Divided we Fail (21 page)

The divide cut across generational, class, and neighborhood lines. “I want mine at my home school,” a black mother of two children—a daughter who attended school in the West End and a son who was bused to the suburbs—told the newspaper after a meeting hosted by the school board.
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In contrast, another mother, who sent her children to the same two schools, said she didn't want busing to end: “The teachers won't teach the black kids as good, if the white kids aren't with them.” Two polls conducted that fall found that the vast majority of parents agreed with her. One poll found that 70 percent of black parents were opposed to Ingwerson's plan, while another a few weeks later found 85 percent opposed.
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Only 58 percent believed their children were benefiting from busing, however.
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Less than a month after he announced his plan, Ingwerson appeared to back down and put off a school board vote indefinitely.
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But he hadn't given up. He believed that eventually, parents and community leaders would come around to his proposal to limit desegregation once they understood the plan better. He still believed busing wasn't the answer to closing the achievement gap: “If you wanted to close the gap on achievement scores, then the plan has accomplished a certain amount of that. If you wanted more, then it probably has failed,” he told the newspaper.
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In December, he put forward a new plan, which the school board voted on and approved immediately.
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Ingwerson's new idea was not as drastic a change. Elementary schools would be grouped into clusters that included several suburban schools and one downtown school. Together, schools in each cluster would work to maintain a racial balance by sharing students among themselves. Black students at each school would have to comprise 15 to 50 percent of each school's population, rather than the 0 to 60 that Ingwerson had originally proposed. Each cluster was given $150,000 to create new programs to entice students away from their neighborhood schools and into schools where they would boost diversity. If schools failed to draw enough volunteers, children would be forcibly bused to meet the required percentages. Ingwerson promised to appoint another citizens' committee to monitor the progress of the new system he dubbed “Project Renaissance.”
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In February, the Jefferson County school district phone lines were clogged with anxious parents wondering where their children would attend school the following year.
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The same month, Ingwerson won a national award for superintendent of the year, despite a letter-writing campaign by
his critics.
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By the end of the school year, all of the city's elementary schools had managed to attract enough transfers to meet the new standards, mainly by putting new magnets into place, including Advance classes and traditional programs modeled on discipline- and values-focused schools started in the 1970s.
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The superintendent's monitoring committee was meant to keep tabs on the new student assignment plan in order to tamp down frustration in the community. It included both integration supporters, including members of QUEST, and activists trying to end busing.
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But it quickly began adding fuel to the fire.

On the committee were Carman Weathers and a University of Louisville education professor, Joseph McMillan. McMillan had graduated from Central in 1946, the same year as Fran Thomas.
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In high school, when he was editor of the Central newspaper, he had campaigned to have the word
colored
removed from the school's name. McMillan had spent much of his teaching career in Michigan, but in the 1970s he returned to Louisville, where he launched a conference on the state of minority families. He straddled divergent poles of the civil rights movement. He had met Malcolm X in Michigan, and believed he was the most brilliant black mind of the century, but he also served on the NAACP and worked on Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. Saving Central from the tyranny of the school district's racial quotas was, to him, the next step forward in the movement.

Weathers and McMillan created a group called Saving African-American Values and Economy, or SAVE. Joining them on the monitoring committee was Carman's old high school friend, Robert Douglas, who represented parents of public school children.

Another spot went to Anne Braden's group, the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. The organization named its new director, a recent transplant from the South End to the West End: Fran Thomas. Fran had become active with the Alliance the previous year, when her daughter had been deployed to Iraq. She had spent most of her life as an army wife in the majority-white South End, where she had fought a realtor's racism to buy her house. Her career had been as a nurse at the local Veteran Administrations hospital. But at heart she was an activist. As a college student in the 1950s, she had worked on a black voting campaign. As a nurse, she became involved with the government workers' union. Her daughter's deployment reawoke the rebellious spirit in her. Fran didn't
believe in President Bush's Gulf War. It seemed like a senseless waste of resources and possibly her daughter's life. She started marching in antiwar protests and moved on to demonstrations against police brutality and promoting educational equality. She convinced her husband to move back to the West End, where her activism wouldn't draw nasty comments from the neighbors. She got along well with Carman Weathers and Robert Douglas on the monitoring committee.

Just as the committee was getting to work, Ingwerson suddenly announced his resignation.
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The school board begged him to stay, but by the end of the school year in 1993, he had packed his bags and was headed back to California. “I've had two difficult years—one was 1984 and one is this past year,” he said. “And both of them deal with equity and quality issues. We didn't shirk from either one of them. Was it something I enjoyed? Heavens no. Was it something I wanted to wake up and keep going at year after year? No. But is it something that is necessary? Yes.”
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The committee made little progress in the wake of his departure. Its members rarely agreed on anything as they rehashed the old arguments for and against busing. But it was a platform of relative power, and the members used it to push their separate agendas. They were able to peruse reams of data about the racial makeup of each school in the district, suspension and dropout rates, and academic achievement. No matter where they stood on issue of busing, they were displeased with what they found. QUEST activists put together a report in early 1993 showing that the city's schools were at their most segregated levels since 1974, and that within the schools, classrooms were often divided by race.
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To Carman and the others, the small number of black students in Advance Program classrooms, the disproportionate number of blacks suspended from school, and the stagnation of their achievement on tests confirmed that the integration plan wasn't working and had never worked. To counteract the problems they believed desegregation had brought about, they proposed an Afrocentric magnet school in Louisville, probably with Central in mind as the perfect location, but the other committee members quashed the idea.
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In August 1994, frustrated by the squabbling in the monitoring committee, Carman sent off another op-ed to the
Courier-Journal
. “From the very beginning of African-American culture in America, there have always been blacks who thought that the best way to survive in America would be
to disappear completely, leaving no trace at all that there had even been an Africa, or slavery, or even, finally, a black man,” Carman wrote. “Integration cannot work when the powerless conscious of blacks integrates with the consciousless power of whites.”
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When the newspaper reported a month later that ten black students had been transferred out of Central so that the school could comply with the school system's racial guidelines, Carman, Fran, and Robert received the news like a slap in the face.
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Two years earlier, the school had an enrollment of more than 1,400 students, thanks in part to a new dynamic principal, but during the fall of 1994, that number had dwindled to about 1,100. They knew a teacher inside the school who reported that people were nervous about the school board's intentions: Riccardo X.

