Divided we Fail (10 page)

Elsewhere, desegregation of schools in the South began terribly, if at all. In a few smaller towns, the transition went smoothly, but elsewhere, violent mobs blocked black students from attending white schools.
¹⁰
It was becoming clear that in the majority of Southern cities, the order of things would not be too disrupted by pronouncements coming out of the Supreme Court. A year after the
Brown
decision was announced, the justices handed down a second decision,
Brown II
, outlining how they expected school desegregation to be carried out: with “all deliberate speed.”
¹¹
Southern school districts interpreted the line to mean “slowly,” and as years passed, it seemed clear many hoped to get away with “never.”

School districts dragged their feet with the blessing of state governments; the federal government expressed little interest in forcing them to act.
¹²
In 1956, President Eisenhower was in the middle of a contested reelection campaign.
¹³
The Suez Canal crisis and a catastrophic drop in
agricultural prices had taken precedence over the South's intransigence on desegregation. Race was a problem that Eisenhower generally tried to avoid. He, along with his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, publicly supported
Brown
, but the president was wary of pushing the issue any further during an election year; racial justice was never a winning campaign issue for presidential candidates.
¹⁴
The Supreme Court, after all, had not set any deadlines for the South to comply with its decision.

Nevertheless, in the few places in the South that did attempt to comply, the violent reaction captured national headlines. The Eisenhower administration knew the president needed a stronger response and a positive angle.
¹⁵
At a White House press conference on September 11, 1956, a reporter asked Eisenhower if he had any plan for making desegregation work. He was prepared with his response. He said he deplored the violence, and then pointed to Louisville's success story: “I think Mr. Carmichael must be a very wise man. I hope to meet him, and I hope to get some advice from him as to exactly how he did it, because he pursued the policy that I believe will finally bring success in this.”

The next week, Carmichael received an invitation to the White House. He was suddenly a national celebrity. The
New York Times
praised him in an editorial, and
Time
magazine lauded his success in an article titled “How To Integrate.” The superintendent spent forty-five minutes with the president explaining his strategy, and Eisenhower emerged from the meeting impressed. Carmichael had handled the desegregation mandate in “the truly American way,” the president said.

Eisenhower's words were prescient. Carmichael's strategy to integrate schools looked good from afar, but it had little effect on the deep racial divide between Louisville schools. Although all of the city's schools were opened to black students, and by the next year 78 percent of students were in a mixed-race school, many of those schools held only one black student or only one white one.
¹⁶
Ten schools were still all black and eight were all white. Fewer than half of Louisville's black students went to integrated schools in the years after the program was implemented. Only eighty-seven white children out of more than thirty thousand in the city went to a school that was previously all black.

This discrepancy between the hype and the reality in Louisville was rooted in the choice provision of Carmichael's plan, which ensured that no white parents who objected to integration would actually have to send
their children to a school with black students. The lesson whites took away from the reverberations of the unfortunate Shively incident was that pushing blacks and whites together too fast was unwise. The best strategy, many believed, was gradual change, letting whites become comfortable with the idea of sharing their schools with blacks, and perhaps someday, their neighborhoods.
¹⁷

As a key part of this inch-by-inch strategy, the school choice provision allowed parents to request transfers away from their assigned school without explanation. Of white students assigned to traditionally black schools, 85 percent requested a transfer. Black parents were also hesitant to send their children to white schools. Of black students assigned to traditionally white schools, 45 percent requested transfers. More than 90 percent of transfers were granted. In addition, teachers in Louisville were not integrated, meaning black teachers taught only the handful of white children who went to the traditionally black schools. The black students who acquiesced to integration entered environments that were entirely white except for their fellow students. At Central High School little changed in the aftermath of Carmichael's decision. Except for one white student, the school remained all black.
¹⁸

As the limits of Carmichael's program became clear, local civil rights activists realized that the struggle for school integration in Louisville was just beginning, as it was across the South. The school choice strategy pioneered in Louisville was also a favored strategy of other Southern cities. The policy allowed districts to open schools to racial mixing, but in practice, most white parents were allowed plenty of wiggle room if they didn't want their offspring mixing with blacks. The plan had another weakness: It covered only the schools inside the city limits. Jefferson County was a separate district. Whites who moved to the suburbs were beyond the city's reach, and most of the county schools were still lily-white.

As the 1960s progressed, the South's slow-and-unsteady approach to integration became untenable. In the courts, the NAACP was pressing dozens of cases calling for the rapid and proactive desegregation of the schools.
¹⁹
At the same time, a new movement, emboldened by the Supreme Court's overturning of
Plessy v. Ferguson
in the
Brown
case, had taken to the streets to push for the integration of everything else.
²⁰

In April of 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to preach at Louisville's Southern Baptist Seminary, where he repeated his now-familiar call
for blacks to rise up in nonviolent resistance: “We've made the world a neighborhood, now we must make it a brotherhood. We must all live as brothers or we will all perish together as fools,” he told the audience.
²¹
The same day, forty black students—most of them younger than eighteen—followed his instructions and were arrested at sit-ins in segregated restaurants downtown.
²²

The sit-in movement had jumped into the national spotlight a year earlier, when college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began a wave of protests targeting downtown lunch counters.
²³
The tactic had spread like wildfire across the South, mostly among college students, but in Louisville, it was high school students who were leading the protests.
²⁴
Most attended Central. Encouraging them was the young and fashionable publisher of the local black newspaper, Frank Stanley, the NAACP, and, of course, their teacher, Lyman Johnson.
²⁵

As early as 1956, Lyman had taken a group of Central students, many of them members of the NAACP's Youth Council, to conduct sit-ins in drugstores.
²⁶
Four years later, he had been incensed at the irony of a segregated theater that banned blacks from coming to see the Gershwin opera
Porgy and Bess
about a black community in South Carolina. He and his students helped form a picket line outside of the show, and eventually attendance dwindled enough that the show's run was cut short.
²⁷
The pickets moved on, and so did Lyman and his students, to the Blue Boar Cafeteria, an inexpensive plate lunch place catering to downtown office workers.

