by John N. Hale
But White officials comfortably spoke of freedom of choice. They could point to the handful of Black students in White schools—almost unthinkable ten years prior—as evidence of desegregation. As long as schools simply declared they were open to all students and pointed toward good faith efforts, the federal government funded them. The federal government was not mandating significant integration, only the appearance of it, and the appearance of federal compliance was something most segregationists could live with. With this “desegregation,” White southern legislators distanced themselves from the open racism of massive resistance.
While freedom of choice policies at first passed the muster of federal compliance, they did not ultimately withstand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court. Freedom of choice plans did not achieve genuine integration. This was evident in South Carolina, one of the first states to champion freedom of choice. There, 92 of the 108 school districts were operating under such plans by 1969. Across the South, just over 1 percent of Black students were enrolled in schools that were at least 50 percent White, and just over 2 percent of Black students were in desegregated White schools overall.45
Token desegregation and ongoing recalcitrance were suspect, especially to the former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who President Johnson appointed as a Supreme Court justice in 1967. Marshall’s appointment in and of itself was a milestone. As the court’s first Black justice, Marshall would continue to make history, ruling in favor of decisions to strike down the so-called “freedom of choice” policies in both Green v. County School Board (1968) and Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969). In no uncertain terms, the majority of Supreme Court justices forbade any further delay in desegregating schools. From the perspective of southern segregationists, it appeared that all was lost when the Green and Alexander rulings ordered immediate and full desegregation.
Yet the clarion call of choice continued to resound widely across the South. In 1970, Mississippi governor John Bell Williams called a large meeting that signified the beginning of a new era of education reform. The site was the Jackson Coliseum, the largest venue in the capital city, a location that was strategic in announcing a new form of resistance. The coliseum sits on the other side of the hill from the fairgrounds, where in 1961 local police had converted cattle, swine, and horse yards into temporary holding cells for activists when they ran out of jail space. The meeting nine years later was no less ominous, but the appearance of the 1970 meeting was much more palatable to a “progressive” South.
Although Governor Williams officially called the meeting along with former Jackson mayor Allen Thompson, Whites came to the Jackson Coliseum to support the launch of a national initiative founded by Thompson, the Freedom of Choice in the United States (FOCUS). An acolyte of massive resistance, Thompson had the support and trust of segregationists. During his tenure as mayor between 1960 and 1964, he had militarized the state to confront “outside agitators”—civil rights activists who had moved to Mississippi to help crack segregation. He had built to his own specifications what Newsweek dubbed “Thompson’s Tank” for law and order during the freedom struggle. A multimillion-dollar armored vehicle, the tank was “a 13,000-pound armored battlewagon” replete with shotguns, tear-gas guns, and a machine gun.46 While mayor, Thompson had overseen the incarceration of activists at the Jackson fairgrounds.
Covered in the regional press, the 1961 FOCUS meeting drew a crowd of more than four thousand people. By Thompson’s side stood US senator John Stennis: Dixiecrat, staunch defender of segregation, signer of the Southern Manifesto in 1956, and soon to be a Republican defector in support of Barry Goldwater.47 Given the backgrounds of these White supremacists, it was clear that “choice” would be used to maintain segregation. This time, however, they did not publicly demand segregation. They did not call in Thompson’s Tank to intimidate African Americans seeking to enter White schools. They did not dispatch the police to arrest Black youth. Instead, they reissued the call to defend the rights of White parents to choose where to send their children to school. It was time for resistance by another name on a much grander scale.
John Lewis asserted that “education represented an almost mythical key to the kingdom of America’s riches, the kingdom so long denied to our race.”48 Southern legislators like Stennis were throwing away the key. Real school choice would continue to be denied.
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An even larger platform for school choice would emerge. Schools were segregated in all major northern cities, and these schools were subject to desegregation orders after the Green and Alexander decisions. Many northerners would embrace the same strategies of resistance, but for school choice to be palatable to the wider American public, it would need the support of pundits and policymakers far removed from the South and its avowed white supremacists. Award-winning economist Milton Friedman would prove just the one to turn regional massive resistance into national policy.
CHAPTER TWO
Milton Friedman and the Problems with Choice in Chicago
A RISING ECONOMIST at the University of Chicago at the time of the Brown decision in 1954, Milton Friedman was the ideal spokesman for school choice. Friedman was the first to present school choice as an application of free-market economic theory to education. His argument, which criticized a liberal state he saw as overreaching, nurtured distrust of the federal government, the same distrust harbored by segregationists. Friedman’s argument for school choice sparked nothing short of a revolution. Chicago also provided the stage from which to amplify the promises of school choice to parents outside the South. When civil rights activists made the demands for integration in cities like Chicago, they shocked northern sensibilities. Northerners shunned the images of violent mobs attacking innocent Black children simply trying to go to school. The nation largely treated segregation and the violence it engendered as a regional aberration confined to the South. Northerners were above this. Or so they thought.
