member I.S. 201 faculty—including its 26
Negroes—refused to teach under anyone except Lisser. Assistant
Principal Beryl Banfield, a Negro named to replace him, indignantly
declined, because, she said, “I object to being chosen on the basis of
color, not competence.”
