Divided we Fail (19 page)

The results of the new plan were just what black leaders had feared. The overcrowding problems Central faced three decades earlier now seemed enviable. Since 1976, Central enrollment had been dropping, but in September 1984, Central's enrollment was even lower than school officials had anticipated—only one thousand students—and many of them were impoverished.
¹⁵

By the spring, parents were volunteering to help overburdened guidance counselors call home to the dozens of students who skipped school each day.
¹⁶
Nearly two hundred students—a fifth of the school—were suspended in the first few months of school, more than double the number in the previous year.
¹⁷
The Advance Program had dwindled. The dropout rate was twice the county average. The statistics just got worse the following year, and the principal, along with two assistant principals and three out of four guidance counselors, requested transfers.
¹⁸
Twelve teachers also left. As Central's reputation suffered, the work of convincing white students to attend magnet programs at Central would become doubly hard.

Nevertheless, the following year, Jefferson County school officials announced that Central would finally begin its specialized programs.
¹⁹
The school was to get a countywide Advance and honors program, in the hopes of attracting high-performing white students, and a health careers program, which was to train nurses, nurses' aides, and technicians. But civil rights activists were furious.
²⁰
“Why not train them to be doctors and medical researchers?” one black leader asked. Woodford Porter Sr., a black funeral home director who wanted black students to be spread throughout
the county, saw the plan as a way to resegregate Central and eventually close it, “just like they did with DuValle and most of the elementary schools in the community.”
²¹

The specter of closing Central scared many in Louisville's African American community, but not everyone saw it as a bad thing that the school might draw more black students. In fact, for Carman Weathers, who was watching intently from the sidelines, this outcome would be ideal. An all-black high school that offered challenging coursework in the heart of the inner city was exactly what he thought Louisville's blacks needed to help them overcome continued racism and to reverse the deterioration of the inner city.

Chapter 16

The data showed that the trajectory of desegregation in Louisville and across the country had corresponded with improvements for both blacks and whites.
¹
But it was easy to overlook improvements in test scores and other achievement measures amid other evidence suggesting that things were getting worse. By the mid-1980s, American cities were vastly different places than they had been three decades earlier, when the fight for school desegregation was first waged. White middle-class families were moving from inner suburbs to outer suburbs, and huge numbers of black middle-class families were following behind them. By 1990, more than a quarter of blacks lived in the suburbs.
²

They left behind spiraling crime rates, rising teenage birth rates, and a crack epidemic. The trend coincided with the adoption of busing plans in cities across the country, but it was also repeated in cities that school desegregation never touched. Nonetheless, busing was blamed for white flight and the decline of urban school districts. Louisville residents were battling over how to make desegregation work, but in other cities the battle shifted to a debate over whether busing had run its course. In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration shifted from defense to offence. Instead of discouraging the expansion of busing plans, it now began to encourage school districts to dismantle them.
³

In 1985, the newly appointed attorney general, Edwin Meese III, said that busing had only a “marginal effect as far as improvement is concerned.”
⁴
That same year, the administration threw its support behind the city of Norfolk, Virginia, which was combating a lawsuit brought by twenty-one black parents after the school district ended its elementary school busing plan in 1983—the first in the nation to do so.
⁵

Gene Carter, the Norfolk superintendent who put the brakes on the city's busing plan, was black. Carter believed that “a black youngster doesn't need to be seated next to a white youngster to learn.”
⁶
Many blacks opposed Norfolk's move to limit busing, however. They remembered the city's anti-busing protests, which had been particularly intense; the district had shut down schools rather than desegregate them in the 1950s.
⁷
But Carter wasn't alone in questioning the wisdom of desegregation. Ten years after most busing plans had been implemented, many blacks around the country were impatient for larger gains for black students, and horrified by the rapid deterioration of inner-city black neighborhoods. Many also wondered whether busing weren't the culprit, or at least partially to blame. In Oklahoma City, a black school board member, Clyde Muse, led a push to dismantle that city's busing plan for elementary-age students at around the same time Norfolk ended its plan.
⁸

In November 1986, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Norfolk case, letting stand the opinions of the lower judges that Norfolk's retreat from desegregation was permissible.
⁹

In the
Swann
decision, the Court had said that ideally, all districts that had once maintained dual systems of education for whites and blacks would one day be declared “unitary,” and no longer need the supervision of the courts in their daily affairs. They had not described how or when this declaration should be made in school districts, however. Like the Warren Court in the
Brown
decision, the Court under Chief Justice Burger was wary of getting involved in the details of running schools; the American conviction that schools should be controlled by localities, not the federal courts, remained deeply rooted.

The decision not to intervene in Norfolk was one of the last of the Burger Court, which, when Burger retired that year, was eulogized by critics as a wishy-washy reign.
¹⁰
The Court's character would soon change dramatically. In the fall of 1986, William Rehnquist took the mantle of the chief justice. He ruled with a much firmer hand.
¹¹
His conservative credentials included a 1952 memo he had written as a Supreme Court law clerk, when the justices were mulling the
Brown
case. In the memo, he expressed
support for
Plessy v. Ferguson
, the precedent the
Brown
plaintiffs were hoping to overturn.
¹²

The Supreme Court's decision in the Norfolk case—or lack thereof—would have sweeping impact. The Reagan Justice Department kept up its attack on busing, suggesting to dozens of school boards that they reconsider their plans.
¹³

In 1990, the Oklahoma case,
Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell
, which had slogged its way through the courts for years, finally reached the Supreme Court. Cases out of Denver, Atlanta, and Topeka soon followed.
¹⁴
Once again, the White House, now led by President George H. W. Bush, sided with the school districts.
¹⁵
This time, the Supreme Court agreed to take on the issue.