Chicago was a petri dish for school choice in the North. Like other northern cities, Chicago faced the challenges of integration and drew on the same “freedom of choice” plans negotiated in the South. Friedman, arguably colorblind in a detrimental way, proclaimed that all parents were free to choose and that this choice would remedy a system broken by government control of the schools. But Chicago was especially fraught with structural problems, not to mention the contradiction of being a northern “liberal” city governed by the same racist policy that defined the South. The city where Friedman developed and published his ideas demonstrated racism at its roots, akin to the structural racism underpinning his proposal.
The racially segregated housing market throughout the Windy City showed no semblance of equality, and residence determined school attendance, enrollment, and thus the racial composition of schools. Under local neighborhood school policies that had been in place since the nineteenth century, district officials zoned students to attend the school closest to them. School zones therefore reflected the composition of neighborhoods. Since neighborhoods were racially segregated, it followed that schools were racially segregated. But schools and the neighborhoods they served were not “naturally” segregated or segregated by choice. Racist housing policies such as mortgage redlining, White vigilante neighborhood associations, and elaborate plans to resist desegregating neighborhoods—many of them supported by the University of Chicago—infected the “marketplace” in which so-called choices were made.
Despite the obviously uneven playing field evident in his own neighborhood, Friedman could effectively sell the school choice idea to the American public because in many respects he epitomized the American Dream. He was born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants from Hungary who barely spoke English upon arriving in New York. Growing up in poverty, Friedman had worked diligently to pursue an education. He read voraciously. He studied between jobs, graduated from high school before the age of sixteen, and enrolled at Rutgers University after winning a scholarship.1 In short, Friedman seemed to demonstrate how one could
pull oneself up by the bootstraps to overcome economic hardship.
Graduating from college in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression, Friedman studied firsthand the economic problems that aggrieved the nation and beleaguered the economy. First understanding the Depression as caused by (and thus to be corrected by) government regulation, he later devoted his career to the libertarian notion that the government should not be actively involved in the economy. Prior to his ascent to renown as an economist and fame as a public intellectual in the 1950s, Friedman was marginalized and at times chastised for challenging the reigning orthodoxy of his field. The prevailing view at the time was based on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who postulated that the Great Depression was caused by economic instability triggered by failing markets and banks, the solution to which was a greater level of government intervention. According to Keynesian thought, the government should set fiscal policy, including tax rates, and increase government spending and borrowing to spur aggregate, large-scale economic activity.
Friedman began making a name for himself by challenging this view. In 1963, Friedman argued in his coauthored volume A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 that the Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve Bank’s misguided monetary policy—not by Wall Street panic or consumers who hastened to withdraw money from banks. Monetary policy that focused on central bank activity—rather than fiscal policy that addressed spending and taxation—held more importance for Friedman, who advocated for changing interest rates and changing the money supply through a central bank as opposed to the network of smaller commercial banks.2
Friedman would not only ruffle feathers through his analysis of monetary policy. His largest contributions to the national political debate extolled the virtues of a free and competitive market in relation to a wide array of fields, including education. As Friedman continued to critique Keynesian economic thought within the ivory tower of academia and began to garner a growing influence and following, he began to articulate theories of the free market and the idea that human freedom was inextricably linked to it. For Friedman, the government should play only a limited role, thereby “freeing” individuals and the market to operate of its own accord. Friedman’s work established the basis for a revolution in regard to the role of government in the economy but also in schools.
Friedman was challenging the core assumption of federal fiscal policy of his time. The Keynesian economic doctrine extended President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic policies of the Great Depression into the 1950s and 1960s. It was often criticized among anti-interventionists or advocates for a smaller government as a tax-and-spend liberal frenzy of congressional Democrats under President Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a mentee of FDR. By the 1960s, LBJ’s Great Society programs and legislation like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 were grounded in the same principles of Keynesian economics. It followed that the government should also guide, or intervene in, a host of other aspects of American society, including education.3 To Friedman and others, federal education policy was the most recent example of an entrenched interventionist government.
Friedman was in a position to advocate for school choice outside the American South, effectively distancing it from a region associated with virulent racism. In academia, Friedman struck many of his teachers, colleagues, and disciples as sharp, witty, and even brilliant. A quirky, charismatic speaker with a reputation for impeccable debating skills, he spread his doctrine through speaking tours, published research, and, most notably, in meetings with high-profile politicians in the Republican Party—those who sought to woo White southern voters to the GOP. He was, in short, a force to be reckoned with.
