lation in others, and a great many people said it was a rather silly kind of provincial thing to talk about, because what was happening in America was the result of immutable, unchanging laws, about which there was not much that could or should be done, and we just had to learn to live with it.

It seemed to some of us around the country, separated and isolated from each other in our thinking and perceptions, that it was a rather illogical way to go about things, consciously and unconsciously adding to that population trend, if there was any way that something might be done to deal with it.

A year or so ago, in trying to get a rural poverty demonstration project underway, I called together a group of people, primarily economists, to talk about what we might do in some rural counties in eastern Oklahoma. The gist of what they said was there is not anything that can be done except to give a bus ticket to everybody who will leave, and those who will not, just subsidize them until they die off.

That might well be true, but I am not willing to admit that it is true. I think if it is, it is a very sad thing to have to admit. And I hope that this conference, which is the first national conference held on this subject, will help to make it respectable to talk about this problem, and will stimulate a great deal more thinkiing and research, and action on the whole subject of the rural-urban shift.

This noon we are very pleased to have as our principal speaker a young man, a good friend of mine, who is recognized in Washington as an outstanding public servant. His B.A. degree is from Brooklyn College and he holds a law degree from Yale Law School. From 1954 to 1958 he was an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, legal defense fund, working directly with now Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall on the school desegregation cases.

He joined the staff of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1961 and served there in various capacities, with distinction, and was appointed in 1965 by President Johnson as Staff Director of that agency.

I am very pleased to present at this time a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., who now lives in Washington, D.C., which makes him a product of the urban-to-urban population shift, William L. Taylor.

REMARKS OF WILLIAM L. TAYLOR

Mr. TAYLOR. Senator Harris, gentlemen at the head table, ladies and gentlemen-Senator, I thank you for that very kind introduction. If I am to be candid, I must say I think that was the least you could do. Everybody knows that a good conference planner has to be a ruthless person, if one may use a political adjective. But you do not know how ruthless conference planners can be until they call you up a few days before and say, "We would like you to be a luncheon speaker at the conference we are having, and oh, by the way, you are replacing Gunnar Myrdahl."

You are flattered for a moment. And then the realization slowly begins to dawn on you, as it has. I met a friend of mine at the airport last night coming out here, and he said, "What are you doing here?" So I broke it to him gently. His face dropped a little bit. The fellow next to me said, “Did you say Gunnar Myrdahl was not coming?"

So I begin to know what it must be like to have the job of replacing Sandy Koufax.

On the other hand, I do want to congratulate the planners of this conference, and particularly on their timing, as well. I think I may be speaking on behalf of some breaucrats from Washington in discussing the timing, because, as you know, we have a population shift taking place in Washington these days. It is called the Poor People's Campaign.

Ordinarily this could be a very exciting time in Washington. It could be a time of change, which is coming about through protest, which I believe is the way change has really come about over the last few years. But right now, the atmosphere does not seem to be propitious, because Congress is talking about a $6 billion budget cut, and one can probably predict that that will not come necessarily out of the rivers and harbors legislation.

So it really is a kind of frustrating time for many of us. And although we are all key people who should be on duty at all times, I think we are probably grateful to be here discussing the problem in an academic atmosphere for a while.

As John Kain suggested just before lunch, what I would like to do is to share with you some of the personal impressions that we gathered from a hearing we held in Montgomery covering a 16-county rural area, black belt area of Alabama, just concluded 2 weeks ago.

You have had a very good estimate of the statistical projections, of demographic facts, from Calvin Beale and others. John Kain has gotten into the question of prescription, and you will be hearing more about that in time to come.

But I hope that I can add a little bit to the perspective, just in the personal terms of having been exposed to the situations.

I might say that we do not necessarily go into this with a great deal of expertise. We have a very diversified staff at the Commission— people from all kinds of backgrounds. But we do not seem to be too strong on people who come out of a rural background.

That may be typified a little bit by the fact that my secretary went down with me to the hearing. As she went out with some of the lawyers to interview witnesses, she took a camera with her into Dallas County, and after the interview was over, she asked a farmer if she could take a picture of his horse. As the story was recounted to me afterward, the farmer was surprised for two reasons.