Mr. X, as his students now called him, had moved around from school to school for a decade after his first traumatic year of teaching in 1975 near the heart of the city's busing protests in the Bittersweet Shopping Center. As a young boy in the projects he had dreamed of following his hero, Muhammad Ali, to Central, before he ended up attending Male High School instead. Now X was finally there, and he had reason to be content.

After years of battling principals to let him teach a black history course, he had found a principal, Harold Fenderson, who was thrilled to have a black history teacher, and at last he had students who were enthusiastic about the subject. He organized students to participate in a Liberation Bowl, a black history quick-recall contest in which they competed with teams from around the country. His team won six national championships. The local Liberation Bowl racked up $150,000 in scholarships for students. He also took students on “sojourns” to cities around the country to tour famous sites in black history. He was one of the most popular teachers at the school. But he was worried. If the number of students continued to drop, it would be easy for the district to close Central. He reached out to the members of CEASE and asked how he could help.

Over the next two years, they organized, attending board meetings and pushing for change from the pulpit of the monitoring committee. They also laid the groundwork for a lawsuit. Finding plaintiffs wasn't difficult. By 1996, many black parents were infuriated by Project Renaissance, the choice-focused student assignment plan that Ingwerson had introduced three years earlier.
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Black students were more than five times more likely
to be rejected from the new magnet programs that West End schools had implemented to entice white students downtown. Not enough white students took the bait, so even as many black students were blocked from attending their neighborhood schools, enrollments in the West End were dropping. Central's shrinking student population now seemed to be a problem trickling down to the younger grades.

Meanwhile, suburban schools were expanding—some were in such demand they opened portable classrooms to accommodate the growing student population.
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The new superintendent, Stephen Daeschner, made some tweaks to the assignment plan in 1996 after a series of critical stories in the newspaper pointing out the distress in West End schools.
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But not all black parents were placated.

CEASE demanded that the school district raise the ceiling for the percentage of black students allowed at each school and that more black children be included in the Advance Program. Gradually, new members were enticed to join. Deborah Stallworth, a nurse with a seven-year-old son, knew Carman Weathers from church and Fran Thomas from her activism in the neighborhood.
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She wanted her son to attend the school down the street from her West End home, but it was oversubscribed with black students. Instead, he was assigned to a struggling school in the white, working-class neighborhood of Portland, two miles to the north. She was incensed. Stallworth campaigned relentlessly until the district finally agreed to move her son. Then she poured her energies into CEASE. Stallworth, organized and passionate, was soon appointed the group's coordinator.

Robert's niece Sandra Hampton signed up to be a plaintiff in CEASE's plan to sue the district.
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Her son had applied to Central and been turned away—although she was pleased with his assignment to Butler, one of the discipline-focused traditional high schools, instead. Jacquelyn and Ja'Mekia Stoner, Gwen and Dionne Hopson, and three other disgruntled families also joined CEASE that fall and signed up to be plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Finding black parents angry at the system was easy. The group's most difficult task was finding a lawyer. In 1998, two years after CEASE had held its protest outside Central's doors and recruited the Hopsons and Stoners, they were still looking. They knocked on the door of nearly every black lawyer in Louisville. Some suggested fees that were far beyond their meager budget—the lowest retainer they were offered was $10,000. Many
black lawyers simply turned them away, horrified at the idea of bringing a case against desegregation. The prospects for their lawsuit seemed about as bleak as the plan to open an Afrocentric school in Louisville.

Chapter 18

The law offices of Teddy B. Gordon occupied a small, two-story brick building marooned among acres of parking lots and skyscrapers in downtown Louisville. The diminutive building was a remnant of earlier iterations of the city, when the street had been lined with retail stores and saloons, before business headed to the suburbs and wrecking balls transformed the streetscape. Somehow, the building had survived.

In the winter of 1998, the members of CEASE called Gordon, on a tip from a friend that he might be willing to take the Central case.
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Inside the building, a small reception area was nestled under a staircase leading to the second floor. Instead of law books, the shelves in his office held a collection of dozens of teddy bears in every shape and size, each one labeled with a child's name. They were souvenirs from the many private adoption cases Gordon had handled over the course of his three-decade career.
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In addition to adoptions, he did no-contest divorces, personal injury cases, and workers' compensation claims. In the early 1990s, he had made the local news for representing an overweight couple who injured themselves on a water slide at Louisville's amusement park, Kentucky Kingdom.
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