Segregation Hearings Open in Boston

The United States Commission on Civil Rights yesterday opened two days of public hearings here on racial imbalance in Boston schools.

The hearings are part of a study of racial isolation that the commission is making in 50 American cities which have significant Negro populations. Among the first to address the commission was Senator Edward M. Kennedy '54.

Kennedy said he deplored the failure of the Boston School Committee to come up with an acceptable plan for the relief of de facto segregation in Boston.

"I do not think that Boston can be proud," he said, "for Boston hasn't made that extra effort [to assimiliate the Negro]."

Kennedy warned that failure to integrate Negroes might result in their losing faith in American institutions.

"We'll never realize our full potential until we assimilate Negroes." He continued, "we won't be the city we could be."

The Commission is attempting to determine the extent of racial imbalance in Boston schools and its effect upon the school children. Yesterday's testimony was provided by those most closely involved -- school teachers administrators, parents and social workers.

These witnesses testified that Boston's reliance on the traditional neighborhood school principle has produced a number of schools where the non-white enrollment is more than 50 per cent.

Nearly all the witnesses said the segregated schools were harmful for both Negro and white students.

Miss Melissa Tillman, a teacher at the New School for Children which is ant integrated private school for the poor in Roxbury, remarked, "segregation is bad because the ghetto gives the Negroes a false sense of security and bad for the whites because they don't know what to do when they meet other people. They don't know that its not a white world."

Some witnesses suggested that special programs carried out in Roxbury schools compensated for the imbalance. But most of them, including Rollins Griffith, assistant principal of the Lewis Junior High School, insisted that the programs did not compensate for integrated schools.

Griffith, whose school is 99.4 per cent non-white, said, "I don't want them to get a distorted view of what lies ahead of them. That is what I think they're getting now in an all-Negro school."

The hearings will continue today at Fanueil Hall.