Divided we Fail (16 page)

That night, in the parking lot of the Bittersweet Shopping Center, just across the street from Southern High School, the protests escalated.
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Demonstrators, many of them high school students, set bonfires fueled with
school bus tires. They broke store windows and battered parked cars. The riot lasted four hours before a beleaguered group of police officers beat the protesters back with riot shields and clubs. The Jefferson County executive, who functioned like a mayor, had been a vocal opponent of busing throughout the court case and could take at least some of the blame for the lack of peaceful compliance to the desegregation order. A day after the Bittersweet riot, he was forced to call in the National Guard.

Protests continued for weeks. A white teenager shot out the eye of a police officer with a slingshot.
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Hundreds of white protesters were arrested. Black students were harassed in school, and one was arrested for carrying a .38 caliber pistol onto a school bus as self-protection. At Ballard High School, in the wealthiest section of the suburbs, twenty black students were suspended for “grabbing girls and hugging them” in the hallways.
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At some schools, false rumors spread that black boys had raped white girls.
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On his first day of school a month after the chaos had begun, Riccardo braced himself as he packed his school materials in a briefcase and a pistol in his pocket, and made the fifteen-minute drive from his house in Newburg, across the enemy lines, and into Okolona. Judge Gordon, hoping to avoid the chaos that had overtaken other cities in the first few weeks of busing, came up with an idea to create fenced protest zones outside of every school. Protesters could have their free speech, but the children would—in theory—be protected in case things got out of control. At Southern, the protesters were gathered in the parking lot of the Bittersweet Shopping Center, still spitting distance away.

As Riccardo pulled up to school, protesters shouted epithets and spit at him, but they stayed behind their fence. Many white students and a few black students stayed home during the first days of school, but they were beginning to trickle back by October. After school let out, Riccardo drove home, relieved that the first day was over, and that he had survived.

Despite the onerous requirements of Judge Gordon's busing plan, which required black children to spend more time in buses and which closed down schools with a long legacy in the black community, African Americans, for the most part, didn't protest.
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On the first day of school, three black protesters, led by a slender woman named Rachelle Edmonson, picketed against busing at Central.
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But for the most part, black parents were resigned, and some were enthusiastic about the desegregation plan. “We don't like it, we hate it just as much and want to demonstrate over it,
but it's too much of an opportunity to miss for our children,” one mother told the local paper.
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Riccardo X hunkered down at Southern and taught his history classes. Eventually, white students started going to school again. By winter, the marches had ended. The city settled into an uneasy peace. For many black Louisvillians like Riccardo and Jacquelyn who traveled into the suburbs that year, there would be lasting scars. “To actually experience first-hand people who hate them because of the color of their skin is quite an emotional experience,” John Whiting, the principal of Shawnee High School in the West End, told the
Courier-Journal
. Others said it was worth it. “You cannot achieve nothing without sacrifice,” said one black father whose children were bused.
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At Central, the sacrifice was different: subtler, but, students said, just as upsetting. Seniors had been exempted from busing for the first year, and that spring, the last all-black class at Central graduated.
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The year before busing, the basketball team had once again taken home the state championship trophy, beating Male High School, an old rival, in an especially sweet victory.
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But Central's future in basketball looked bleak under Plan X.

The following year, Central High School, where only a handful of white students had attended since 1956, became majority white. Most white students would have to stay for only two years, however, meaning the school's student population would be in constant churn. There wouldn't be time to build a good team. The school was still able to win sports trophies, but they were for swimming, tennis, and fencing, individual sports that did little to rally school spirit.
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Most of the newcomers wouldn't even bother to learn the school song. Central no longer felt like “our school.” It felt like no one's school.

During the fall of the second year of busing, Central High School students held a contest for the best Afro. It was 1976. Over the summer, black Louisvillians had packed the pews and the street in front of a West End church to see Angela Davis.
Ebony
magazine ran advertisements for the Afro Styler, for “a bigger, fuller, softer Afro in minutes.” Many of the black kids at Central, male and female, had grown out their hair to keep up with the trend and embrace black pride.

But the winners of the contest were two white students from the suburbs. Voting on senior superlatives that year had gone the same way. Most Successful, Best Dressed, and Most Popular were all white students. Out
of thirty-six awards, only seven black seniors won. Their peers called them “Uncle Toms.” A white teacher was assigned to teach the school's black literature course. None of the student government leaders were black. Rumors flew around the school that the district was planning to rename it “River Glen High School.”

“It seems like black don't count,” said one Central student. “With desegregation, we can't get recognition.” Another student, who had previously served in student government before the white students arrived and voted her out, proposed organizing a separate black organization. “Its purpose would be to tell blacks about their own culture,” she explained. “Right now, there's nothing in the school that we can hold on to.”
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Central's black students found themselves facing the incredible irony at the heart of the fight for racial equality in America. For blacks, fighting for a color-blind society meant trying to kill off a piece of one's identity that was simultaneously a stigma and a symbol of pride, history, and community. W. E. B. Du Bois had described the dilemma three-quarters of a century years earlier: “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
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The doors of opportunity had opened up to a degree unprecedented for blacks in America by 1975. But the transformation of Central into a white school, and the resulting loss of power and influence by black students, tapped into this persistent anxiety about the loss of black culture and identity. Blacks had fought for decades to be able to live and eat and learn wherever they wanted. But the Black Power movement, the descendants of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, questioned whether the means—integration with whites—was worth the cost. Desegregation diluted black voices. It frayed black ties to one another. It also highlighted the differences among them.

