Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  Jacquelyn was rail thin with a soft, tentative voice and an air of fragility. Ja’Mekia was stockier and more assertive, a poised debater who spoke in a precise but rapid-fire diction that could easily drown out her mother’s more hesitant drawl. Jacquelyn didn’t want to take the school’s side in this fight. She didn’t want her daughter to think she wasn’t good enough. Ja’Mekia’s grades were fine, she explained quietly, it was just that she was black. Ja’Mekia began to cry again, and Jacquelyn joined in.

  Like Dionne, Ja’Mekia had attended a school in her neighborhood only briefly—for Head Start and first grade. Then the Jefferson County school system assigned her and La’Quinn to Eisenhower Elementary in the South End. When the children were young, Jacquelyn moved the family often, and each new home meant a new school zone. The family had most recently landed at a rented three-bedroom house at 41st Street and Market, near Shawnee High. The neighborhood had been a solidly white middle-class enclave in the 1950s, but its bungalows and cottages had gradually been taken over by middle-class blacks in the 1960s. By the 1990s, the neighborhood was home to the working poor. It resembled other clusters of once dignified but now decaying housing stock in the West End. The one difference was that the neighborhood’s children were paired with the East End, not the South, under the city’s busing plan. For the final grades of elementary school and for middle school, Ja’Mekia and La’Quinn were bused to the far eastern corner of the county, the wealthiest area of the city.

  Norton Elementary, where Ja’Mekia attended fourth and fifth grade, was located across the road from the Standard Country Club and less than a mile from the lush campus of one of Louisville’s most prestigious private schools, Kentucky Country Day. Ja’Mekia woke up at 5:30 in the morning to catch her first bus to the county depot, where school buses from across the county exchanged students. There, Ja’Mekia switched to another bus that headed past the downtown skyscrapers to the new brick four-squares and mini-mansions of East Louisville. In sixth grade, she was assigned to Kammerer Middle School, a short trip from Norton. Like Norton, Kammerer’s black enrollment hovered below 25 percent, close to the minimum allowed under the desegregation plan.2

  Ja’Mekia did well at Norton, and even better at Kammerer. Jacquelyn had her tested for advanced placement, and Ja’Mekia passed easily. At first, Ja’Mekia was nervous about being the only black student in most of her advanced classes. Louisville required its schools to maintain enrollments close to the actual percentage of blacks in the city—30 percent. Nearly all schools fell between 40 percent black on the high end of the spectrum to 20 percent on the low end.3 But programs within the schools, like the Advance Program and special education classes, were exempted from the racial guidelines. The Advance Program—Louisville’s version of an accelerated curriculum for students deemed to be “gifted”—was around 11 percent black. Ja’Mekia was afraid of being thrust into a white world, of being labeled the “black white girl” by her friends from the neighborhood. So what? her mother responded. Ja’Mekia stayed in the advanced classes.

  Jacquelyn may have had a soft, tentative manner, but it disguised a steely determination to push herself and her children ahead. She encouraged her children, but she did not indulge them, particularly when it came to school. When La’Quinn passed first grade without knowing the alphabet or how to spell his own name, Jacquelyn rode the public bus to his school to talk to the administrators. Told he could catch up with his peers in second grade, she politely but firmly demanded that her son be held back. Assuming he could master two years’ worth of school in one year was absurd, she argued, and letting him pass would most likely set him up to fall further behind each year. The school relented and let La’Quinn repeat first grade. And when the school system notified her that Ja’Mekia and La’Quinn would be bused to Fairdale, she moved the family to the rented house on 41st Street.

  Jacquelyn’s wariness about Fairdale came from firsthand experience. She had been assigned to Fairdale High School as a tenth grader in 1975, the first year of busing. Until then, she had attended schools near her house on Vermont Avenue, in the far West End near the river. She could have transferred voluntarily to a white school under the city’s early version of a desegregation plan but, like most black students, she chose her neighborhood school, Shawnee. The school had once been all white, but as suburbanization accelerated, the school became mostly black. Unlike Central, however, Shawnee was never completely segregated. Many whites, most of them poor, still clustered in Portland, a neighborhood that hugged the West End’s northern edge along the river.4 They were the ones who couldn’t afford to leave, even when cheap mortgages were handed out in the 1940s and 1950s. Jacquelyn’s best friend growing up was white—one of the Portland holdouts. The two lost touch after tenth grade, however, when Jacquelyn was sent away.

  On September 4, 1975, Jacquelyn boarded the bus to Fairdale, only vaguely aware of the decades of demonstrations and legal battles that had brought her there. But shortly after the bus turned off the expressway and headed into the country, the high stakes and emotional turmoil of the civil rights movement came vividly to life. A meadow in front of the school was filled with an angry mob waving picket signs and nooses. They screamed obscenities and aimed rocks and sticks at the windows of the school buses.5 The welcome inside the school was only slightly warmer. In several classes, Jacquelyn sat alone as the only black student, a target for spitballs and whispered name-calling that she swore the teacher heard but ignored.

  At the end of her first day, Jacquelyn climbed onto her assigned bus to head home. The other buses turned onto the highway and passed the crowd, but her bus, the last in line, stalled a few seconds too long before pulling away. The crowd surged. In a matter of seconds, angry whites surrounded them and clamored at the doors and windows. The bus driver held onto the door handle with both hands to keep them out. Frustrated, the crowd threw rocks at the windows, and then began to rock the bus. The students cried and cowered for over an hour before police dispersed the crowd and they were able to drive home. Jacquelyn’s new pair of sailor-style jeans and flowered tank top, chosen especially to make a good impression on the first day of school, were smeared with grime from the floor.6

  The next day, Jacquelyn’s mother ignored her pleas to stay home. “You’ll be all right,” she said, “but call me if you need me.” Jacquelyn boarded a bus to Fairdale every school day for the next three years, enduring taunting and harassment. Her mother listened to her reports after school each day, but the response was always the same: “You’ll be alright.” When the weather turned cold, white students rolled snowballs with sharp rocks embedded in them to throw at the black students as they passed through the hallways. The black students learned to travel in groups of at least five. Many of the boys were suspended or expelled for fighting. Black students didn’t play sports or participate in clubs, and Jacquelyn did not attend her senior prom. She saw what Fairdale was like in the daytime. There was no way she was going there after dark.

  Jacquelyn graduated in 1979 and vowed never to return to Fairdale. She certainly wasn’t going to let Ja’Mekia and La’Quinn attend school there. But like her own mother, Jacquelyn was not the sort to hide ugliness from her children. She told Ja’Mekia and La’Quinn about Fairdale when they were young, and the story became family lore.

  She also didn’t shy from telling her children that becoming a single mother at the age of twenty-one had been her single biggest mistake. Her children were her life—she loved them intensely—but she repeated often that she had made herself a hard bed. Being a single mother meant she never went to college. Instead, she worked long hours at menial jobs to earn enough to get off welfare. For several years of Ja’Mekia and La’Quinn’s childhood, she woke up before dawn each day to take a two-hour bus ride to the University of Louisville’s suburban campus to work as a janitor. The money she earned was just enough to pay for rent, food, clothes, and the occasional splurge on popsicles from the ice cream truck. These were the consequences of her mistakes. S
he repeated often to her children that they had better not make the same ones. She expected them to do better, and being black and poor was no excuse. Her mother’s sayings had become hers: Life wasn’t always sunshine, but if you work hard, you’ll be alright.

  Jacquelyn’s memories of Fairdale left her with more than a few misgivings about busing, but her children’s experiences in the suburbs changed her mind. Alert teachers discovered La’Quinn had a learning disability, and they pushed him to overcome it. He never became an A student, but by the end of middle school, he was able to keep up. Ja’Mekia overcame her fear of being mocked as the “black white girl” and flourished both academically and socially. She went canoeing and camping with white friends and occasionally spent the night at slumber parties in the suburbs. By age twelve, Ja’Mekia decided she wanted to be a lawyer, and that Central was the best place for her to fulfill her dream. Jacquelyn was thrilled that her children seemed headed for a life better than her own.

