One junior high, famous for its dreadful teaching, famous for the hatred that its pupils wisely bear their teachers, has in its ranks to the present hour and present day a man so lost to the consumption of whiskey and cheap wine that pupils and fellow teachers alike make jokes about it. One boy who stayed out playing hookey for a few days returned at length and, with a smile on his face, was able to justify his reason for returning in these words: "I got tired of seeing all the winos on the street. I though I'd come back to school to see and educated wino."

At other schools, overt racism has been common. Teachers new to the system are appalled by the conversations, by the style of easy and automatic condescension, by the casual assumption of inherent inferiority in the black children and in their lives and families.

Physical conditions have outpaced all descriptions of their squalor. Black-boards have collapsed; windows have been nailed-shut; classes have been packed into foul-smelling cellars and unpartitioned auditoriums. Teaching has taken place in areas where it has been a continuing struggle merely to breathe fresh air and to hear a child when he talks.

Money for repairs, for improvement, for uplifting, has gone instead to political purposes, to salary raises for our lady School Committee member's retainers, to placate her custodians, to reward her principals, to reward the Superintendent himself for his steadfast dedication to the morbid status quo for which she and he equally stand. All evidence, all confirmation of the inferior status of the ghetto schools has geen ignored, denied, refuted. Even the blunt fact of racial segregation, known well to anyone in the schools dealing with normal vision, went for many years unadmitted and was repeatedly denied.

The Interim Report on Racial Imbalance signed in 1964 by the heads of Brandeis, Northeastern, Boston University, MIT, and the Christian Science Monitor, and by Boston's Roman Catholic leader, Arch. Carinal Cushing, indicated that there were 45 schools in Boston with over 50 per cent non-white, 28 with over 80 per cent, 16 with 96 per cent or above. Among the highest in the city: the William Lloyd Garrison School, with 96.8 per cent non-white. One school (the Hyde) had 99.1 per cent. One: 99.5 per cent. One (the Lewis annex) did not have one child who was white.

Other statistics, prepared and endorsed by many of the outstanding religious leaders in the area, have demonstrated financial inequalities between the predominantly white and Negro schools.

10 per cent lower textbook expenditures.

19 per cent lower library expenditures.

27 per cent lower health expenditures per pupil.

In schools with over 90 per cent Negroes, eight out of nine major items were lower than in comparable white schools.

In schools with an all white student body, the average ran up to $350 allocated per pupil per year. In three heavily Negro districts, averages were $240, $235, $232.

In-class expenditures for Boston as a whole averaged $275 per pupil. In the Negro schools: $213.

It has been made apparent as well that Negro areas also have the highest percentage of provisional teachers, those who are fill-ins, have no tenure, no seniority, no experience and no obligation to remain.

In the face of such evidence, in defiance of the editorial positions taken by both major Boston papers, Louise Day Hicks has consistently stuck to her guns in defending the superiority of the neighborhood school, even when that school was an insult to its own neighborhood, a scar, a cancer, detested, hated, feared. "I believe that little children should go to school in their own neighborhoods, with the children with whom they play. It is as simple as that."

Others on the School Committee have expressed similar attitudes, some of them more direct. One member, William O'Connor, has made public utterances as can leave no possible uncertainty as to what he thinks of Negro children: "We have no inferior education in our schools. What we have been getting is an inferior type of student."