Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  As committee members, Weathers, Douglas, and Thomas could ask for almost any data tracked by the school system. They examined graduation rates, enrollments by race and gender, school capacities, and test scores. One number that stood out to them in particular was the decline in the student population at Central. The school could hold 1,400 students, but the enrollment in 1994 was only 1,100.12

  Their worries were confirmed by reports from the inside. A friend of Weathers and Douglas, Riccardo X, taught black history and world civilization at Central.13 X grew up poor in Louisville’s Little Africa neighborhood in the 1960s and had planned to join the military after graduating from Male High School. As a sophomore, however, inspired by fellow Louisvillian Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam, X dropped out of the ROTC. He became a teacher instead. In 1975, his first year on the job, he was assigned to Southern High School in Okolona, a working-class white neighborhood and a hub of anti-busing violence. The Bittersweet Shopping Center, across the street from Southern, was a headquarters for mobs of white protesters who screamed racial epithets and threw bottles as X arrived at work each morning. As the year went on, he became more immersed in the teachings of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, eventually abandoning his European last name.

  X moved schools every couple of years until he landed at Central. There, he finally felt at home. His classroom became known around school as the BCC, the Black Cultural Center. He decorated it with kente cloth and artifacts, articles, posters, and timelines outlining black history from the early Egyptians to current events in Louisville. His students worked in teams named for ancient African civilizations and studied a homemade textbook, the X Text, that he filled with excerpts from Maya Angelou and the architect of Afrocentrism, Molefi Asante. Like Carman Weathers, Robert Douglas, and Fran Thomas, X worried that Central’s slipping enrollment would give the school board a good excuse to close it.

  The group’s concerns were still rather amorphous until September 23, 1994, when their cause suddenly came into focus. The Louisville Courier-Journal printed an article on the front page of its Metro section reporting that ten black students had been removed from Central High School.14 The percentage of black students at the school had risen to 43 percent, pushing the school out of compliance with the school system’s racial guidelines, which limited black enrollment to 42 percent of a school’s population. The main problem was that Central couldn’t hold on to its white students. Although the school was usually able to recruit an adequate number white freshman each year, they tended to leave at an alarming rate after their first or second year. As the white numbers were depleted, the school was forced to turn away more blacks. Sending away students in the middle of the school year was a first, however. School had already been in session a month, and some of the students had already attended Central for a year.

  Fran Thomas convened the first meeting of CEASE in the living room of her three-story house on 47th Street in the West End, one of the only residential blocks in Louisville that overlooked the Ohio River. The neighborhood had once housed Louisville’s white elite, but now it was an enclave of aging middle-class blacks who had raised their families there in better times. Robert Douglas lived around the corner, and Weathers lived a few blocks away. Also invited was Loueva Moss, a nurse and block watch leader who had helped Thomas in a failed run for city office, and a few other neighborhood activists. Most in the group were over the age of sixty, and several were members of the same Catholic church. The first order of business was getting Weathers to quiet down so the rest could speak, but eventually everyone got a chance to talk and agree on their mission: Central, the pride of the black community, was in peril, and they must save it.

  None of them had attended integrated schools, and in their experience, integration had led only to violence and disappointment. Assembled in the creaky old house poised on the edge of the Ohio’s southern banks, they agreed that their principal enemy was the desegregation system that had never lived up to its promise of uplifting the black race. Mixing white and blacks students together was supposed to bring equality, but in Louisville and across the country, equality was still as elusive as ever. In their eyes, black people had not yet crossed the river to freedom, and desegregation was the chain that was holding them back.

  Black students were still relegated to the worst schools; they had seen the numbers to prove that low-performing schools such as Fairdale enrolled many more blacks than the city’s top-tier magnet schools. The numbers told them that “choice,” the new education reform buzzword, really just meant choice for white students. Too few blacks could be found in accelerated tracks such as the Advance Program, and their test scores still lagged far behind whites. Worst of all, the one school in Louisville that had long taken blacks from the ghetto and propelled them to success was threatened. They were not against integration, but it always seemed to entail compromises that hurt black interests. It no longer seemed worth it to them.

