Divided we Fail (13 page)

In Kentucky, the population went from being 70 percent to only 50 percent rural between 1940 and 1960.
²
More than two hundred thousand people moved to Louisville in those two decades, and three-quarters of them moved to the suburbs. In Louisville, the suburbs grew as the city population dropped for the first time in the city's history.
³
In moving directly from farm to suburb, these people skipped the experience of “urbanization,” holding onto the more conservative value systems they had brought with them from the countryside. The historian C. Vann Woodward called the process “rurbanization.”
⁴

Joyce Spond was part of this less-noticed migration of rural whites to the city. She had been born one of nine children raised on a farm in Nelson County, a Catholic stronghold in the center of Kentucky. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a homemaker. Life in rural Kentucky revolved around church and school. Joyce went to a one-room schoolhouse for elementary school, and then commuted to Old Kentucky Home High School, named for its proximity to the plantation commemorated in the state's official song. “My Old Kentucky Home” was about the idyllic countryside and the hard life for slaves on the plantation, and it was also about emigration. “A few more days till we totter on the road, then my old Kentucky home, good night,” the lyrics went. The rolling hills around Bardstown, forty miles south of Louisville, were beautiful, but there was little work. High school graduates looking for a job outside of farming had only one choice: to move to the city.

Already, several of her siblings had left for Louisville, and Joyce saw no option but to follow. Many of her Shively neighbors had followed the same trajectory. Most were just a generation away from coal mining or subsistence farming. In the blocks around her lived other graduates from Old Home and schools like it across the state. They were strivers who saw the tracts of ranch houses and one-acre yards as the next step up the ladder.
Once the Wades had moved away, it only took a few months for peace to return to the neighborhood. But underneath the surface calm, a deep anxiety was lurking.

The residents of Shively thought of themselves as ordinary Americans, patriotic and hardworking, and as the 1960s progressed, they wondered where the country was headed as they watched the news of the riots happening a few miles away in Parkland and in cities around the country. They worried that everything they had worked for could be taken away; the bombing in 1954 was enough proof that the violence of the radicals might intrude here. But for those who were paying attention, scarier even than the riots and the antiwar protesters tearing up black neighborhoods and college campuses were the nine black-robed men and the aggressive members of the Johnson administration who seemed determined to use their power to promote civil rights for blacks at the expense of whites. Moving to the suburbs was part of what was supposed to be a seamless journey from rural poverty to urban blue-collar endeavor to eventual white-collar success. The presence of blacks there threatened this path. If Shively became known as a black neighborhood, property values would decline, and, as important, so would the self-worth and social standing the whites who lived there were fighting so hard to attain.
⁵

Joyce stayed with her sister for only a few months in the city while she gained her footing. She got a job at White Castle, and then enrolled in comptometer school to learn how to use an accounting machine. Her pale blue eyes and pretty face made marriage a likely prospect, however. Within a year, she had married and not long after was moving into her own Shively ranch house a couple of streets away from her sister's.

Joyce's husband was a Teamster who eventually took a good job working for the union. When Joyce became pregnant, she quit her own job to stay at home. She had a son, and a couple of years later, twin girls. Their house was a small bungalow with a front porch and a garage, but the most important feature, as far as Joyce was concerned, was Schaffner Elementary, two blocks away. To Joyce, the school's proximity was a luxurious amenity: from first to fourth grade, Joyce had walked two miles each way to the local one-room schoolhouse, and the trip to her high school had taken an hour and sometimes more on a school bus, one way.

Just as in the rural towns where the new suburbanites had come from, the school was the center of their lives. Joyce had been ambitious before her
marriage, and now she poured her energy into the PTA, where she rose in the ranks to become the president. As the 1960s came to a close, her role expanded beyond organizing bake sales.

In 1964, Congress had passed and President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act. Among other major precedents in the law, it allowed the US attorney general to sue school districts that continued to segregate and to take away their federal funding.
⁶
The landmark law seemed to spark even more anger and violence: For five years running after the passage of the law, summer riots broke out in black ghettos.

Baffling to white suburbanites, the Johnson administration suggested that the violence and rage in the ghetto was their fault.
⁷
A study commissioned by the president, the Kerner Report, blamed the violence on “a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans” inside the “racial ghetto.” Whites outside the ghetto had “prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization,” while blacks were excluded even as “this affluence has been flaunted” before them. “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it,” the report said.
⁸

Under Johnson's leadership, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) took on a more proactive role in the pursuit of school desegregation.
⁹
Until 1965, the NAACP, working mostly alone, had been slogging through court case after court case trying to force school districts to comply with the
Brown
ruling. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the federal government finally stepped in as an enforcer.

The new role was driven in part by another influential report commissioned by the president.
¹⁰
The Coleman Report, as it came to be known, was a sweeping survey of the state of education for minority children published in 1966. It found that white and black children, particularly in the South, still attended schools where segregation was “nearly complete.” In schools where there was some integration, it was almost always a few blacks mixed in with whites, never a few whites in a black school. Looking at standardized tests, the report found a disturbing gap between black and white students. The gap started early, gradually widening as students reached the upper grades. Southern blacks, followed by Southern whites, did the worst on tests, but in the South, the gap between the two groups was largest.

