Factors Associated with Attitudes Toward Desegregation in a Florida Residential Suburb

Attitudes of white parents of school children in Winter Park, as measured by a Likert scale, are widely distributed but predominantly unfavorable. Favorable and unfavorable attitudes are significantly associated with occupational prestige, education, a configuration indicating relative exposure to southern race relations norms, and regional self-identification. T HIS IS a preliminary report on a study of attitudes toward public school desegregation and their associated background characteristics in an urban, cosmopolitan Florida suburb. Reports in the literature of field research on community attitudes toward public school desegregation in the South have been relatively infrequent. This is an interesting state of affairs in view of the awareness of sociologists and social psychologists that the issue of school desegregation in the South provides a rare opportunity for significant field research.' The events leading up to and following the Supreme Court decisions of 1954 and 1955 regarding desegregation constitute one of the few "ready-made" natural sociological experiments in the history of the United States. There is here an opportunity to test the usefulness of sociological research techniques for providing information to personnel concerned with action policy. Such information may be particularly useful where the areas concerned are culturally heterogeneous as in the border states and Florida, where the attitude structure of the population cannot be accurately intuited or inferred. Not only is it desirable to estimate sociologically the attitude structure of such populations, there should also be an attempt to isolate social background factors which might serve in the future as indicators of variables in an attitude prediction configuration. Although no attempt is made in this study to test the efficiency of attitudes as predictors of behavior, there is a general feeling in the literature that community attitudes are important as possible predictors of action.2 In the years between the Supreme Court decisions and the writing of this paper there have been some interesting research reports. Killian and Haer related attitudes toward desegregation to social background characteristics in Tallahassee3 and Killian directed the research on attitudes of Florida public officials toward desegregation which is included in the Florida Attorney General's brief submitted to the Supreme Court.4 The Tallahassee study reports on an area sample of whites in a typical southern city, located in the culturally "Deep South" area of northern Florida. Outside Florida, Tumin has reported in considerable detail the results of interviews with white members of the labor force in Guilford County, North Carolina, with respect to factors associated with attitudes toward desegregation. These include reports on "readiness and resistance" to desegregation as *This paper is based in part upon the author's doctoral dissertation (The Ohio State University, 1959). The preliminary research was supported in part by a Faculty Grant-in-Aid from the Southern Fellowships Fund. Additional postdoctoral research was supported in part by a grant from the Research Fund of The Woman's College, University of North Carolina. I For a detailed analysis of opportunities available and needed research, see Robin M. Williams, Burton R. Fisher and Irving Janis, "Educational Desegregation as a Context for Basic Social Science Research," American Sociological Review, 21 (October 1956), 557-583; and Stuart W. Cook, "Desegregation: A Psychological Analysis," American Psychologist, 12 (January 1957), 1-13. 2 The reader is referred to the chapter on attitudes in any standard social psychology textbook. 3 L. M. Killian and J. L. Haer, "Variables Related to Attitudes Regarding School Desegregation Among White Southerners," Sociometry, 23 (July 1958), 159164. 4Richard W. Ervin and Ralph E. Odum, Amicus Curiae Brief of the Attorney General of Florida, In the Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1954. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.215 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 05:03:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms