Divided we Fail (2 page)

Her mother was a cashier at AutoZone with a degree from the local community college and her father, who had divorced her mother and moved in with another woman a couple years earlier, worked the line at Louisville's General Electric factory. The people in her neighborhood were poor; many lived on welfare. But at Central, Dionne believed she would find her way to the next step. She called out to her mom as the tears of bitter disappointment began to fall.

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Dionne was accustomed to getting what she wanted. She was the youngest of five children, the rest of them boys. At age four, her brother Dejuan had jealously guarded his chubby-cheeked baby sister. “She's
my
baby,” the little boy scolded admiring strangers who approached to coo at her. Her father, Thurman, doted on her, putting aside money from his GE paycheck so Dionne could have new clothes from Sears. Her brothers shared rooms in their modest white frame house on 28th Street, but Dionne had her own, filled with toys. Before she could walk, her uncles often dropped by the house to pick her up and plunk her on a blanket by the basketball court, where they could watch over her and show her off. Time with her mother, Gwen, was often spent shopping—Gwen wanted to make sure Dionne
never felt the sting of the poverty that surrounded them. But in second grade, Dionne was removed from her sheltered life.

Under the desegregation policy of the Jefferson County Public Schools, which included Louisville and its suburbs, Dionne was assigned to an elementary school twelve miles to the south, in a white working-class village called Fairdale. Every morning for the next seven years, Dionne's mother shook her awake before dawn to catch the bus for the hour-long ride. On most mornings, she whined, argued, and stalled as long as possible. At age eight, Dionne was still a tiny girl, but she made up for it with her stubbornness. The view of the neighborhood elementary school from their windows added fuel to her griping. For first grade, Dionne had crossed through their yard to Catalpa Street to attend Maupin Elementary. Why should she have to travel to the outer reaches of the county when a school sat a few steps from their back door?

Dionne, her family said, got her strong will and strong voice from her mother. Arguments between them were frequent, and they were not for the fainthearted. Gwen's deep voice, trained from years singing in the church choir, dominated a room even when she wasn't annoyed. Yet Gwen's fierceness often dissolved for her daughter. She had always had a soft spot for Dionne, who was encouraged by the sympathy she detected in her mother's face.

Gwen's childhood had been similar to Dionne's—seven brothers protected her from most of childhood's difficulties. Girls didn't tease her and only the bravest boys asked her out. Her mother, who ran a home for orphans and foster children out of an old Victorian on Catalpa, buttressed the defensive dome surrounding her. When they shopped downtown or in their neighborhood, Parkland, her mother didn't explain why they couldn't go in the stores with the pretty mannequins except to say simply, “We're not allowed.” When they walked to the back section of a diner to eat or to order takeaway at a lunch counter, the staff greeted Gwen's mother by name, as a cherished customer. Gwen never thought about the segregation that prevented them from sitting down or from taking a seat by the window. The boundaries between black and white that Jim Crow imposed on their lives didn't register, partly because in the 1950s, when Gwen went to elementary school in Parkland, suburban flight hadn't emptied the city of its white residents. Most of the students in her classes were white.

She had attended Maupin Elementary herself in the 1950s, walking a
block from the three-story house where she grew up on Catalpa. Since she had attended, the school district had replaced the building with a modern new facility. Gwen was incensed that her daughter was forced to go to school an hour away when there was a brand-new school next door. She felt a pang each morning as she nudged her youngest out of bed and endured her arguments, but she never let Dionne skip school. Gwen wouldn't allow her daughter to miss out on her education. Every day, Gwen was out the door with the two youngest of her five children, Dionne and Dejuan, by 6:30 a.m., and she waited with them on the corner until the bus arrived and took them away to Fairdale.

