ustxtxb_obs_1967_10_27_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

cally pursued by the conservative majority after the 1965 bond issue which liberal board members foresee as having farreaching and perhaps unavoidably tragic consequences for the city. The plotting of locations for new schools after passage of the 1965 bonds was in conservative control. Mrs. White, when she saw the maps of proposed locations, sent copies to seven men who held respected positions in various fields relating to sociology and urban affairs at Rice, the University of Houston, and Texas Southern University. Would the proposed locations, she asked, tend to perpetuate ghetto patterns among children attending them? They would, most certainly, the sociologists replied unanimously. Interested, the men offered to donate their time and talents to the district. They would be happy to conduct a study to help determine sites which would enable the district to take positive steps toward elimination of racial tensions and self-perpetuating cycles of ignorance and poverty. Further, they were willing to assume the responsibility of soliciting the necessary funds for such a study themselves. They were turned down by the board. IN DALLAS ABOUT THIS time, Mrs. Barnstone tried to interest the board in a US Office of Education report which contained results of a nationwide survey on equality of education. It offered proof, she argued, that in a normal integrated situation, children do better work than in a ghetto with remedial work. The child’s whole concept of self can be altered by the difference in the two situations, the report said; it seemed to point conclusively to factors which can make a vast difference in young lives. She, too, was ignored. The building program went along as planned. Shortly after construction began, a Negro family named Broussard asked an injunction to halt the construction of new buildings long enough to have a study to determine proper sites. The Federal District judge ruled against the injunction, and the Broussard case is now on appeal in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New OrleanS. While the case is on appeal, the district has burned the midnight oil getting about 30 new schools built in conservative-selected locations. The $59.8 million bond issue was supposed to fund a five-year program; two years later, about a month ago, only $3.5 million was left unencumbered. Construction also has begun on a $5.5 million-dollar administration building which, though it was unpublicized during the bond campaign, is to be paid for by 1965 bonds. It is located in the wealthy River Oaks area. “When the National School Board Association met here,” Mrs. White says, “we spent $140,000 refurbishing the old downtown administration building. That’s the type of spending I deplore.” She also looks askance at expenses incurred in extensive remodeling of crumbling old buildings, some of which stand within a few blocks of sites selected for new schools. Finally, she comments on the rising expenditure of tax dollars in legal cases to prevent integration. When an integration suit is brought against the district, Mrs. White says, the board does not discuss it and decide upon a proper course of action. It is assumed that such cases will be fought automatically by school board attorney Joe Reynolds. The district’s annual budget for legal fees, she says, has risen from $25,000 to $80,000 within the past four years. 0 The New Left Under Fire Dallas The New Left has come to Dallas and things have begun jumping. In the latter part of September the announcement was made that a Draft Information Center would be opened across the street from the entrance to Fair Park to “provide information, guidance, counseling, and other assistance not readily available to persons registered or about to be registered under the Military Service Act of 1967.” Cong. Joe Pool, rather like a bumptious version of the White Knight in the television commercial, came charging into the picture waving his American flag, ready to save his fair constituency from the “communist plot” by promising that there would be a full investigation, complete with hearings, by the House unAmerican Activities Committee. About this time another bomb was dropped, when the Dallas Times Herald ran a front page story stating that a “selfavowed Marxist” was head of a group calling itself the Dallas Draft Resistance Committee. From then on things became a hodge podge, with Draft Information Center and Draft Resistance Committee being used as synonomous and interchangeable terms by both Cong. Pool and the Times Herald. Moreover, the Students for a Democratic Society, Southern Methodist University, the Dallas Cmte. for a Peaceful Solution in The writer is an Observer contributing editor. 6 The Texas Observer Vietnam, and a New Left newspaper dragged in to spice up the action. If this all sounds confusing there are those in Dallas who feel the confusion is purposeful, so as to blur the differentiation between these groups and by indicting one to indict them all. To unravel the confusion it must first be conceded that there are interrelationships between the people of the left-of Sue Horn Estes center organizations involved; but as there are only ten or twenty New Leftists in town they would be expected to support the same causes and organizations. The Draft Information Center and the Draft Resistance Committee are a case in point. The leadership of both of these groups is opposed to the US involvement in the war in Vietnam; they believe the US should effect a unilateral withdrawal immediately; they believe the draft is an infringement on the right of the young men who are made to serve in the armed forces because of the draft and that the maintenance of the draft perpetuates the “war machine” and our continued presence in Vietnam. The way to hamper the machinery, it is reasoned, is to gum up the draft. The procedure for doing this is where the two groups part company. The Draft Information Center was started locally by an ad hoc committee with Robert Foley, a 23-year-old Virginian and former SMU graduate student, as director. One source says that the initial financial support came from the Dallas Committee for a Peaceful Solution in Vietnam, but the Committee quickly disavowed any connection with the center when Pool, waving his HUAC banner, appeared on the horizon. The center people and many of the younger militants in the Dallas peace movement were angered and dismayed at their elders’ disavowal, regarding that as a failure to stand up under fire, a lack of commitment to the cause. As a result, the militants are expected to set up their own peace committee sometime in the near future. The center provides both religious and non-religious counseling and hands out billfold-size cards listing the various Selective Service deferments, advising a potential draftee what his rights are under the new law, and suggesting alternatives to military service. Two listed alternatives, not recommended by the Center, are emigration to Canada and refusing to be inducted. It is Foley’s belief that adequate information is not available to draftees through local Selective Service boards because the boards have too much of a stake in seeing that draft quotas are met. Foley is currently awaiting a decision from a draft board in Virginia on his application for conscientious objector status. He isn’t hopeful, in view of his anti-war activities. The Draft Resistance Cmte. approach is somewhat different and more militant. It is headed by 20-year-old SDS organizer