First of all, nobody had ever asked him to take a picture of his horse before. And second of all, it was not a horse, it was a mule.

When we understood these investigations which led to the hearings some months ago, what we had in mind was examining all of the issues which bear on the opportunity for employment and economic security for Negroes living in the 16-county area. We wanted particularly to assess the effectiveness of Government programs in eliminating discrimination and dependency and creating opportunity.

We began the investigation, I should add, with some trepidation. Although our agency has had some experience over the years investigating civil rights denials in the rural South, we were entering into some new territory, and we did not want to find ourselves in a position of making judgments without sufficient information on some of the major policy questions that you are considering at this conference

questions such as whether the Federal Government should take major steps designed to influence migration patterns in particular ways.

But it became very clear during the course of our investigations that even if the hearing did not furnish all the policy answers, it would make clear the one overriding failing of our present policy: that for Negro citizens in rural Alabama our present policy is not providing any choice whatsoever. We are not making it possible for them to stay on the land. We are not equipping them with the education and the skills which will enable them to survive in the big cities and to get jobs once they get there. And we are not providing anyplace else for them to go.

Now, freedom of choice is a favorite phrase in the South. And we heard it frequently from southern school officials, and from other government officials, such as the welfare people, who told us that the main reason that Negroes did not have an adequate diet or balanced diet was that they do not choose to eat certain kinds of foods.

But the overwhelming fact of life in these rural counties is the complete absence of choice for Negro citizens. The foreclosing of the opportunity for a decent life begins very early.

Consider, if you will, the children of one of our witnesses, Mrs. Patty Mae Haynes, who is a welfare recipient in Macon County, Ala. We went to her house shortly before she testified at the hearing. And this is the way Eugene Patterson, who is our vice chairman, describes his impression.

At the end of the trail, he says, is a small clearing, where Mrs. Patty Mae Haynes lives with her six children.

The sagging two-room shack has no glass windows, simply some shutter holes in the rotten plank walls. Large cracks between the planks admit the rain when the wind is blowing. Rain cascades straight down the roof even when there is no wind. A bony dog sleeps under the dilapidated porch. Inside the house two sagging beds sleep the family of seven. The husband disappeared 2 years ago. The six children have been tested at the nearby school and found to be suffering from various degrees of retardation.

Mrs. Haynes cooks whatever food she can get from welfare on a small stove in the bedroom. There is no toilet, even outdoors. The water supply comes from a puddle far down in the woods, where a small spring drips out of a rock ledge. The oldest of the children-the oldest of whom was 13-ate pieces of chicken from a central plate, and threw the bones to the dog through holes in the porch. Then the small ones stuck their heads in the water bucket and drank from it. The kerosene lamp supplies light when Mrs. Haynes can afford kerosene. The lamp was empty. It was hard to imagine bedtime in such a house.

And he goes on.

I think the impact of this kind of existence upon the chances of Mrs. Haynes' children was described most graphically by Dr. Mermann of the Yale University School of Medicine, who had examined 800 children in Lawrence County, Ala. Ninety percent of these children had never seen a doctor. Though they were ragged and dirty, they appeared to be cheerful children.

But Dr. Mermann's examination showed four out of five of these children were suffering from anemia so profound as to have merited treatment in a doctor's office. The anemia was accounted for almost entirely by malnutrition. Dr. Mermann found only 20 children had hemoglobin counts approaching the median hemoglobin count of white Americans.

And, as he told the Commission, these children have two-thirds the amount of red blood you and I have. For some, the figure is one-third. With that small amount of oxygen-carrying capacity, it is no wonder these children fall asleep in school classes and suffer from general apathy and fatigue. He estimated that the life expectancy of these children as being 10 years shorter than that of whites.

He also said that the medical evidence suggested that malnutrition may cause brain damage and arrest mental development.

So although Mrs. Haynes' condition may be extreme, and I think it is even for the black belt, Dr. Mermann's work and work of others showed that the effects of malnutrition are repeated over and over again a thousand fold through the black belt, and I am sure through other poverty areas of this country.

