With such allies at her side, Mrs. Hicks has been able to block almost every serious effort that has been made to improve the ghetto schools and, confronted by a recent state law specifically indicating financial penalties for segregated systems, she has been able to stall the wheels with sufficient success to prevent any meaningful improvement and not lose a penny of state aid for Boston's budget.

...Joseph Alsop wrote recently: "Of the more than 400,000 Negro boys and girls who reach 18 each year, hardly 10 per cent are given an education reaching the white standards."

Wherever that 10 per cent may be, it is apparent by now that they are not in Boston. Here in this city, as in so much of this violent and unjust and undemocratic nation, Negro children every day of their lives are denied an equal share in the advertised pleasures of their country. Negro kids enter Bostons ghetto schools with the same expectations and the same motivations as children all over America. They come, as other children do, with faces bright, with hopes held high, with energy, with dreams, with expectation. For six years, eight years, ten years, 12 years, they face a grim array of hostile teachers. To the reaching hands of the children are given dry and thankless texts, books long outdated, unloved, unlovely, books teachers can respect no more than can their pupils, books from which few children learn and from which no child should.

They come in hopeful, credulous. They leave, hearts broken, hating, filled with cynicism: a cynicism, however, which is never quite equal to that which our unjust white society breeds, fosters and deserves.

Meanwhile, over in Cambridge, and in other academic circles, the dilettantes of education play intellectual games and talk cleverly of cultural deprivation. They write government proposals, requesting funds for pilot programs, involving themselves in the agony of the ghetto to the same degree and with the same embarrassed caution that delicate ladies use when they dip their toes into the edges of cold or unfamiliar waters. Denying its historic role of protest, the University of Harvard stands comfortably in brick and ivy on the safe side of the Charles River, enjoying the passage of another football season, and talking politely at congenial cocktail parties about the unfortunate problems of the unfortunate children of the ghetto.

To the extent that Harvard does involve itself in the ghetto, it is primarily under the aegis of the rotting schools themselves, in the context of Boston-run compensatory projects which use the name of Harvard in acquiring government money, profit perhaps from an occasional flash of insight, but which in raw fact make little or no dent upon the lives of any detectable number of black children and instead serve mainly to tie up Harvard's hands, the scholars themselves becoming hostage to the School Committee, arming it with prestige, tricking it out with bits of academia, and keeping the once-brave voice of Harvard silent, and its corporate mouth closed.

It is, I may add, as a graduate of Harvard and one who has often been obliged to apologize for its apathy before the anger of the Negro community, that I lodge this charge of moral failure and ethical cowardice at those who dictate policy for the University, above all the President and Deans. We have yet to discover how our nation's outstanding place of learning can sit back in brick oblivion and course-book apathy and watch America's Number One Norern Segregationist chart her way to power not seven minutes distant, not five miles off. In this Harvard shows itself no different perhaps than the society of which it is a product. No more and no less than the white bigot of South Boston, or the raw-voiced howling redneck of Alabama, the genial scholars of education and urban problems leave their offices at Harvard, step into their attractive little cars and drive off to their isolated white homes in segregated suburbs.

We are all to blame.

We are all involved at once.

We are involved not in a modest problem of reasonable dimensions, but in a major agony of revolutionary proportion.

We all know--but few of us speak, less of us care, none of us act.

In the face of gross racial segregation, the weak-kneed liberals on our State Board of Education have given up all leverage and released state funds in return for token gestures. As a result, the Negro population has turned it upon itself and found its salvation only in the lream of a black community governing the lives of black children, educating black kids in black classrooms under black teachers and headmasters. It is not surprising that this has happened and, in many respects, it is probably just as well. Whether we like it or not, in any event, the time has passed when the white community can any longer call the signals. We have not the choice--and we have forfeited the right--to tell the Negroes what to do about their children's lives. We can no longer call for mild styles of Sunday-morning brotherhood and moderation.

There has been too much moderation.

There have been truckloads of reasoned understanding.

There has been a whole decade of gentle and unoffending condemnation of the Boston Public Schools.