MANY Americans are familiar with the famous Supreme Court 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the federal court declared that state laws allowing separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional.

Less known, indeed almost unknown, is the case of Stell v. Savannah Board of Education which was heard in U.S. District Court in Georgia in 1963. The Savannah Board of Education challenged desegregation of its schools and the federal district court ruled in its favor after exhaustive examination of the scientific evidence of racial differences in learning, a process which was never conducted in Brown v. Board of Education. Stell was entirely ignored by the national media, which is one reason why you won’t even find a Wikipedia entry on it today.

In his book Race and Reality, another forgotten and largely ignored cry in the dark against the terrible hubris behind racial egalitarianism, Carleton Putnam, the Princeton-educated lawyer and businessman who took this subject on, described the court’s findings, which were eventually overturned on appeal. (The Supreme Court refused to hear it.)  The Georgia federal court ruled that desegregation would be harmful for both blacks and whites. I believe the court’s findings have been abundantly vindicated, particularly by the chaos that now reigns in black schools, where blacks are forced to learn according to expectations better suited to white schools, and by the legal forms of segregation that have been pursued by whites, who generally relocate or enroll their children in private schools in order to avoid the results of integration all the while duplicitously (or ignorantly) championing full equality without difference in the mistaken belief that this charade is better for blacks. O, white man, you are so dishonest. You are up to your neck in the mud of your own lies.

From Putnam’s book:

“On June 28 the Court announced its opinion and judgment, together with certain findings, the chief of which were:

“5. The psychometric test results have conclusively demonstrated that the differences between white and negro students in learning capabilities and school performance vary in increasing degree from the pre-school period through the completion of high school. The differences between white and negro students were consistent on all types of tests and increased with chronological age at a predictable and constant rate. The negro overlap of the median white scores dropped from approximately 15 % in the lowest grades to 1-2 % in the highest and indicated that the negro group reached an educational plateau as much as four years before the white group. When a special control group was selected for identity of age and intelligence quotient in the lower grades, the negro students lagged by two to four years when the entire group reached the 12th grade.

“6. The tests covered general intelligence, reading and arithmetic achievement, and mental maturity. On the last, the white average was 22 points above the negro average. The achievement tests showed major ability pattern differences. On reading comprehension and arithmetic fundamentals there was virtually no overlap between the two groups . . . .

“8. All the evidence before the Court was to the effect that the differences in tests results between the white and negro students is attributable in large part to hereditary factors, predictably resulting from a difference in the races. The evidence establishes and the Court so finds that of the twenty-point difference in maturity test results between negro and white students in Savannah-Chatham County a negligible portion can be attributed to environmental factors. Furthermore no evidence whatsoever was offered to this Court to show that racial integration of the schools could reduce these differences. Substantially all the difference between these two groups of children is inherent in the individuals and must be dealt with by the defendants [the School Board] as an unchangeable factor in programming the schools for the best educational results.”

So much for the basic facts. Then the Court turned to a related matter:

“11. The congregation of two substantial and identifiable groups in a single classroom, under circumstances of distinct group identification and varying abilities would lead to conflict impairing the educational process. It is essential for an individual to identify himself with a reference group for healthy personality development. Physical and psychological differences are the common basis of group identification, indeed they compel such self-identification. To increase this divisive tendency, it has been established without contradiction, that selective association is a universal human trait; that physically observable racial differences form the basis for preferential association and that patterns of racial preference are formed and firmly established at a preschool age.

“12. The effects of intergroup association are reasonably predictable on the basis of that branch of psychology known as social dynamics. In the case of two identifiable groups in the same classroom, intergroup tensions and conflicts result. These become substantial when the groups have a high identification index in a situation where the difference between them is as great as that existing between white and negro children in the Savannah-Chatham County schools.”

Finally the Court came to the question of the exceptional Negro:

“15. Throughout the trial, counsel for plaintiffs emphasized the conceded ability of certain superior negro children to meet the progress norms of the white classes and implied that at least selective transfers of such students to white schools would not cause injury similar to the effects of group integration. The Court finds that such selective integration would cause even greater psychological harm to the individual negro children involved and to the balance of their group.

“16. Negro children so transferred would not only lose their right of achievement in their own group but would move to a class where they would be inescapably conscious of total social rejection by the dominant group. Such children must try to identify themselves with the white children while unable to free themselves from continuing identification with other negro children. Additionally, the children involved, while able to maintain the rate of the white class at first, would, according to all of the test results, thereafter tend to fall further back in each succeeding term.

“17. The effects on the remaining negro children would be even more injurious. The loss of the better group members would greatly increase any existing sense of inferiority. The competitive drive to educational accomplishment for those not transferred would be taken away. The Court finds that selective integration would cause substantial and irremovable psychological injury both to the individual transferee and to other negro children.”

Please follow and like us: