The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  The community control movement, both ideological and programmatic, took hold in the early 1960s in Mississippi and in such cities as Boston, Chicago, and New York. Black activists established Freedom Schools in order to boycott public school systems that refused to meaningfully desegregate. The Freedom Schools presented a new opportunity. SNCC organizer Charlie Cobb, who proposed the schools in Mississippi in 1963, argued that a movement controlled by people of color required something new: “building our own institutions to replace the old, unjust decadent ones which make up the existing power structure.”59 Movement activists also established Liberation Schools across the country to meet community needs. Liberation Schools, which the Black Panther Party developed after the Freedom Schools, provided curricula and teachers committed specifically to African American students—something sorely lacking in “desegregated” schools.60 Grounded in a deeper history traced to slavery, education that capitalized on self-determination and empowerment always presented a compelling alternative to working with schools governed by White policymakers.

  The busing saga and the process of desegregation captured national headlines, emerging as the mainstream solutions to racially separate or “imbalanced” schools. The narrative eclipsed other solutions and visions for quality education that sprang from the civil rights movement, like the Freedom Schools and Liberation Schools that were working alternatives parallel to the segregated academies of the South. These were driven by a different ideology that moved beyond desegregation. Just months after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, SNCC organizer Bob Moses asked, “Why can’t we set up our own schools? Because when you come right down to it, why integrate their schools? What is it that you will learn in their schools? What [students] really need to learn is how to be organized to work on the society to change it.”61 Fellow organizer Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the phrase “Black Power” in the summer of 1966, wrote:

  Integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. It allows the nation to focus on a handful of Southern children who get into white schools, at great price, and to ignore the 94% who are left behind in unimproved all-black schools. Such situations will not change until Black people have power—to control their own school boards, in this case. Then Negroes become equal in a way that means something, and integration ceases to be a one-way street.62

  Demands for community control of schools took hold in northern cities that typically prided themselves on being more liberal than the South. Black activists in New York who identified with the Black Power arm of the larger civil rights movement made demands for “local control” that reverberated across the nation by the late 1960s. In the neighborhood of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, Black activists began to assert demands for greater control of schools. In 1966, concerned citizens organized a “People’s Board of Education,” which elected local activist Milton Galamison as president. The group, gaining strength through collaboration with the New York–based teachers’ union, United Federation of Teachers (UFT), organized the “Independent School Board No. 17.” Under African American leadership, the group critiqued the very nature of the segregated system. Its members moved beyond calls for desegregation and other forms of incremental change. The civil rights coalition demanded equity and justice through transformative, redistributive reform defined by and for people of color.63

  In Chicago, Black parents and civil rights activists teamed with the University of Chicago, public school administrators, and a Black advocacy group, the Woodlawn Organization, to establish the Woodlawn Experimental Schools Project in 1968. The organization sought to increase community control of the curriculum, teacher and principal staffing, and extracurricular programming. Rather than waiting for schools to desegregate, Black parents wanted to improve the quality of education immediately in their neighborhood.64

  Similarly, concerned Black parents and education advocates took matters into their own hands in Detroit. In 1967, the Reverend Albert Cleage, influenced by the autonomy and self-determination promoted by Black Power ideology, founded the Black Christian National Movement. Rev. Cleage and others broke from mainstream calls for integration and demanded community control of Black schools instead. Working in conjunction with the Inner City Parents Council and Citizens for Community Control of Schools, activists issued a declaration in 1968.65 They said that they were “ready to move to direct action, if necessary, such as pickets, boycotts, sit-ins, liberation of schools and actual takeover of the schoolhouse until the community obtains real decision-making power.”66

  These northern education activists all practiced the politics of Black achievement by demanding greater control of their own schools, and they gained tangible policy shifts. In Michigan, for instance, the state legislature passed a bill that transferred some power to the community and expanded the number of school districts to increase direct representation. They decentralized some of the education decision-making, creating regional boards and a central statewide board that drew members from each of the regional districts.67 The move reflected what occurred in New York, where ongoing pressure forced state legislators to create nearly thirty community school districts to increase parental and community participation.68

  Whites who opposed busing and integration found their own interests served by community control initiatives, which promoted the segregation and “school choice” that they wanted. Liberal Whites recoiled at relinquishing some power, exposing the limits of their commitment to civil rights. The case in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhood of New York City illustrates the fragility of White liberals then as now. In the process of establishing neighborhood schools, Black community control advocates rightly viewed many White teachers as paternalistic and condescending to students and parents of color.69 It was clear, after all, that Whites refused to integrate in the true sense of the word or share meaningful decision-making. Activists noted that Black teachers were underpaid and rarely promoted to key administrative positions. Whites continued to treat Black students and teachers with disrespect in the schools that desegregated. White teachers who taught Black students largely misunderstood Black culture if not outwardly disrespecting it. As historian Jerald Podair noted, “Ocean Hill–Brownsville citizens saw community control as a chance to change the rules of an unfair market, and end decades of economic and political marginalization.”70

  The state legislature permitted experimentation with community control in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. Supported by a galvanized local Black community fed up with racist, inferior education and limited desegregation plans, and supported with a sizable Ford Foundation grant, Black parents and community members established their own board, the Brownsville–Ocean Hill Independent Local School Board. It circumvented the traditional power structure of the citywide board of education as well as the power of the teachers’ union, the local United Federation of Teachers. Black parents and community members acquired power to appoint principals to fill vacancies in their local district. Their first appointment, Herman Ferguson, was a Black Power advocate active in the Revolutionary Action Movement, a militant organization founded in 1963 and inspired by Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams. White professionals in the UFT branded Ferguson and the revolutionary cause as too radical. The union sued on the grounds that Ferguson’s appointment violated a law that required a written examination. The union lost the case on the grounds that the position was experimental, and Black appointees remained.71 But the battle lines were drawn, pitting White progressives against Black community control advocates, and Black activists were clearly willing and able to effectively challenge the union at a time when teacher unionization was on the rise. On the other side, White teachers and the UFT wanted to retain control of any decentralization initiatives. As one White member of the majority-White UFT put it, Black advocates on the local board were progressing too “definitively” for the union.72 In Detroit, Black advocates demanded Black teachers and administrators for Black schools. The Detroit Federation of Teachers offered a te
pid color-blind response: “Color is beside the point if the person is doing the job.”73 As historian Jeanne Theoharis later noted, “With public support of racial segregation viewed as the distasteful purview of Southern racists, ‘color-blind’ discourses provided a socially acceptable rhetoric to harness many Northern whites’ contentment with the status quo (and opposition to housing, school, and job desegregation).”74

  The community control “experiment” in New York illustrates the triviality of White liberalism in the face of Black power demands on the ground. This reaction presaged White liberal support of school choice today. When the UFT and its president Al Shanker spoke out against Black advocates who demanded control of their own schools in the 1960s, it exposed White liberals who were not ready to concede power or control. White teachers would travel south to teach in Freedom Schools in Mississippi, but when it came time to relinquish control to Black leaders in their own neighborhoods, White liberals drew a line. Predominantly White teacher unions like the UFT insisted on a hiring system in which credentials were valued and rewarded—an “objective” and “fair” process. The UFT relied on notions of equality, merit, and state-sanctioned standardized examinations to “qualify” all appointments in the community control experiment.75 The union also maintained a commitment to color-blindness—no teacher would be hired or fired based on race.76 The UFT went on strike against the Black advocates for over a month across the city. By refusing to teach they hoped to retain control of teacher selection. It was one of the most divisive strikes in history, yet White teachers preserved their power, and the UFT retained control over the hiring, firing, and placement of teachers. White teachers would not be moved to concede or even share control over Black education.

  The political alliances that supported Black community control in many ways made for strange bedfellows. In New York, conservative Republicans, left-leaning Black legislators, and civil rights activists aligned to provide support for community control and decentralization policies, including vouchers, or governmental stipends or tax breaks to compensate for the cost of private school tuition. The movement also attracted the political support of New York government and civic leaders, not to mention the era’s captains of industry, including the presidents of RCA and Time, the chairman of IBM, and a former president of Harvard University.77 As Todd-Breland notes in her analysis of community control, the development of such coalitions established the foundations for relationships between grassroots organizers and the business community that would define school choice in later decades.78

  White parents looking to enroll their children in schools in northern cities faced a new, uncertain landscape intimidating for those vested in segregated schools. Antibusing riots and increasing demands for Black community control disrupted business as usual. The milieu surrounding school desegregation and civil rights activism unmasked a truth that racism knew no regional boundaries and never had. This, combined with the race riots igniting across northern cities, made the task of building a quality urban school system highly challenging, if not impossible.

  The 1965 insurrection in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was predominantly Black, demonstrated to many Whites that investing in cities had become unwise. Violence erupted in August that year after an instance of police brutality, hardly a first. President Johnson sent sixteen thousand National Guard troops to Los Angeles in the next six days of rebellion and unrest. Thirty-four people were killed, most by police and National Guardsmen, over one thousand were injured, and nearly four thousand were arrested. The uprising devasted the neighborhood’s Black business community, causing nearly $50 million in property damage.79 The rebellion made national news and caught the country off guard. A bewildered if not clueless Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act only five days before the violence, aimed at eliminating racial discrimination in voting. “How could this have happened,” Johnson is said to have lamented, “after all I’ve done?”80

  Two years later in Detroit, African Americans pushed back against police who, in a case typical of police harassment, had raided an after-hours bar. President Johnson again sent in the US Army—nearly five thousand army paratroopers, and, in the riots that followed over the next days, forty-three people were killed, over one thousand were injured, and nearly four thousand were arrested. Similar to Watts, estimates of property damage soared to over $50 million, equal to about $390 million today.81 The Detroit riots in 1967 stemmed from the same sort of longstanding racist policies behind the rebellion in Los Angeles. The unrest also followed decades of civil rights organizing in the city. Organizers had cultivated a heightened political consciousness and mobilized the Black community to demand change, vote, and hold city officials accountable. In fact, during the same summer of 1967 in the Motor City, Black activists there stepped up demands for community control of schools.82

  Rebellion also took place in New York, Chicago, Newark, Cleveland, and other northern cities, especially after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, when over one hundred cities across the nation experienced racial violence.83 The nation was literally on fire, and Whites were terrified.

  These events contributed to a new perception that public schools were violent spaces. In Detroit, members of Citizens for Community Control of Schools, a local organization aimed at increasing Black citizens’ power to oversee education, responded to a deleterious education system and asserted that they were prepared to take “direct action, if necessary, such as pickets, boycotts, sit-ins, liberation of schools and actual takeover of the schoolhouse.”84 When Black students carried the principles of the civil rights and Black Power movements into the schools and physical confrontations ensued at times between students, White parents and school administrators became uneasy, calling on law enforcement to keep the peace in schools. In Boston, the press reported on school overcrowding and discipline problems. South Boston High School defined for many readers the environment of urban public schools, which increasingly beseeched law enforcement to provide discipline and surveillance. “The halls are relatively quiet,” Muriel Cohen of the Boston Globe reported in 1976 on South Boston High. “The State Police are stationed at the stairways and strategic points in the narrow, pastel colored hallways.”85

  Police in schools were not an uncommon sight at the time. National discourse by the early 1970s posited that “juvenile delinquency” was a problem of significant magnitude, particularly in desegregated schools. The notion was grounded more in fear of desegregation than actual evidence. More and more cities required a police presence in public schools to restore “law and order.”86 Police, armed guards, metal detectors, and other manifestations of disciplinary power grew to become permanent fixtures in our public schools, and schools in turn became pathways to prison for “disruptive” Black students.87

  White Americans were deeply troubled by desegregation and shaken by the riots of the 1960s. Best-selling nonfiction books about the nation’s public schools, with titles like Death at an Early Age and Our Children Are Dying, captured the sentiment as thousands of Whites fled the city for suburban enclaves. Between 1950 and 1970, Chicago lost 29 percent of its White population, Newark lost 54 percent, and St. Louis lost 48 percent.88 Beyond city limits, Whites were distanced from the tensions of the civil rights movement and the increasing calls for Black empowerment. As White people left cities behind, they depleted the property tax base that was (and remains) integral to school funding and left the public school system to crumble. Whites still in the cities subject to desegregation orders were, for the most part, wealthy and enrolled their children in private schools, or they were poor, left with little choice but to attend desegregated public schools. When Whites fled, they left behind a “majority-minority” system that was difficult to integrate meaningfully.

  White flight was a widespread form of resistance. The movement to the suburbs was not easily framed like the photo of the young Joseph Rakes wielding the US flag as a weapon. But its numbers suggest that northern Whites wanted nothin
g to do with desegregation. Even before the apex of the busing controversy in Detroit during the early 1970s, massive flight drained the schools of White students. By 1966 in the Detroit public schools, African American students composed over 55 percent of all students, up from 17 percent in 1946.89 By 1984, nearly a decade after the busing controversy, Whites made up less than 10 percent of the city school district.90 In Boston, over two hundred thousand Whites left for suburban enclaves between 1950 and 1970.91 Approximately 60 percent of students enrolled in Boston public schools were White in 1973. By 1980, Whites accounted for only 35 percent and by the close of the decade, only 26 percent.92 Hyde Park High School, one of the centers of busing during court desegregation in Chicago, began as a White school. After one year of court-mandated busing, the school was 60 percent White and by 1986, the school was 82 percent Black. “This school is really not integrated,” Doris Brown, a Black senior at the school in 1986, recalled. “Lots of whites had moved out and the rest who live around here go to private schools.”93

  Doris Brown’s observations could just as easily have been made in nearly any other major northern city that was implementing desegregation plans. By 1980, Whites accounted for less than 20 percent of the public school enrollment in Chicago. Those Whites who remained in the city opted for private education.94 One White parent in Boston encapsulated the new function of private schools in the North: “There were no circumstances under which [our daughter] was going to Boston public schools.” For many parents in the aftermath of busing and desegregation orders, enrolling in public schools “was just not a risk [they] were comfortable taking.”95 Privatization and White flight decimated investment in Boston public schools as well, and a largely poor population was left behind. By the 1980s, over 90 percent of students in Boston were students who qualified for free and reduced-price lunches. By 1988, nearly 40 percent of public high school students were dropping out before graduating. Over one-third of city schools qualified for special state assistance due to failing test scores.96 The lines had been drawn yet again, this time between urban and suburban areas.