The report's most important finding was that schools mattered less than what happened at home in the students' lives. Yet this was less true for minority students; for them, schools mattered much more in determining whether they would achieve: “It is for the most disadvantaged children that improvements in school quality will make the most difference in achievement.” Facilities mattered, teachers mattered more, but most important was the family background of the child and of the other students the child was surrounded by, according to the Coleman Report. It concluded that if a student's classmates came from wealthier homes where parents had higher levels of education and where achievement was emphasized, the student would perform better in school. If the classmates were poor, with parents who had weaker educational backgrounds, the student would do worse in school.

The report gave the Johnson administration a mandate to push harder on desegregation. Just as important as its promise to cut funding for school districts that continued to segregate, in 1966, HEW created guidelines describing what a desegregated school district should look like.
¹¹
No longer could school districts hide behind the vaguely worded
Brown
decision. The guidelines specifically targeted freedom of choice plans, like the one in Louisville, and required school districts to prove that these plans actually led to desegregated schools or risk losing federal funding.

The courts still had a big role to play. In the spring of 1968, an NAACP case contesting a freedom of choice plan in New Kent County, near Richmond, Virginia, reached the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs argued in
Green v. New Kent County
that the school district had created a complicated web of overlapping bus routes in order to ensure that the county's two high schools remained racially segregated.
¹²
Earl Warren, the chief justice who facilitated the passage of the unanimous
Brown
decision, was still on the bench. Also on the Court was a newcomer: Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who had orchestrated the
Brown
strategy, had been nominated a year earlier. When the lawyers stood up to make their oral arguments to the Court, on April 5, it was less than twenty-four hours since Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis.
¹³

The Court's decision came swiftly. In May, the judges argued that merely telling families that their children could “freely” choose where they wanted to go was not enough to ensure equity.
¹⁴
School districts must take
affirmative
action in ensuring racial mixing and create “a system without a ‘white' school and a ‘Negro' school, but just schools.”

For civil rights activists, the decision, although it was still vague about what school districts should actually do to end segregation in the schools, was something to celebrate during an otherwise traumatic year. Along with the death of Martin Luther King, Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam, and that June Robert Kennedy, a favorite of many blacks because of his efforts to help African American communities and his association with Dr. King, was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
¹⁵
But for white Southerners in the suburbs, the court's decision was added to other ominous signs—the riots, the antiwar protests, the spread of drugs, sex, and crime—that the security of their place in the world was in danger.

That summer, a Republican presidential candidate responded to their fears. Richard Nixon, carefully positioning himself between the segregationist third-party candidate, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, and the liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, pitched his campaign to voters living in places like Shively in what would later be called “The Southern Strategy.”
¹⁶
It was these people—white suburbanites, many not too many years removed from the farm, living in cities under siege by the civil rights movement—who had almost won him the 1960 election against Kennedy.
¹⁷
He understood what they wanted to hear. He spoke about the need to restore “law and order.” He sounded reasonable on Vietnam, vowing to end the war, but responsibly.
¹⁸
And, most important to his Southern constituents after the
Green
decision, he laid out a reassuring stance on school integration.

Brown
, Nixon said, speaking during a television interview in Charlotte, North Carolina, “was a correct decision.”
¹⁹
“But on the other hand,” he added, “the proactive desegregation of the schools, as the justices had ordered in the
Green
decision, “should be very scrupulously examined and in many cases I think should be rescinded.” The setting for the interview most likely wasn't an accident. Charlotte was the setting for one of the nearly two hundred cases questioning freedom of choice plans.

In 1965, encouraged by the new provisions in the Civil Rights Act, local NAACP lawyers in Charlotte had sued the school board on behalf of a black family whose son had been assigned to a black school farther from their home than the local neighborhood school.
²⁰
In April 1971, the
Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in the case,
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
.

Green
, which had focused on a small town, had not settled what large cities like Charlotte and Louisville—where there was significant residential segregation—should do to create racial balance in their schools. The
Swann
case was more precise: “We find no basis for holding that the local school authorities may not be required to employ bus transportation as one tool of school desegregation. Desegregation plans cannot be limited to the walk-in school.”
²¹
In other words, the justices believed busing was a potential and even preferable tool for rooting out school segregation. The Court foresaw the potential arguments against this solution, but believed it was worth it, even if it was “administratively awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre in some situations.” They also argued that though it might be inconvenient, busing students across town certainly wasn't a novel idea. After all, students had been bused ever since the country began shifting away from one-room schoolhouses. About 40 percent of students traveled to school by bus in 1970, the Court noted.

The justices may have predicted there would be resistance to their ruling, but it's unlikely they could have predicted how much.

Chapter 11

In the fall of 1971, dozens of school districts started the school year with new student assignment plans, many of them involving busing.
¹
Joyce Spond watched these developments with concern. The
Shively Newsweek
, which had floated the idea that the Wades and Bradens had been co-conspirators in the house bombing, followed the desegregation cases closely, and Joyce read it regularly. Louisville, where most schools were as segregated as they had been before 1954, was ripe for a court case.