On Democracy and School Integration

Abstract

It is offensive to American ideals that a person, because of his or her birth, should be assigned to a slum school with antique facilities, an atmosphere of violence, a weak academic program, and a teaching force that has lost all hope. It is offensive whether the reason for the assignment is that the person is Black, or that the mother of the family must support four children without the help of the father, or that the family recently emigrated from a peasant background and speaks broken English. But it is also offensive if the reason for assignment to the slum school is to achieve racial balance, if being born in a suburb would have kept the student from being so assigned. The difference is that, in some circumstances, considerations of equal treatment may balance that offensiveness for the judiciary that must remedy the effects of segregation.