After the bus picked them up, it circled through the shabby shotguns of Parkland and the Cotter Homes, a rundown housing project nearby. Children stood on corners loaded down with backpacks, expectantly holding their parents' hands. Once the bus was full, it rumbled away from Parkland's familiar streets, with their Baptist churches and fastidiously painted houses fighting the decay around them as well as those that had succumbed to graffiti and rot. The fastest route took them along the ring expressway, which passed through Shively, once a stronghold of white resistance to busing. From the expressway, Shively's small bungalows were hidden amid the trees. To the north of their route sat Churchill Downs; the storied racetrack's elegant white spires contrasted with the gritty urban neighborhood around them. Next they passed the acres of parking lots and bland hotel buildings surrounding the airport and fairgrounds. Finally, they entered the South End. Low windowless factory buildings and industrial parks gave way to flat patches of farmland. Stalled in the traffic going the opposite direction were commuters and buses filled with white children.

Dionne's bus exited onto an old two-lane highway that dipped and wound toward the ridgeline along the far southern edge of Jefferson County, which encompassed the city of Louisville and most of its suburbs. Trailer parks and vinyl-sided farmhouses sat back from the road. The traffic, mostly pickup trucks and rust-pocked Pontiacs, was light. Less than a mile from the county border was Dionne's school, Coral Ridge Elementary.

In 1989, on her first day at Coral Ridge in second grade, Dionne felt panicky as she watched the scenery changes through the bus window. The frilly, matching outfit picked out by her mother did not cheer her up—she cried when her mother waved good-bye, cried harder at the sight of tears on her mother's cheeks, then sniffled all the way to her new school. The
alien landscape of Fairdale sparked a renewed outburst of tears as the bus slowed and turned into the school parking lot.

Beverly Goodwin, the principal of Coral Ridge, was ready for the forlorn band of youngsters climbing off the downtown buses.
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Goodwin had greeted them each year for more than a decade, since the city's desegregation plan went into effect in 1975. The sight of her generally struck awe into her new charges. Dionne stopped crying when she saw the tall, elegantly dressed woman with a halo of bright blond hair and an equally bright smile. Many of the new students had already met her: Goodwin tried to ease the transition for the downtown students by holding meetings in their neighborhoods over the summer so that parents would be comforted by knowing who would be watching over their children and so the children would be comforted on the first day by a familiar face. After being promoted from guidance counselor to principal in the mid-1980s, Goodwin outfitted her wood-paneled office with stuffed animals and a worn-in couch that gave it the feel of a cozy living room. She made the rounds of all the classrooms most days, encouraging students and teachers in her Nashville twang. Soon Dionne began to settle in. Although she made it a morning ritual to protest the long trip to school, by her second year at Coral Ridge she was thriving.

Fairdale was a relic of Jefferson County's rural past that seemed more closely tied to Kentucky's distant Appalachian regions than Louisville's cosmopolitan center a few miles away. The town was an old farming village located next to an area known as the Wet Woods, once a hangout for bandits at the turn of the century.
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It was all white and about as poor as Dionne's own all-black inner-city neighborhood. About three-quarters of the school's children had their lunches subsidized, and there was a high concentration of students with special needs—learning disabilities, emotional problems, and/or behavior issues. The school offered no classes for gifted and talented children, or even honors classes for a lower tier of high achievers. The school didn't enroll enough children from the wealthier families who generally demanded such programs. Yet Coral Ridge's test scores tended to be high for a school with concentrated poverty, and by fourth grade, Dionne stood out as particularly bright and driven.
⁷

Dionne was talkative, sometimes too talkative according to her teachers, but she was also quick to learn, especially when it came to reading. She bonded with her classmates and teachers on camping trips to the nearby state forest, where Goodwin's husband was a ranger. By fifth grade, Dionne
thought of Goodwin as a “mother away from home.” Dionne stopped by the principal's office often to say hello. Sometimes she came in leading Gwen, who tried to visit the school as often as possible despite the distance.