  Before the letter came, Ja’Mekia had rarely thought about race beyond her mother’s stories and her nervousness over joining the advanced classes. Her mother’s Fairdale story was dramatic, but it was a distant legend, an abstraction. To be told that the only reason she couldn’t go to Central was because she was black was a shock. It seemed deeply unfair to her, as if she had traveled back in time to the Jim Crow days she had read about in school, when blacks weren’t allowed to do anything. Worse, by the time the letter arrived, it was too late to apply for one of the city’s other magnet schools, which tended to have the best reputations in the city.

  Ja’Mekia was partly hurt, partly furious. She could try for a spot in a mediocre, nonmagnet school in the suburbs—probably in the South End—and face another four years of early mornings and long days. If she did nothing, she would be sent to Shawnee, down the street from her house. The school had a lingering reputation as a place for hopeless cases—the drug dealers in training and future dropouts—despite efforts at a turnaround in the early 1990s.7 There was no Advance Program, so Ja’Mekia would have to return to regular classes. But Ja’Mekia decided she might as well stay close to home.8

  Jacquelyn knew Shawnee was no place for Ja’Mekia, and she was frantic as she watched her strong, confident daughter deflate before her eyes. She made phone calls to Central, but she was rebuffed. She went in person, and she was turned away. She and her daughter still had hope, however. The letter had said that students not accepted their freshman year would be first in line the following year for any open slots at Central. That fall, Ja’Mekia applied for Central and also Fern Creek, an East End school with a communications magnet where several of her cousins went. Ja’Mekia wasn’t interested in communications, but she figured some of the skills would be useful in law.

  The letter did not explain that slots for black students rarely opened up after ninth grade since Central had trouble not only attracting white students but also retaining them. The school’s administration and many of its teachers were interested in maintaining Central’s legacy as a black school, and many white students, apparently, didn’t feel welcome. In the summer of 1996, Jacquelyn received another letter. Central had refused Ja’Mekia again. Soon after, the story about a protest at Central ran in the newspaper. “Suddenly the system has become more important than the children,” one of the protesters told the paper.9

  The argument made sense to Ja’Mekia and her mother. The protesters were quoted in the newspaper as saying they would be meeting again soon to plan more action. Parents whose children had been turned away because they were black were encouraged to attend. Jacquelyn was curious. She couldn’t afford a babysitter, so on the day of the meeting, she brought Ja’Mekia and La’Quinn along with her.

  Chapter 3

  The protesters called themselves Citizens for Equitable Assignment to School Environment (CEASE). The group had fewer than a dozen members. But those few people were already shaking the fragile foundations of racial harmony in Louisville. The city sat on the southern banks of the Ohio River, once the last barrier to freedom for slaves running north, but many white Louisvillians preferred to think of their city as northern at heart, more Ohio than Mississippi.

  True, segregation had been enforced in schools, housing, train stations, buses, hotels, department stores, and restaurants, but the practitioners of Louisville’s version of Jim Crow believed their system to be kinder than its counterparts in the Deep South. The Confederate flag might occasionally appear as a bumper sticker on a South End pickup truck, but Louisville was also a place where white Southern Baptists—staunch opponents of integration elsewhere—had once hosted Martin Luther King Jr.1 The school system, the most racially integrated in the nation by the 1990s, was the bedrock of white Louisvillians’ conviction that their city was racially enlightened.

  Black Louisvillians were more skeptical about white good-will. Louisville was the city where a black family had been bombed when it tried to move into a white neighborhood in 1954. It was the city where rioters tried to outdo Boston’s anti-busing zeal in the 1970s. The word darkies wasn’t excised from the state song, “My Old Kentucky Home,” sung every year before the Derby at Churchill Downs, until 1986.2 In Louisville in the 1990s, whites and blacks who mixed at work and school parted ways each evening to go home to neighborhoods nearly as segregated as they had been a century earlier.3

