Interim Report of South Carolina School Committee, January 11, 1955 [cover title] - 1955

[Columbia, S.C., 1955. Near fine.. 12pp. Original gray wrappers printed in black, stapled. Light wear overall. The second interim report from the South Carolina School Committee, comprised of five Senators, five Representatives, and five laymen, sent to the governor and the General Assembly, apprising them of "our findings and recommendations pending final action of the United States Supreme Court and the development of the situation its decrees will create in the field of public education." The committee is reacting, of course, to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which effectively called for the integration of public schools in the United States. The committee's findings are both alarming and unsurprising. In one passage, they state they have "no reason to change its views that the concensus [sic] of public opinion in this State favors better educational opportunity for all children - in separate schools." Their first recommendation reads as follows: "Your Committee will not recommend any course of action or legislative enactment which will force negro children to attend schools established for white children or require white children to attend schools established for negro children. If forced separation is wrong, then it must follow that forced intermingling is also wrong." One passage in the introductory portion of the work mentions the disruption of integration in other communities "on the basis of the May 17th decision" (i.e., Brown v. Board of Education), which is resulting in the decrease of enrollment of white children in public schools and facilitating their move to private schools. This paragraph ends, presciently: "This experience indicates that, wherever integration is attempted, there will result a gradual migration of families who can afford homes elsewhere to neighborhoods where residential segregation by choice will produce educational segregation by necessity." OCLC does not explicitly record this imprint, though there are likely copies of the report in serial runs of interim reports of the School Committee at one, two, or three institutions in South Carolina.