Divided we Fail (18 page)

For high school, Carman's only choice was Central—Jim Crow was still in full force. During his tenure there in the early 1950s, the high school moved to its new building, just a few blocks from his home. Carman was leader of the jocks. He was short but stocky, strong and loud. He spent his school years chasing a football and, when he was off the field, girls. When he could get away with it, he avoided schoolwork, although he admired his teachers, including Lyman Johnson, who taught him civics. He didn't care much about academics, in spite of his great-grandmother's admonitions to study, but Carman was very bright and he did like to talk about politics and ideas with his best friend, Robert Douglas. The two were an odd pair, but Robert had picked out Carman from the crowd on the first day of school and decided they would be friends. Robert was tall and thin, and read a lot of books. He was introspective and a daydreamer. But both liked to talk, and when they got together, they spent hours discussing the bad situation of blacks in America and what to do about it.

They stayed in touch after they graduated and went to college, and then on to graduate school. Robert became an artist and immersed himself in civil rights activism, working as an open-housing organizer. At one point, he was involved with the activists who organized the rally that sparked the 1968 riots. Carman pursued his own version of protest.

Carman's first job was as an assistant football coach at his alma mater, Jackson State University, a historically black school in Mississippi. He loved the job. The team won often, and the school sent nearly fifty players to the pros in the 1960s and '70s.
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But after four years, he became frustrated. As formerly white public and private universities dropped their ban on black students, they seemed to be drawing away some of the best black players. It was Carman's first taste of desegregation, and he didn't like it.
He left for a new job at the all-black Crispus Attucks High School in Hopkinsville, a town south of Louisville with a relatively large black population for Kentucky.

Crispus Attucks took black students from two counties, and competed in football with black teams around the state. After five years as an assistant football coach at the school, Carman picked up the local paper one day and read the list of school salaries that reporters gathered and printed annually. The assistant coach at the white school, Hopkinsville High, was making about $3,000 a year more than he was. Carman knew the man. He didn't have a master's degree, as Carman did, and he had only been there three years. Carman made an appointment to see the superintendent.

As Carman tells the story, the superintendent agreed to meet with him, and then explained that while he was sorry about the discrepancy, white people needed bigger salaries because their cost of living was higher. “That's the same way I feel about my lawyer, because he needs more money,” Carman replied. “And he's about to get more money.” Shortly after, Carman got a raise.

His victory was short-lived. In 1968, the school board closed Crispus Attucks High School to comply with a federal order to desegregate the county's schools.
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The black teachers and administrators scattered to the formerly white schools. Many went to Louisville to look for jobs. Carman's head coach was sent to Hopkinsville High School. Carman was offered an assistant coach job at Christian County High School, in a different district. He took it, although in moving out of his district, he lost his tenure status. Carman and a librarian also imported from Crispus Attucks were the only black teachers in the building.

Carman told the white Christian County administrators that he didn't want them to bring all the “black problems” to his door, but soon enough, he was flooded with requests to deal with disciplinary cases and political struggles, including a dispute over whether the football team—now nearly all black—should give up the preintegration tradition of choosing the homecoming queen. Carman refused to step in, and the football team selected a black girl as queen.

He didn't last long at Christian County. In the early 1970s, Carman returned to Louisville, gave up coaching, and took a job at Russell Junior High in the West End, working with students at risk of dropping out. Once
again, all of his students were black. He loved the work, and the students responded well to his voluble pied-piper personality.

Then, in 1975, Carman discovered his job was once again on desegregation's chopping block. Judge Gordon announced the details of Plan X that fall; Russell Junior High was among the five schools that the judge planned to close.
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Four were traditionally black. Carman was stunned. He joined protests to save the school, to no avail. Why should Russell be punished because white people won't come? Carman asked. The judges and school administrators and lawyers fighting for desegregation weren't interested. The black students at his school were needed to integrate the schools in the suburbs, and Russell was housed in an old building in one of the West End's rougher neighborhoods. In September 1975, the doors were unceremoniously shuttered and Carman once again had to find a new job.

He was not alone. In years following
Brown v. Board
, thirty-eight thousand black teachers lost their jobs.
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Other staff—coaches, principals, counselors, cafeteria workers—were also let go.
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One report at the time said what happened to black school staff was not integration, but
disintegration:
“the near total disintegration of Black authority in every area of the system of public education.”
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Some teachers were fired outright, but in later years, the decline in black teachers was in part due to a decline in hiring.
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A 1972 report about Louisville argued the city was one of the worst culprits in the South.
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About 600 teachers in the city system were black. The schools would have needed to hire an additional 450 to bring their numbers up so they matched the level of black students in the system. Another report found that while Kentucky had employed 350 black principals in 1954, there were only 36 black principals left by 1970.
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After Russell closed, Carman moved to Thomas Jefferson High School in Newburg. The school was exempt from busing because it was naturally desegregated with blacks from the Newburg enclave and low-income whites from nearby Okolona. To Carman, it was a beautiful school. The principal, Stanley Whitaker, was a dynamic leader and the atmosphere was mostly calm. Carman settled in and once again felt at home.

