1961 US Commission on Civil Rights Report Book 2 - University of ...

in schools with a heavy concentration of minority groups the opportunity
to transfer their children to schools with unused space and to an education
situation where reasonably varied ethnic distribution exists." 4a Can
government validly encourage transfers on racial grounds to achieve desegregation,
even though presumably it may not do so to achieve segregation?
The courts have not yet had to face this question.
In 1960-61 school officials in Westburg, Long Island, New York,
transported white pupils by bus to a newly constructed school located
in a predominantly Negro area in order to prevent the school from becoming
an all Negro one. As a result the racial distribution at the
school was about half Negro and half white. 42 *
Other cities have transported children from overcrowded schools to
schools having space for them—but for a less felicitious purpose. At
its Detroit hearings the <strong>Commission</strong> was told that prior to November
1960, students from the predominantly Negro schools in that city's
Central District were transported to predominantly Negro schools in an
outlying area. Nearer schools, enrolling primarily middle-class white
children, were by-passed. 43 Since November 1960 children from the
Center District have been transported by grades to empty classrooms in
three predominantly white schools. Whether or not they were segregated
in a receiving school depended upon its principal. 44
Baltimore is another city that has resorted to busing children from
one school to another to relieve overcrowding. The <strong>Commission</strong> had
been told it was the policy of the school authorities, when bus transfer
of a group of children was required, to select a receiving school with a
racial composition similar to that of the sending school. At the <strong>Commission</strong>'s
Williamsburg conference the superintendent of the Baltimore
Schools said, ". . . to a large degree that would be true, but not completely
so in every situation." 45 When pressed to say whether it would
be true even if there were a nearer school, he replied: 46 ". . . the
nearest school in all the situations that we have at the present time would
be overcrowded to the point that it couldn't house the additional children
that would be transported." 4T
A policy of maintaining the racial composition of schools through
transfer policy (as in Detroit before November 1960) may in fact be a
positive policy of maintaining the status quo. If the status quo is racial
segregation, even though merely de facto, a program to preserve it would
seem to result in unconstitutional de jure segregation.
Berkeley, Calif., has an unusual zoning device that tends to avoid
racial imbalance resulting from boundaries and minority concentrations.
It intersperses optional attendance areas among fixed zones. This
"permissive zoning" allows the residents of an optional area to select
any one of two or more schools. In one situation, for example, the
choice is between two schools having a less than i percent, and one
having approximately 25 percent, Negro enrollment. 48 In another, the
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