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

Having put the power of assignment in hands of teachers by default,
as far as their choosing or not choosing to teach in an X's school—
the Board is bound by the acts of its servants. . . . 71ft
The Board of Education of the City of New York, can no more disclaim
responsibility for what has occurred in this matter than the
State of South Carolina could avoid responsibility for a Jim Crow
State Democratic Party which the State did everything possible to
render "private" in character and operation. See Rice v. Elmore,
4th Cir. 165 F. ad 387, cert, denied, 333 U.S. 875, . . .
The Skip with case clearly holds that inferiority of the school to which a
pupil is assigned as compared with other schools in the system constitutes
a denial of equal protection of the laws—notwithstanding the absence of
any official action or inaction calculated to segregate or discriminate on
grounds of race. Skipwith appears to apply where there is a substantial
disparity in the quality of schools—whether the plaintiff be Negro or
white.
It is interesting that the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia in
1957 reached the same conclusion in similar circumstances. In
Dobbins v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 72 an action was brought under
a compulsory school attendance law. The defense of the Negro parent
was that his son had been assigned to an inferior, distant, Negro school
although he had sought and been denied admission to the local white
high school. Evidence was offered to prove the inferiority of the assigned
school. It was rejected by the trial court. The highest court of
Virginia found that the evidence should have been admitted and that
under the circumstances the defendant did not violate the compulsory
school attendance law because it "cannot be applied as a coercive means
to require a citizen to forego or relinquish his constitutional rights." In
both of these cases the defendants asserted their constitutional rights defensively.
Surely the same rights could be asserted to provide affirmative
relief—by way of transfer, rezoning, or other means—against inferior
school facilities.
The relative overcrowding of schools that serve the Negro population
in the urban North and West is notorious. All educators point
to the related unfortunate teacher-pupil ratio as critical. There is
reason to believe that these deficiencies, rather than the ability of the
teacher, explain the inferiority of the predominantly Negro schools as
compared with the predominantly white schools of the North and West.
An earlier part of this chapter discussed the New York post-Skipwith
program to relieve both overcrowding and the disparities of teacher
training and experience. The <strong>Commission</strong>'s first hand information on
such conditions is fragmentary and should be considered as illustrative
and not as an indictment of the single school system to be mentioned.
Secondary sources suggest there arc many school systems in the North
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