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FREEDOMWAYS FOURTH QUARTER 1968 boards, it is well known that school boards are no more moved by arguments about the illegality of their acts than they are about the immorality of their acts. It is naive to assume that they would be threatened by a position which stressed their acts as being illegal rather than immoral. However, the author's naivete is revealed even more clearly when he states: "The school boycott is the heaviest artillery in the civil rights movement arsenal." This reveals an appalling lack of sophistication and awareness of what has been going on in the civil rights movement generally and in school integration conflicts specifically. Has Crain never heard of civil disobedience, of direct action, or tactics such as sit-ins and the very effective boycott of local businesses? The author's reason in stating the school boycott is the "heaviest artillery in the civil rights movement" is soon revealed, because he points out that this is a very ineffective weapon. When Crain isn't actually being naive or confused, he is being tediously obvious. For example, he summarizes the incidents in the eight Northern cities and makes the following hypothesis: "White parents will not protest integration as long as 1) the school their children are to attend is not predominantly Negro; 2) white students are not transferred out of their present school; 3) white students are not forced to attend schools located in the ghetto; and 4) neighborhood racial stability is not threatened." Why is it necessary to wade through pages of rather ponderous, repetitious writing to find such remarkably obvious conclusions stated? The banality of his conclusions is pervasive. At one point this astounding statement is found: "... in most cases the school board members first respond to the issue by acting in accordance to their predispositions about civil rights: liberal boards tended to integrate; conservative boards did not." To be told simply that school boards will integrate if they are more liberal than conservative is hardly a finding about which one needs to read a book. The author's penchant for presenting meaningless analysis is illustrated as he makes a great point of separating what he calls "symbolic and welfare goals." In his words, "The major goals of the civil rights movement-fair employment, open housing, integrated schools, equal use of public accommodations-all fit our definition of symbolic demands, in that the emphasis is upon removing barriers to Negro mobility rather than actually trying to move Negroes into these newly opened opportunities." (Moving Negroes into newly opened opportunities would be what he would designate as a 422
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 11:32:07
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-14 12:18:19