It is, of course, the welfare system, as Commissioner Patterson pointed out, which is keeping Mrs. Haynes and her children alive, but it is doing so just barely. The monthly payment for a family of four in Alabama is $85. For Mrs. Haynes' family, I believe it is $113. And for many who administer the welfare programs, it is considered a form of charity, which is to be dispensed for those who are deserving, for those whose conduct conforms to accepted standards, and also still today for those who know which door to come into the welfare office.

Even if Mrs. Haynes' children were not terribly damaged by the effects of malnutrition, their life chances, their economic opportunities, are not going to be improved very much by the education that they are now receiving.

Rural schools generally are poor, but those we saw in the area we visited were, in our judgment, incredibly bad.

We all know that historically southern schools have been segregated, supposedly separate but equal. But Plessy v. Ferguson was no more the law of the land in the South, as many of us know, before 1954 than Brown v. Board of Education is today.

In many of the rural areas in the South, including the counties that we looked at, Negroes for years had no public schools. The schools that did exist were provided by churches and foundations. Even today, the rule of Plessy is not followed in the hearing area. Alabama expenditures per pupil for 1966-67 school year were about $390 per pupil, which placed the State 46th in the Nation. County support for schools is woefully inadequate. The State funds accounted for about 78 percent of the non-Federal revenues for public schools in the State. Two-thirds of the children that we are talking about in this black belt area are Negro children. Only a handful of them are going to the formerly all-white schools. Needless to say, no white child is attending an all-black school.

Recently, the Department of Justice calculated the value per pupil of the school buildings and their contents in the black belt areas. White schools and their contents were valued at an average of $823 per pupil, and Negro schools valued at $240 per pupil.

The insurance valuations on these buildings differed per pupil by amounts ranging from $100 to $400. In the white schools, the children have an average of about 14 books per child. In the Negro schools, about six books per child.

In the 16-county school system that we studied, all of the white high schools were accredited, but only two-thirds of the Negro high

schools were accredited, and almost none of the Negro high schools were accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.

The superintendent of schools in Butler County testified that 12thgrade Negro students in the accredited Negro high schools in his district averaged four to six grades behind the national achievement

norms.

We heard from a bright young girl who is a student in this high school, and she said she wanted to become a registered nurse. She was ninth in her class of 114, but she was not accepted for admission because her achievements test scores in science, math, and verbal ability were far below the accepted minimum standards. She felt that her school had failed her, and obviously it has.

The graduates of the Butler County high schools, and all the graduates of schools in rural Alabama are the students who get a Greyhound bus ticket as a graduation present. They come to the cities, where they are several years behind their competitors, with nothing to sell but their muscle and their will to work, because the academic failure of the Negro black belt schools is surpassed by their failure to provide anything which is relevant in the way of training or vocational education. Half the county school systems we looked at have no real vocational education program at all. Only home economics and vocational agriculture were offered.

And where vocational courses are offered to Negroes, they are being trained for the traditional or the lower paying jobs.

If these graduates and nongraduates stay home, can they find work? Before 1965, they did not find work, except in wood and lumber mills. For example, Greenville, Ala., is a town with four factories and a textile mill employing about 1,800 people. No Negroes were hired in these factories until the effective date of the equal employment title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And today, with one exception, these plants have been hiring Negro women as sewers in large numbers, and this has encouraged a number of young Negroes to remain in Greenville.

The same is true of the two manufacturing plants that we find in Greenville. The one exception is the Dan River Mills plant, where three Negroes have been employed for years only as janitors and laborers.

Another new source of employment in the black belt should be the pulp and paper industry. These industries may not be expanding as a whole, but for example, three new mills have been built within the last 2 years in this area. Of the 782 jobs that were provided, 112, or 14 percent, were being held by Negroes, and these plants are located in areas where the population is 60 to 80 percent Negro.

Similarly, for all of the companies in the 16-county area reporting increases in employment in 1966 and 1967, less than 25 percent of the new jobs went to Negroes.

The EEOC reports show that Negroes account for only 22 percent of all the reported jobs in the black belt.

We found to our dismay that the most potent tool of the Federal Government to assure equal opportunity in employment to Negroes, the Federal contract compliance operation, has not been efficiently utilized in this hearing area. This is true in other areas of the country

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