  On October 24, a month after the ten black students were forced out of Central, the fledgling group had the chance to make its argument in public at the monthly school board meeting. The room was packed. On the agenda was a presentation by a professor who had studied the city’s desegregation plan and drawn up a list of suggested improvements—among them, a proposal to allow for at least one majority black school. But the study was pushed aside when Riccardo X, along with three of his students, stood up to make his case. “Central’s existence is now dependent on whether white students choose to go there,” X said. “And under your rules only white students get to choose.”15

  X sat down, and an elderly man stood and began to shuffle toward the podium. His craggy, elongated features were hollowed with age. But most in the room recognized him. Lyman Johnson was X’s predecessor as Central, for years its most radical and most beloved teacher. As a young civics teacher at Central in the 1940s, Johnson—like X—taught an unvarnished version of Western civilization, telling his students that he hoped “old Leopold, that devil Belgium king, is still roasting in hell for the way he forced black people in the Congo to bring rubber sap into the villages.”16 Outside of school, he brought his most devoted students along with him to lunch counter sit-ins. (Later, he would admit embarrassment that he was never actually arrested, despite his best efforts.)17 In 1949, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP sued the University of Kentucky on his behalf, and he became the first black graduate student admitted to the state’s flagship school.18

  He had always believed deeply in integrated education. In 1956, he accused the Louisville school superintendent of being “a cheap, peanut” politician in a letter to the Courier-Journal after a desegregation plan was enacted that led to only token racial mixing.19 In the early 1970s, he was a plaintiff in the lawsuit that forced the city to begin its busing program, and later joined the school board to see his legal victory implemented in policy.

  Johnson reached the podium and turned to face the crowd: “I feel like asking all of you to leave the room and just let me cry for a while. I just want to cry.” Johnson talked about Central in the old days, reminding the room of when Central’s campus had been devoid of trees. When the white students came, trees were planted. Central finally got the swimming pool it had requested thirty years earlier. Windows were replaced. New books were bought. The broken seats in the auditorium were finally fixed. It got an Advance Program and new science labs. As Johnson saw it, forced desegregation might not be the ideal way to achieve equality, but it was the only realistic one. “For 60 years, I’ve tried to get my people out of the cotton patch . . . and some of them are trying to get to go back to the cotton patch,” he said. “And I’ll tell them right to their face, they haven’t got the sense God gave chickens.”20

  Johnson sat down. Riccardo X’s face was impassive. Fran Thomas was up next. She was feeling a bit weak. Thomas had graduated from Central in 1946, during the time that Johnson was rising to prominence as one of the city’s leading civil rights figures. Although she never sat in his classroo
m, Thomas, like many older Central graduates, claimed him as her teacher. Later, she had met him at political demonstrations, and now they exchanged Christmas cards every year. She made her way to the podium.

  “I’m not going back to the cotton patch,” she began. She was tired of black children having to bear the brunt of a busing system that had not brought them equality yet, she said. The facilities might be better, but the level of education was just as poor. “Dr. Johnson hasn’t been in the schools in years. I love him. I appreciate him, but you’ve got to listen to us now. It’s a new day.”21

  A year later, Fran Thomas’s defiance would seem less shocking. Across the country, an old strain of black politics was rising to the surface once again. Black Nationalism was back. In 1995, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, called for a new March on Washington. The black men who answered his call far outnumbered the 250,000 who attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march.22 Although Farrakhan was widely denounced in the mainstream media for his homophobia and anti-Semitism and dismissed as a “sect leader,” to many blacks, his talk of self-help and racial independence inspired. As one housing project resident in Washington, DC, put it, when Farrakhan spoke, “Black people listen.”23 Dennis Walcott, then the president of the New York Urban League and later chancellor of New York City schools, described the march as representing “the true beliefs of blacks for years: self-determination, strengthening families.”24

  Three decades after the peak of the civil rights movement, a host of worsening social problems overshadowed black gains, including significant increases in income and educational attainment for blacks. Under Reagan, African American unemployment spiked, the wealth gap widened, and crime in inner-city neighborhoods exploded, eventually peaking in the early 1990s.25 Black test scores stopped climbing in the mid-1980s, leaving black students still stuck far behind whites.26 Families appeared to be on the brink of collapse. Single mothers headed nearly half of black households, up from 18 percent in 1950.27 By the 1990s, many blacks were fed up. In the midst of all these crises, it could be hard to remember what good desegregation had done anybody.

  Just as the message of Marcus Garvey, who advocated for blacks to join together and return to Africa, had been embraced during some of the worst years of Jim Crow—as the Ku Klux Klan was flourishing in the 1920s and millions of blacks were abandoning the South—the mounting troubles in the 1980s and ’90s corresponded with a rise in Black Nationalism. A 1996 survey found that 12 percent of blacks ascribed to nationalist views.28 More than a quarter had beliefs that were “neutral,” falling in between integration and nationalism.