In the years before busing, many black parents with more money and education had stopped sending their children to Central. They sent them to Male and, increasingly, Atherton, the formerly all-white high school in the white East End. In pursuit of better opportunities for themselves and their children, more black families moved away from downtown and the West End entirely, taking advantage of the slow but steady lifting of political and social obstacles.

Black doctors, lawyers, maids, and factory workers had once been contained
all in one place by the brutalities of legalized segregation. Now, the barriers were lifting, giving those at the top the ability to move on. The federal Fair Housing Act in 1968 had reversed the federal government's former stance of aiding and abetting housing discrimination, and overt racism was becoming less socially acceptable.
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In 1970, most of the suburbs around Louisville were less than 1 percent black.
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By 1980, neighborhoods in the strongholds of anti-busing resistance, including Shively, Okolona, Valley Station, Jeffersontown, and even Fairdale, had seen their black populations rise to between 1 percent and 5 percent. The shift was subtle but significant. The image of suburbs as places of lily-white,
Leave It to Beaver
uniformity no longer fit the reality. This shift was what the civil rights movement had been fighting for all along. But the victory was only partial. Those at the bottom—the vast majority—stayed behind.
¹⁹

Before busing began, Central increasingly educated the poorest of the poor in Louisville. As school desegregation was implemented, many feared the possibility of white flight. (And indeed, thousands of whites abandoned the public school system by moving to other counties and sending their children to private school.)
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Few talked about busing as a way to combat the problems caused by black middle-class flight from the inner city. In a way, though, it was. The integration of the schools diluted the black community's power over its schools, but it was a calculated trade-off.

A 1980 poll by the University of Louisville found that racial attitudes—at least among the young—had changed since busing began five years earlier.
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More than half of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds favored desegregation and thought there were few or no “important differences” between blacks and whites, up from about 40 percent. “We found out we have the same kind of problems, growing up, with parents, it comes out we're just the same, we're just different colors, just different parts of Louisville,” said Krystal Dave, a black student bused to Fern Creek, a high school on the outer edge of the county.
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And the achievement gap was closing. Although scores for high school students on reading tests remained mostly flat, the scores for elementary-aged black children rose significantly as white scores stayed the same.
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“The black community understood the dilemma of busing, how inconvenient it was and is for young people to be on the corner to catch a bus,” said Robert Cunningham, black founder of a pro-busing group in Louisville, Parents for Quality Education, during a federal hearing of the US Commission
on Civil Rights in 1976. “But we felt that it was worth the sacrifice. If that young child doesn't get on the bus . . . he may be on that corner the rest of his life.”
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Riccardo X was among those who remained unconvinced the trade was worth it. After two years at Southern High School, he moved on, frustrated with the racism he still saw around him. For the next decade, he roamed the Jefferson County Schools, moving from school to school teaching world civilization—white history, as he saw it—while searching for a place where he could work with black students to teach them about their own culture and heritage. Busing, he believed, seemed like an effort to erase black students' sense of their history and self-worth, exactly what he thought they needed to overcome the limitations white society had placed on them.

IV

The Numbers Game

Chapter 13

On a late summer day in 1980, Louisville's school superintendent, Ernest Grayson, called the media to the school district's new headquarters near the city-county line. It was not the typical back-to-school press conference. Instead, Grayson mounted a podium and announced that he was suing the school board. The charges were conspiracy and racketeering. The lawsuit was a counterattack. For the past two years, the school board had been trying to push him out of the job. Grayson alleged that the school board was trying to bribe him—by offering him a different position in the administration if he would agree to step down.
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The bizarre battle between the board and the superintendent nearly overshadowed the five-year anniversary of busing that fall. Under Grayson's leadership, two major financial scandals had broken out, including allegations that Grayson allowed school bus drivers to be overpaid by a quarter of a million dollars.
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Perhaps worst of all, a year earlier, Grayson had proposed that white students should spend more time outside of their home school zones.
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Busing white students for longer than two years would be more fair, and would improve continuity and fix problems at high schools, in particular, Central, where school spirit had flagged and sports suffered as white students cycled in and out.

White parents were furious. The school board quickly rejected the plan, saying white parents “weren't ready” for more busing yet.
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Not long after filing the lawsuit that summer, Grayson was fired.
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The school board had its own problems. Six months after Grayson left, the school board chairman told a group of reporters that he believed “poor kids, by and large, do not subscribe to the same set of standards” as wealthy and middle-class students—that essentially, they were less interested in learning.
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As a result, he argued, separate schools with extra resources were needed for the “students we don't know what the hell to do with,” so the system “could have some shot at teaching them.” He spent the next few weeks trying to calm the outrage among Louisville's black leaders.
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To bring order and smooth the many ruffled feathers, the school board sought someone with fresh perspective to replace Grayson. (The concept of the outsider-as-savior would later become something of an obsession among education reformers, as they recruited business entrepreneurs and lawyers to lead failing school systems, and brought in droves of career-changers to take jobs as teachers and principals in order to shake up the profession.) In the early 1980s, the Louisville school board limited the list of candidates for the superintendent job to educators with experience in public education, but they traveled far from Louisville in their search and hired Don Wayne Ingwerson, a longtime superintendent in the Orange County Public Schools in California.