The boycott and pickets carried on for months, a victory in itself for the black leadership. The sit-ins brought together the black community “as nothing else in the past had,” one
Courier-Journal
reporter wrote.
²⁸
But, as in other places across the South where blacks were becoming bolder about challenging the old power structure, whites were slow to give up their privileges. It took two years from the climatic 1961 sit-ins for Louisville's board of alderman to finally criminalize racial discrimination in public accommodations.
²⁹
The same year, Johnson won another victory: the public school system agreed to desegregate teachers.
³⁰

Black leaders, most of them drawn from top echelons of the community, or, at least, from the squarely middle class, had forced immense progress in just a little over a decade. In theory and usually in practice, blacks could walk into any restaurant and expect service; they could send their child to any school inside the city limits; they could ride on buses, read at the
library, and swim in the pools, just like anybody else.
³¹
Most blacks didn't spend weekends golfing at the Shawnee Golf Course, but just knowing that they had fought and won the right to do so was a point of pride. Yet the day-to-day realities for many blacks had hardly changed at all. Everything was different, and yet nothing was.

For Fran Thomas, who had graduated from Central, the upheaval seemed distant. After years of struggling to support her children on a nurse's salary and keep them out of the public schools, in 1966, she married an army officer, Virgil Thomas, and the family moved to Fort Knox, an army post south of Louisville. Fran left the black cocoon she had been raised in and entered an entirely white world.

The United States was increasing its involvement in the Vietnam War, and only a year after their marriage her husband was deployed. The G.I. Bill meant the couple could afford a home, though. Fran was nervous about the idea of settling permanently outside of the black community, but she went looking for houses before Virgil left. At the far tip of the county, the G.I. Bill had stimulated a suburban growth spurt. Many young military families found their ideal spot in Valley Station, a neighborhood situated along Dixie Highway near the halfway point between Louisville and Fort Knox. As the influx reached its peak in the early 1960s, the schools strained to accommodate all of the new children.
³²

Fran found her dream house there, on a quiet street off the main drag. It was a freshly built one-story ranch with a façade of white stones. There were hardwood floors, a full bathroom and a half bath, three bedrooms, and a big backyard. She stopped to see it one evening and talked to the realtor. Perhaps he was fooled by Fran's light skin or by the dim light, but he agreed to show Fran and Virgil the house the next afternoon. When they arrived at 2 p.m., the realtor took another look at her and refused to let them in. “There are no blacks in this subdivision and there will never be,” he told them, shooing them away.

Fran was furious. The realtor had sparked the rebellious side that had led Fran to dabble in civil rights activism during college. Before she had been reluctant to move to Valley Station; now she was determined. She made an appointment to see Virgil's colonel at Fort Knox. The colonel was surprised to see her, but cordial. The military had long been in the vanguard of racial progress, ever since Truman had integrated the military on executive order in 1948. Fran got down to business quickly: “If I'm not
going to get the house I want to live in, then my husband is not going to Vietnam. He doesn't have anything to go over there and fight for.”

The colonel looked at her, and then told her he would make some calls. He informed the real estate company that if Fran and Virgil Thomas couldn't have their house, then it would have trouble selling any more houses in a neighborhood that was financed with government money. The threat worked and the realtors relented. A few days later, Fran went to sign for her new home.

Virgil left soon after; he would eventually be deployed three times to Vietnam. When her son was old enough to fight, he was sent to war, too. Fran was left alone with her younger children, once again working as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Hospital. Fran's neighbors were tolerant, if not too friendly. Many were also in the military and were more used to the idea of sharing their space with blacks. It was a new decade. As the 1960s dawned, the trauma of the house bombing had been largely forgotten; Shively was still all white, but Carl Braden had been released from jail after Kentucky's sedition law was overturned, and charges were dropped against Anne. Louisville had reached “a most enviable position” when it came to race relations, according to the city's mayor, Bruce Hoblitzell, a gentlemanly former sheriff who addressed both men and women with an affectionate “Honey.”
³³
Enormous, unimaginable progress had been made over the course of just a few years. Still, there was a long way to go.

III

With Our Own

Chapter 9

Riccardo X liked to say that he stopped believing in Santa Claus at a very young age. The apartment where he was born in 1953 had no chimney. It was in the College Court housing project, the oldest public housing in Louisville.
¹
To get to Riccardo's stocking, the jolly old white man with his bag of toys would have had to make it through the projects without being mugged—an unlikely prospect.
²

In the mid-1960s, his mother moved Riccardo and his sister across town to another public housing project, Southwick, built a couple of years earlier on the land where Little Africa, the former enclave of freed blacks in the far West End, once stood. Southwick had been envisioned as a village of two-story, brick apartment buildings with modern plumbing and tidy green spaces where mothers could garden and children could play, all centered around a shopping complex that would carry the neighborhood into the modern era.