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

enrollment. In September 1960, Air Base School enrolled 25 Negro and
771 white students. u
Dr. Joe Hall, Superintendent of Schools of Bade County, Fla., testified
at the <strong>Commission</strong>'s Gatlinburg conference that there are four airbases in
Florida with desegregated schools within their confines. Some of them
at one time were operated by county school boards, but Dr. Hall reported
that when they desegregated the counties turned them over to the
Federal Government. 15
Two additional schools were desegregated in Miami during the 1960-
61 school year when one Negro was assigned to a formerly white elementary
school and another to a junior high school. There were about i ,633
white pupils in attendance at the 2 schools. 16
Louisiana
Before the school year 1960-61 there were no instances of public school
desegregation in any of Louisiana's 67 parish school districts, although 3
suits were pending before the United States District Court for the Eastern
District of Louisiana, seeking desegregation in the parishes of Orleans,
St. Helena, and East Baton Rouge. 17 When it appeared in the summer
of 1960 that the Federal court order to desegregate the first grades of the
New Orleans schools in the fall of 1960 would be enforced, the Governor
and General Assembly of Louisiana resisted by every means at their command.
The chronology of events leading up to the admission of four
first-grade Negro girls to two formerly white New Orleans schools on
November 14, 1960, is recounted in detail in a report of the <strong>Commission</strong>'s
Louisiana Advisory Committee. 18
Mrs. N. H. Sand, president, S.O.S. (Save Our Schools, Inc.), New
Orleans, testified at the <strong>Commission</strong>'s Williamsburg conference that the
Governor called the legislature into the first special session in 1960 on
November 4, and that in 5 days of "hysteria," 21 emergency bills were
passed to preserve segregation. (For details see chapter 5.) Mrs.
Sand reported: 19
Save Our Schools appeared at the hearings before the House committee
and before the Senate committee. We opposed every bill that
would lead to closing even one school in the State of Louisiana. We
prepared a summary and legal analysis of the bills on the spot and
had copies of these in the hands of the legislators before they voted
on the bills, but the legislature voted in favor of all 21 bills. Even
legal minds found it difficult to keep up with the spate of legislative
activity that began with these bills and has flowed ever since or with
the Federal injunctions that were used to counter some of them.
41