  Black residents who had been around in the 1950s scoffed at the idea that the city’s discrimination against blacks had been more benign than elsewhere. One called the city a “bastion of polite racism.”4 Yet many were also proud of their city’s progress. Yes, there were still many remnants of racism. But on most measures—test scores, graduation rates, numbers going to college—black students were far better off than they had been in the days before busing, and black leaders pushed back against occasional efforts to roll back pieces of the desegregation plan.5 So far they had held the line, and most blacks in Louisville backed their efforts: When the school superintendent floated a proposal to end mandatory busing in 1991, a poll found that 70 percent of African Americans in Louisville disapproved and wanted busing to stay.6

  But in the other 30 percent were those who measured how far blacks had come, and wondered how anyone could be so foolish as to call it progress. In 1996, CEASE, the group protesting Central’s admissions policies, became their voice and their battle cry.

  The group was led by a motley collection of outsiders and gadflies. One of the most outspoken was Carman Weathers, a former gym teacher and football coach. He was also a regular at school board meetings, and his rants against racial discrimination in the schools were occasionally published in the op-ed section of the Courier-Journal.

  Weathers had begun his teaching career at a traditionally black school in the West End that was closed in the wake of busing so that black students could be sent to the suburbs.7 He moved to another school, also a traditionally black institution, which was closed shortly after. Weathers ended up at Buechel, one of two alternative schools for children with discipline problems—the only schools in the system that were allowed to be majority black.

  With his Don King haircut and beefy football player’s build, Weathers made an odd companion for his fellow graduate of the Central class of 1953, Robert Douglas, a lanky art professor in the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville.8 Douglas had been a community organizer in Louisville’s housing projects in the 1960s before he went for his doctorate, and spent his free time painting and crafting sculptures of black nudes in a loft downtown. But the two agreed on most things, especially when it came to the dilemma of race and how to solve it. Like Weathers, Douglas believed blacks needed to reexamine their desire for integration and turn inward to uplift the race. Their main differences lay in style: Weathers had a tendency to turn friendly dinner party conversations into heated political debates, Douglas had a more Socratic way of making a point, asking questions that circled around his argument indirectly.

  Although Weathers and Douglas were generally
dismissed by leaders in the black community as outdated relics of the 1970s Black Power era, school officials had invited both men to join a committee of community groups convened in 1992 to monitor a new version of the desegregation plan—a gesture Weathers and Douglas assumed was a strategy to neutralize their criticism. If that was the plan, it didn’t work. The two men became more disillusioned with and outspoken about the school system the longer they served, particularly as they learned more about the state of their alma mater.

  On the committee they found an ally in Fran Thomas, a petite, jovial woman who directed the Kentucky Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.9 An army wife who had spent most of her life in the white South End military enclaves linked to Fort Knox, on the surface, Thomas wasn’t the most likely pick to lead an organization founded by Anne Braden, a civil rights activist once tried for treason because of alleged Communist ties. But despite her background, Thomas had always been rebellious. In 1968, when a real estate agent tried to steer her from buying a house in an all-white subdivision, Thomas called the colonel at Fort Knox. She told him her husband wouldn’t be going to Vietnam if they couldn’t buy a house in the same neighborhood as the white soldiers. A few phone calls later, the house was hers. They stayed in Valley Station, where she worked as a nurse for the base and the Veterans Administration until their daughter was sent to fight in the first Gulf War.

  Thomas didn’t believe in the war, and she didn’t want her daughter risking her life for a mission she saw as an oil grab. Thomas joined an antiwar protest soon after her daughter was deployed. Not long after, she and her husband moved out of Valley Station to the West End, away from their shocked neighbors. Energized by a new calling, she became immersed in fights against police brutality and in the debate surrounding the selection process for a new superintendent of schools.10 (Thomas, believing the school board should hire a black superintendent, later filed a federal complaint saying the board’s choice of a white man was racist.)11 The daughter of sharecroppers in Alabama, Thomas was also a Central graduate—class of 1946. She was convinced Central had saved her from a life of hard labor and poverty. Like Weathers and Douglas, she became more agitated about the school the longer she spent on the monitoring committee.