Home / Full timeline / Public officials and spokesmen for civil rights groups criticize Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Casper Weinberger’s latest pronouncement on school desegregation.
Public officials and spokesmen for civil rights groups criticize Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Casper Weinberger’s latest pronouncement on school desegregation.
1974 (Sep 7)
Public officials and spokesmen for civil rights groups criticized Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Casper Weinberger's latest pronouncement on school desegregation. During an interview on September 6, Weinberger said that the cutoff of federal funds for education, which had been used in the past to coerce recalcitrant southern school districts into compliance, would serve to increase segregation in the North. Secretary Weinberger denied that his department was hesitating on the question of desegregation, but admitted that "we are dealing with a very fierce public opposition to desegregation.” Ruby Hurley, Southeastern Regional Director of the NAACP, disagreed with Weinberger's assessment that a cutoff of funds would be counterproductive and compared the conciliatory approach to northern school desegregation with the more forceful tactics in the South. According to Hurley, “Public school systems are often poor even without federal money. Officials who run segregated school systems will think twice if they are faced with a cutoff. ... If you wait for people to change their minds on a problem like this without leverage, you'll wait a long time. ... It's a lot easier to clean up somebody else's backyard than your own.” Atlanta School Superintendent Alonzo Crim responded to Weinberger's statement by declaring: “The law should be applied with equal force in all parts of the country ... quite often segregation is intensified by these delays.” Margie Hames, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who had handled many desegregation cases, expressed the belief that “segregation in the South was more open and easy for us to deal with. I don't think the North has accepted the fact yet that they have more subtle forms of segregation.” In defense of Weinberger, Peter Holmes, director of HEW's office for civil rights enforcement, pointed out that the cutoff of funds and other legal actions are more complex in the North than in the South since segregation was not legalized in the North.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.