As the South's dual school system yields to integration pressures, Negro teachers rejoice in the new benefits for their race—and worry about their own professional futures. Some are finding that when Negro students go off to the white schools, the Negro teacher does not go along. He loses his job.
Faculty integration may well become one of the stickiest issues as pupil integration accelerates under federal insistence that federal money cannot go to segregated schools. Ironically, the states and districts that are setting the pace for integration are the ones already under fire from civil rights groups for dismissing too many Negro teachers.
"Retaliation." Though authorities dispute him, N.A.A.C.P. Counsel Jack Greenberg contends that 500 of North Carolina's 11,792 Negro teachers will lose their jobs this year. Eight Negro teachers in Asheboro, for example, have been dropped with the closing of all-Negro Asheboro Central High School, and no Negro has been hired to teach next fall at the city's other, and now only, high school. Fired Negro Teacher Louis H. Newberry, who holds a master's degree from New York University and has pursued graduate studies at the University of North Carolina, says bitterly: "I think my qualifications are superior to anybody they have over there." The whites, argues Negro Teacher Gaines Price, "are being forced to integrate, and they are retaliating by not absorbing teachers of the Negro race."
No Corner on Incompetence. In Florida, Dr. Gilbert Porter, executive secretary of the all-Negro Florida State Teachers Association, contends that "several hundred" Negro teachers are being dismissed, and says: "Among all of the Negro teachers being let go, one or more must have qualifications equal or superior to those of the white teachers in that county." Elsewhere, 22 Negro teachers in four Arkansas school systems being integrated have been told that they will not be rehired, and ten Negro teachers in Texas claim to have been dismissed because of integration shifts. Since integration is barely getting out of token status, thousands of fur ther firings seem likely in the future.
Educators concede that many Negro teachers do not measure up to their white counterparts. "The dual system has guaranteed that," says a Texas expert. Donald Agnew, specialist in Negro education for the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, says that, although "I hate to talk about it, since our organization has worked for years to raise standards," he que tions "the quality of instruction that Negro teachers have received and can impart." At the same time, John Griffin of the Southern Education Foundation points out that "Negroes have no corner on the incompetence market." In fact, well-educated Southern Negroes have long gone into teaching for lack of other opportunities. Florida has based some of its dismissals on National Teacher Examination scores, and Griffin predicts that the test will "weed out some substandard white teachers too."