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Chapter 2 The NAACP Challenge to Segregation Nate Jones In November of 1969 Nate Jones heeded the call of Roy Wilkins, long-time executive secretary of the NAACP, and left his private practice in Youngstown , Ohio, to become general counsel of the NAACP in New York. As he surveyed the NAACP and the civil rights movement, they appeared in shambles. • His immediate predecessor had resigned in protest when the NAACP fired a staff member for publishing an article criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court for its failure to enforce Brown v. Board ofEducation and the other civil rights of black citizens. • In a series of Northern school cases, the courts of appeal had rejected his predecessor's claim that the mere existence of heavily black and heavily white schools-regardless of cause-denied black children an equal educational opportunity. • Instead, the lower courts had approved segregation resulting from neighborhood schools on the theory that any black family could freely choose a white school by moving to a whites-only neighborhood. The lower courts reached this conclusion only by refusing to permit evidence of housing discrimination. The Supreme Court refused to review these judgments. • The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, long the primary litigating arm of the NAACP, split from the NAACP and shied away from challenging Northern school segregation in the face of the still-massive job of dismantling the Southern dual systems that, fifteen years after Brown, had not desegregated "with all deliberate speed." • In the wake of the riots and the election of a president largely unsympathetic to minority interests, separatists called for' 'black power" over the vast and expanding urban black ghettos and challenged the NAACP's traditional but muted vision of an integrated America. Jones was born in 1926 in Youngstown, Ohio, to parents who had moved from Big Island, Virginia, in the hope that their children could have the educational opportunities they had missed. His father's formal schooling stopped in the fourth grade of a ramshackle, one-room "colored school" 21 22 Beyond Busing when he went to work on the crops full time. In Youngstown, he provided for his family as a delivery truck helper, window washer, steel worker, and night janitor, often holding down two or more jobs to make ends meet. His mother 's education ceased at the same grade level, but after her children were grown she attended night classes. In 1962 she graduated from high school at the age of sixty-three, the class valedictorian. In Youngstown, Jones attended the state's traditionally "mixed" schools with black and white students but no black teachers or other professional staff. The children of both races got along, but some of the white adults would refer to a black by every name except his given one: "Sambo" still had a harsh ring to Jones's ear. The movie theaters, swimming pools, YMCA, and churches were all segregated in Youngstown. Schools and neighborhoods might be somewhat "mixed"-on white terms to be sure-but social and civil life were largely separate. Maynard Dickerson was a lawyer, the publisher and editor of a weekly black chronicle, the Buckeye Review, and a state NAACP and local community leader. In 1936 Dickerson became Youngstown's first black city prosecutor . Dickerson befriended Jones at an early age and continued to inspire him for the next four decades. Jones would help Dickerson at the paper, sit in the front row of the forum meetings arranged by Dickerson at the all-black YMCA, and talk informally with many of the civil rights and educational spokesmen. He listened to NAACP officials debate the presidents of black colleges about racial reform. He weighed the arguments over self-help and the challenge to the color line. He witnessed firsthand the traditional split among black reformers and, then, proceeded to study the dispute between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois about how blacks could best survive in a hostile white America. Washington had counseled blacks to learn vocational and job skills while accepting segregation, but DuBois argued for complete freedom for blacks by uniting to confront white racism. Every Sunday, Jones also attended the Third Baptist Church. On the Lord's day, his home was the church: for the junior service, the sermon, the three o'clock service and, in the evening, for drama, speech, recitations, and singing at the Baptist Young People's Union. From his first days, Jones was a youthful organizer who talked, prodded, and questioned. He pondered how...

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