To question the basis of federal intervention as Friedman did guaranteed political isolation. Even though he was an insider at an elite institution, Friedman put forth outsider views that resonated with those who had advocated for school choice in the South. Friedman first and foremost bucked the system with gusto, and his willingness to do so was seen as an admirable trait in an era remembered for its rebelliousness. “My maverick status did not keep me from receiving more requests than I could accommodate,” Friedman later recalled.4
Exemplifying the American Dream, Friedman also espoused one of its most widespread myths. For Friedman, hard work and steadfast effort with a little luck could catapult one to the top. Two Lucky People, the autobiography he wrote with his wife, Rose, highlights the latter. “In all,” they wrote, “it was pure luck that . . . enabled us to have an extraordinarily rich and varied life.” For Milton in particular, it was “luck” that he’d had an inspiring math teacher in high school in New Jersey who offered a course in Euclidean geometry. It was luck that he had teachers at Rutgers University who enabled him to go to Chicago. It was mere chance that Friedman met the faculty he did at the University of Chicago.5 For Friedman, it was all happenstance luck, an uncontrollable factor in economics. Of course, he acknowledged, it was not all providence. His American-inspired ingenuity, work ethic, and keen intellect rounded out the American Dream that he exemplified. These traits precipitated his rise as an influential, Nobel-winning economist.
Though a growing number see the American Dream as unattainable, the idea remains popular. Popular psychologist Angela Duckworth used the word “grit” in 2007 to encompass the idea that with the right combination of passion, perseverance, and tenacity, most people, if not all, can overcome great challenges to achieve life goals.6 Though this belief is criticized, it remains widely accepted in education circles, and many Americans are comfortable embracing it. They are in turn likely to endorse the ideas of someone like Friedman, son of immigrants, born in Brooklyn, who worked numerous jobs to help pay for his education.
Yet there are privileges and an unequal playing field that explain the rise of someone like Friedman. Nothing in this archetypal narrative mentions the privilege of his race. It disavows race and racialized policy altogether. It ignores the reality of segregated schooling enforced by housing segregation and policy decisions that enabled new forms of segregation in spite of a growing movement against it. It discounts northern housing covenants that relegated BIPOC families to “ghettos” that stripped away the same protections and promises offered to Friedman. He may have been a poor child of immigrants, but Friedman was White. Intellect, merit, and hard work played a role in his life, to be sure. But so did his Whiteness, which was protected and privileged through law, policy, and custom. This was neither the American Dream nor “grit” but a racialized system of advantages that was as American as apple pie.
There were structural limitations to Milton Friedman’s ideas about school choice too. As an economist, Friedman grounded his policies in a bottom-line objectivity that assumed individuals were rational actors who for the most part acted in their own best interest. Yet in the 1950s, in the city of Chicago, there was much irrationality on full display. The housing market in particular and neighborhood segregation were governed by policies that intentionally separated White and Black families. White neighborhood associations chased Black families out of homes in the neighborhood in and around where Friedman lived. His employer, the University of Chicago, meddled in local housing policies to clear out urban “slums” occupied by Black families. White homeowners and elected officials created policies that displaced Black families—all to effect and maintain segregation. Just as in the South, Whites undertook massive resistance to avoid sending their children to desegregated schools. And the Chicago neighborhoods created by racialized policies were intricately linked to Friedman’s “educational marketplace”—the place where ostensible free choices were made about where to go to school.
Friedman may have seen that nothing was fair or equal. He may on some level have known something about racism and how it played out on the streets, outside his office window. Regardless, these did not factor into his analysis or the school choice theory that reshaped American education.
Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in econ
omics in 1976. He earned the award for his “brilliance and independence” in challenging the predominant view of Keynesian economics, arguing that “money matters.”7 By the time he was awarded the Nobel, internationally esteemed economists credited Friedman with shifting the macroeconomic policy of major nations including the United States, spurring revision and reexamination of previously accepted truths that undergirded monetary policy. “It is very rare for an economist to wield such influence,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted in 1976, “not only on the direction of scientific research but also on actual policies.”8 His influence continued to grow. In 1980, he published Free to Choose, also cowritten with his wife, and it rose to the top of the best-seller list and inspired a popular PBS series of the same name.9
Some of Friedman’s most influential ideas are about education policy, and his platform as a renowned public intellectual amplified his influence. Friedman put forth what would be dubbed “school choice” in an essay first published in 1955 as part of the edited volume Economics and the Public Interest and later included in his highly influential Freedom and Capitalism. In “The Role of Government in Public Education” Friedman first challenged a deeply entrenched acceptance of an interventionist state, which he claimed entailed a “concentration of attention and dispute on the areas where new intervention is proposed and to an acceptance of whatever intervention has so far occurred as natural and unchangeable.”10 Government influence in education policy, like government intervention in a plethora of other fields, constituted an intrusion that had grown to the point where it seemed immutable by the mid-1950s. Though he never specifically mentioned it, the Brown v. Board of Education decision represented one of the most profound interventions in the field of education since Reconstruction. By publishing his essay in 1955, one year after the Brown decision and the dawn of desegregation, Friedman was wading into one of the most contentious debates of the century.