Other schools that were struggling to stay diverse shut down around them—a vocational high school downtown, Shawnee Junior High, and several elementary schools.
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In 1980, a controversy erupted over a proposal to close several traditionally white high schools in the South End.
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During the public hearings to discuss the plan, hundreds of parents and students
turned out to protest, chanting, singing, and carrying signs, including one that read, “White People Wake Up!” The deputy superintendent, David DeRuzzo, acknowledged their frustration: “Closing a high school leaves a void in the community,” he told the newspaper. “Communities look to their high schools not only as a place where their children will be educated, but also as a place that binds the community together.”
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The school board scuttled the plan to close the formerly white schools. Instead, a year later, it turned to four other high schools.
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Three traditionally white schools, including Fern Creek, in the suburbs on the outer edge of Jefferson County, and Thomas Jefferson were slated for closure. The middle-class parents who sent their children to Fern Creek protested against the closing of their school and won.
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The other three, located in poor and working-class neighborhoods, were shut down; if there were parents, students, or teachers who were upset, they got little attention from school officials or the press. Thomas Jefferson was reopened as a middle school that drew from far beyond the borders of its previous boundaries. Its former students were split up and bused elsewhere. For the third time, Carman was left without a job after his school had been closed to accommodate desegregation.

In Carman's eyes, the closure of Thomas Jefferson tore the Newburg community apart, draining its unity and spirit. The promise that busing would help black children seemed ridiculous to him if it meant simultaneously undermining the strength of the communities they lived in. In the eyes of the school board, the closures were unavoidable: African Americans had demanded desegregation; to make it work, they would have to make sacrifices. But as black schools and teachers were discarded with little concern for how their loss might impact black communities, patience began to give way.

Chapter 15

Lyman Johnson stood at the podium in Central High School's auditorium. His gray hair was combed back from his lined forehead, and large, slightly tinted glasses hid his tired eyes. It had been more than a decade since he'd walked these halls as a teacher and, later, an administrator. He had served on and then retired from the school board, but he was unwilling to sit out the brewing fight over Ingwerson's plan to overhaul the desegregation system in Louisville.

It was March 19, 1984, and two hundred black activists and students, along with a handful of whites, had gathered at Central to protest the superintendent's alternative busing plan, finally released that winter after months of debate. “Young people, I've run out of gas,” Lyman said. “I've done the best I could. Don't let the wagon roll back downhill.” The crowd gave him a standing ovation as he made his way back to his seat. Audience members yelled that Ingwerson should go back to Orange County and leave Louisville alone.
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Superintendent Ingwerson's planned overhaul had quickly escalated into a major public controversy as his citizens' committee tried to hash out a deal. One of the biggest concerns was the fate of Central. The neighborhoods around Central were nearly 100 percent black. A newspaper reporter noted that it would make sense to bus in students from Ballard, the school that served much of the East End, which was overcrowded. But officials feared white flight if Central's zone was extended to include parts of the
white, wealthy neighborhoods to the east.
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“Any neighborhood that is assigned to Central will be perceived as a bad place to live,” said one member of Ingwerson's committee.
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Thousands of black children had to leave their neighborhoods to attend high schools in white neighborhoods, but rather than force white children to do the same, officials proposed to end the busing of white high schoolers to the inner city altogether by making Central a magnet school. Black leaders called the hopes of desegregating the school using volunteers a “pipe dream.” So the busing committee settled on a compromise. Central would get a temporary satellite district, which would be dismantled as soon as the magnet was up and running.
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Ingwerson's plan ignored the compromise.
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Instead, he proposed turning a nearby school, Manual, into a magnet, and shuffling its students—many of them poor whites who lived on the southern edges of downtown—to Central.
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No middle-class suburban students would have to come downtown. In addition, his proposal rearranged the desegregation plan so that substantially fewer whites would have to get on buses. He also increased the ratio of blacks to whites that would determine if a school would be integrated. And though the number of black students who would be bused was reduced, too, they still bore the burden of desegregation. During the high school years, only 250 white students would be bused out of their neighborhoods, compared to 2,500 black students. When asked how he thought black parents would feel about the plan, he told a newspaper reporter that, were he such a parent, he would be “very pleased,” adding, “I would see someone caring for my child.”
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Black parents themselves did not see it that way. Black leaders and ministers lobbed charges of “one-way” busing and accused the superintendent of wanting to kill Central.
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“Blacks are still enslaved by whites by this plan,” said one black parent during a hearing at the school.
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Parents started a petition drive and promised mass demonstrations if Ingwerson didn't reconsider.
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Business leaders and local politicians, including the mayor, pressured Ingwerson to compromise.
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In April 1984, after the rally at Central and discussions with black leaders, Ingwerson announced a new plan that the school board quickly passed.
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He would assign of a desegregation czar in the school district administration.
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Manual, down the road near the University of Louisville campus, was becoming a performing arts magnet with a special college prep track
connected with the university. Central, located close to the courts, banks, and hospitals downtown, would stop drawing students from around the county and instead introduce magnet programs in law, business, and health. But in the coming fall, Central would still take some low-income white students from Manual, which was losing its attendance zone. Except for a handful of students living on the border with downtown, East End parents were still exempted from having to send their children to the inner city for high school.

The following year, some of the original plaintiffs in the desegregation lawsuit went back to court. They wanted the district judge to restore the desegregation case to the active docket. But the judge, Thomas Ballantine, was not sympathetic. He believed the school district had done an excellent job of complying with the court's orders. He refused to reopen the case.
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