“A Boycott Solves Nothing” (text)
The civil rights leaders who seem to be hell-bent on staging a Negro and Puerto Rican student boycott of New York City schools on Monday have set out on a reckless course. They could hardly wait for the new Board of Education plan for better integration and better education before turning loose their mimeograph machines to denounce it. The board did not claim finality or perfection for its program; it was open-mindedly receptive to ideas for improvement. The civil rights leaders were ready with a stubbornly closed mind.
What do they hope to prove with a boycott? That children can be persuaded to stay out of school? What are they really hope to attain? We do not claim to know but we do know that by their unreasonableness these civil rights leaders are going to alienate public opinion rather than win sympathy for their cause. Given the pattern of residence in New York City, the Board of Education can do just so much to lessen imbalance in the schools. To ask more is to ignore the facts and figures of school population and pupil distribution. You can bust children just so far. You can hire bus drivers when you ought to be hiring teachers. You can put children into buses for an hour and a half or more each day as the board plans to do for some—but what did they learn in the bus?
Under some pressure to intervene, mayor Wagner has properly referred the civil rights leaders back to the board. He has indicated his confidence in the board’s goodwill. He has implicitly rejected the idea of third-party mediation and has left the jurisdiction where it belongs—with the educational authorities.
A boycott possibly followed by other demonstrations and more boy cuts, can do no good. It is,under the circumstances, utterly unreasonable and unjustified. It is the violent, illegal approach of adult-encouraged truancy. The children should be in school getting the best education they can to cope with the world in which they are bound to be at a regrettable disadvantage anyway. The parents and the civil rights leaders should be sitting down with the Board of Education reasoning together toward Improvement of a plan that, at best, can only be modestly helpful.
There aren’t going to be any miracles delivered in solution of this almost insoluble problem. All that can be hoped for is gradual, at first partial, alleviation of imbalance in the schools—accompanied by considerable Improvement in the excellence of the schools, if the money can be had. To expect more is to demand the impossible.