Gwen was skeptical of Coral Ridge—she got a bad feeling from the white teachers, who, she believed, treated black children differently—but she tried to hide her opinions from her daughter. When it was time for Dionne to graduate from elementary school, after fifth grade, she didn't want to leave. In a note on her last report card from Coral Ridge, Dionne's teachers wrote that she “often escaped into a book,” that her writing was “wonderful,” and that she had “great potential that will be developed in her middle and high school years.” At the bottom of the paper was a note from the principal: “I can't believe you're leaving us. You've been a joy and I'll miss you. Good luck in middle school, love, Mrs. G.”
⁸

Dionne had her own high expectations for herself. She believed her debating skills and her high marks in reading and writing made her a shoo-in for Central's law program, already her goal by sixth grade. But first she had to endure another three years of early-morning travel to Robert Frost Middle School, located in a thin peninsula of Jefferson County that jutted south along the Ohio River. The school was even deeper in the South End than Coral Ridge. Demographically, Frost was similar in most ways to Dionne's elementary school. Academically, the school didn't surpass the low expectations for a school with so much poverty, both white and black.
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The school was located at the end of a street in a subdivision of identical one-story houses the size of double-wide trailers. The blocks of homes were hemmed in by railroad tracks on one side and the Ohio River on the other. Nearby, Dixie Highway, the South End's main drag, led to the army airfield at Fort Knox. It was lined with fast food outlets, bait shops, and gun stores. Steep, forested hills surrounded Coral Ridge; at Frost, the skeletal skyline of the city's power plant loomed over the campus. All day, giant cooling towers belched clouds of white smoke into the sky and trains roared past on the way to drop off loads of coal. Levies hid a view of the river and an industrial waste pond a few hundred feet from the schoolyard.

More ominous to Dionne were the packs of white teenagers that roamed the subdivision's streets after school. During her years at Frost, Dionne ran track and often stayed after school for practice. To get home, she and a small group of other black students involved in after-school activities waited for a city bus headed downtown. Standing on a corner near
the school, they were easy targets for high school boys cruising by in low-riding cars, screaming curses from their rolled-down windows. The one that bothered Dionne the most was, “Go back to your country, niggers!” She wondered where they thought she came from.

More than anything during her time at Frost, Dionne needed a haven where she would be loved and cared for. Her parents divorced when she was in middle school. Her father, Thurman, moved across town to Newburg, a black suburban neighborhood near the GE plant. Dionne remained close to her dad, but her mother loathed Thurman's new girlfriend. The conflict was devastating for Dionne. The only thing that might have hurt more was losing him for good. She began dreaming of going to Central around the time her dad left.

The magnet law program wasn't the only reason Dionne wanted to go to Central. It was a five-minute drive from her house in Parkland and, more important, the school was Louisville's traditionally black public high school. In the 1950s, Central had been an organizing ground for Louisville's civil rights movement and cultivated many of the city's leading black figures, from lawyers and intellectuals to boxing legend Muhammad Ali. It was the city's only black public high school until the 1960s. Tales of basketball and football victories from its early years, and the elaborate parades that accompanied them, were still repeated in Louisville barbershops decades later. The booming voice of its head disciplinarian for fifteen years, Maude Brown Porter, haunted Louisville's black senior citizens half a century after they had graduated.

Central was also the alma mater of Dionne's parents. Dionne grew up hearing stories from Gwen and Thurman about the legendary high school at West Chestnut Street and Ninth. Gwen could still conjure the mix of smells that met her each day as she filed to class—pressed hair from the cosmetology department, sawdust from the carpentry shop, and motor oil from the auto mechanic garage. She could hear the dignified click of Mrs. Metcalf's four-inch heels on the tile floors, see the grimace on her face as she glanced over Gwen's math homework and scolded her to study harder.

The school was all black when Gwen graduated in 1969, but she didn't notice the deprivations of segregation—the shabby secondhand books and aging facilities. What Gwen remembered was the fierce love of her teachers. It was their life's mission to help their students succeed in life.
To Gwen, this was the caring that she believed was missing from white-dominated schools like Coral Ridge and Frost.

Gwen had never thought much of desegregation as a cause, although as a child, she had grown up in a mostly white neighborhood. Her mother had inherited money from her husband, who had worked for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, and after he died she moved her family to the house on Catalpa, two blocks from Parkland's town center. They were the second black family to move onto the street.