In Oklahoma, downtown neighborhoods had been nearly emptied of whites, and the school district was busing black students to schools further and further away from their homes to keep the schools integrated.
¹⁶
One of the underlying questions in the case was whether an all-black school should be considered a product of officially sanctioned segregation if less than fifteen years earlier the district had maintained segregated schools.

The Supreme Court handed down its decision on January 16, 1991. Five of the justices, led by Rehnquist, agreed that school districts that had eliminated the “vestiges” of segregation could end busing, even if it meant some schools would revert to having student populations that were all black or all white.
¹⁷
Justice Marshall dissented, asking whether thirteen years was enough to shed a legacy of legalized segregation spanning sixty-five years.
¹⁸

The Oklahoma decision, much like
Brown
, was significant, but it was also vague. How would districts and courts know that the vestiges of segregation had been erased? Did all remnants of segregation—racially unbalanced faculties, different resource allocations—have to be removed at the same time? Or could school districts that were making incremental progress be partially released from court decrees? Rehnquist's opinion didn't say. A month later, on February 19, 1991, the court agreed to hear a case that addressed these questions out of DeKalb County, Georgia, which encompassed part of Atlanta.
¹⁹

Unlike Oklahoma City, DeKalb did not have a busing plan in place; rather, the plaintiffs in the case—both white and black parents—had sued in the 1980s in an effort to force the city to adopt one.
²⁰
More than twenty
schools in the district were nearly all black, and these schools had fewer books, less experienced teachers, and less money.
²¹

A court of appeals decision ordered the district to remove all the vestiges before it could be released from supervision. The county responded by trying voluntary methods to better mix black and white students, including magnet schools, but the court warned that if those tactics didn't work, busing loomed as a next step.
²²
At that point, eighteen plaintiffs joined the case in protest. Most were black, and they opposed busing.
²³
They wanted the DeKalb school district to focus on quality, not the numbers game of desegregation, which they saw as a ploy to further undermine the rights of black parents.

The Supreme Court set the date for arguments in the Georgia case for the following fall.
²⁴
That summer, Thurgood Marshall, who had often vowed that he would never retire, hobbled into a conference room in the court building, leaning on a cane, to face a group of reporters. A day earlier, on June 27, at the age of eighty-two, he had announced his retirement, contingent on the appointment of a successor. Someone asked why he was going back on his vow. He pulled off his glasses and looked into the glaring camera lights. “This is it,” he said. He, his wife, and his doctor had been discussing retirement for months. He was “old and coming apart.” When asked if President Bush should appoint a minority justice in his place, he frowned: “I don't think it should be used as an excuse one way or the other . . . for doing wrong, for picking the wrong Negro and saying I'm picking him because he's a Negro.”
²⁵

A few days later, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a black judge born to illiterate parents in Georgia. Thomas, the
Washington Post
wrote at the time, was full of contradictions.
²⁶
He was also on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Marshall. On nearly every issue that Marshall had fought for over his long career, the two men disagreed.

Thomas didn't believe in affirmative action, yet thought that “there is nothing you can do to get past a black skin.”
²⁷
He had flirted with the Black Panthers in college, and always been “partial” to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings. He also believed that color blindness was the best way to dismantle racism: “Racial quotas and other race-conscious legal devices only further and deepen the original problem,” he once wrote.
²⁸
After a nasty confirmation fight following sexual harassment accusations by lawyer
Anita Hill, Thomas was confirmed in October, thanks in part to seven Southern Democrats. The senators feared a backlash from black voters if they rejected the second African American justice ever to be nominated to the court.
²⁹

His appointment was too late for Thomas to hear arguments in the Georgia case, but the timing also excluded Marshall, who had officially left the bench a week before the court date.
³⁰
Without Marshall's vote, the decision came back unanimous the following spring. DeKalb County would not have to implement a busing program. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a moderate Reagan appointee who leaned right but was also known for his ability to forge compromises, wrote the majority opinion. “In one sense of the term,” he said, “vestiges of past segregation by state decree do remain in our society and in our schools. Past wrongs to the black race, wrongs committed by the State and in its name, are a stubborn fact of history. And stubborn facts of history linger and persist.” But the long history of racial segregation was no reason to make desegregation the perpetual goal for school districts, Kennedy wrote. “Racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake,” he concluded.
³¹

“A fatal karate chop has been placed to the neck of desegregation nationwide,” the plaintiff's attorney, Roger Mills, said. “It looks very, very bleak for the future of black children.”
³²

The racial mix in schools was becoming less pressing to many Americans, however. Polls showed blacks weren't that interested in desegregation. Although nearly 100 percent of both whites and blacks said they favored integration by 1986, only 55 percent of blacks surveyed in a 1986
ABC/Washington Post
poll favored busing.
³³
More striking was a 1984 poll reporting that 79 percent of blacks thought it was “more important to improve schools in black neighborhoods than to bus to achieve racial integration.” Only 12 percent thought integration was more important.
³⁴
In the wake of the
Nation at Risk
report, many black parents, along with the rest of the country, were beginning to pay attention to outcomes for black children, not just opportunities.