  One of the survey questions asked whether blacks should attend Afrocentric schools. A quarter of African Americans agreed that they should.29 The question tapped into a movement among blacks starting in the late 1980s to revive the connection between black Americans and Africa, thus enhancing their racial pride. In this vein, Jesse Jackson proposed a new name for blacks, African American, at a national conference in 1988, after he failed in a run for president.30 By the early 1990s, Afrocentric schools were opening across the nation.31 Many operated privately, but public schools with an African focus became increasingly common.32

  Although most advocates of Afrocentrism publicly eschewed black separatism, in practice, Afrocentric schools inherently bred racial isolation. Most schools offering the curriculum were majority black, a function of the fact that many such schools were opened in black ghettos or in districts that had resegregated after their desegregation orders were lifted. In one California school, students said a pledge each day to “think black, act black, speak black, buy black, pray black, love black, and live black.”33

  In Louisville, only Carman Weathers openly advocated for the creation of all-black schools. The rest of the nascent group believed integration was a fine goal, but equality was more important. In meetings held in living rooms and the basement of the Catholic church, the core group grew to half a dozen. They came up with the name CEASE, and they crystallized their demands: The school system’s upper limits on the percentage of blacks per school should be raised to 85 percent—the same as it was for whites.34

  In the summer of 1995, less than a year after news broke that Central had kicked out ten of its students, denial letters went out to more than two hundred black students, including Ja’Mekia Stoner.35 The students met all of Central’s entrance requirements, except for their race. The following June, another round of letters went out denying more black freshmen, among them Dionne Hopson. Fed up, the members of CEASE formalized their organization. That summer, they lined up a series of meetings with school board members, state senators, and civil rights organizations to seek support for their cause. For the most part, the response was icy. The next step was direct action, and if that didn’t work, then they would sue.36

  First, they needed willing plaintiffs. From his position within the school, Riccardo X was able to help identify some of the students who had been denied. Others were found by word of mouth, flyers, and the publicity from the newspaper stories. The students and their parents were invited to a meeting at Robert Douglas’s home, where the CEASE members gave speeches and urged the parents to join their cause for the sake of their children. They passed around a petition demanding that “the ratio of African American students to White and other students be changed to allow African American students their right of choice.”37 They also asked parents to sign a “request for enrollment,” agreeing that if their children weren’t allowed into their school of choice, they would “join with other outraged and unfairly treated parents to pursue legal action against the Jefferson County Public Schools for denying my request because of my child’s race.”38

  The arguments appealed to Gwen. Why shouldn’t there be quality schools in the West End? Why did everyone assume her child had to sit next to a white child to learn? Why did their lives still have to be defined by their race? When the group asked who would be willing to join a second protest outside of Central High School on the first day of school, Gwen promised that she and Dionne would be there. CEASE marked her as a potential plaintiff.

  Jacquelyn sat through the meeting accompanied by her two restless middle schoolers. She was not particularly impressed by their arguments—she thought they were putting too much emphasis on the barriers faced by blacks. She wanted Ja’Mekia and La’Quinn to focus on what they could accomplish, not what stood in their way. But she also badly wanted her daughter to get into Central. The first year at Shawnee had been worse than Ja’Mekia had feared. The teachers seemed to regard her classmates more as problems to be managed than students to be taught. Bored and humiliated, Ja’Mekia often didn’t arrive at school until around 10 a.m., but she made Bs in her first two classes of the day. Sometimes she didn’t go to school at all. Jacquelyn knew her daughter wouldn’t make it if she didn’t get out soon, so she gave CEASE her name.

  The protest was mortifying. Ja’Mekia couldn’t meet the eyes of the students filing into school. She was sure everyone was laughing at her, assuming that her grades weren’t good enough to get in, and that here she was skipping school to whine about it. It was nearly as bad as the shame she felt sitting through class at Shawnee.

  Dionne felt numb. She was spending her first day of high school at Central, but instead of embarking on a legal career, she was on the outside, holding a picket sign. In their matching deep altos, Dionne and her mother bellowed chants along with Fran Thomas, Carman Weathers, and the others for the television cameras. But Dionne was already thinking about the following day, when she would be starting school at Pleasure Ridge Park, a few miles up the road from Frost Middle School. When a white student stomped out of Central and yelled to the picketers that someone could have her seat, Dionne winced. It wasn’t a seat she could have. The next day, Dionne woke up early to catch the bus to the South End. Ja’Mekia headed east to Fern Creek. CEASE began looking for a lawyer.

  II

  Our Beloved Central High

  Chapter 4
<
br />   Lyman Johnson was born in 1906, a grandson of slaves who talked often about the hardships of plantation life. He was the youngest of eight, skinny, with a long, serious face, and wavy, thick hair. He learned to be self-sufficient after his mother died and he was left to tend to the housework for his father. The family lived in the cabin his grandfather had built in Columbia, Tennessee, not too far away from the plantation where he was born. By the time Lyman lived there, white families had moved in nearby. His father was principal of College Hill School, the one-room schoolhouse for black students in Columbia, and he instilled in his children pride and ambition.1

  In comparison to many Southern blacks, Lyman’s family was well off, but as a teenager, Lyman had his first inklings of how difficult it was to protect one’s dignity in a segregated world. On a school day in 1921, Lyman’s father sent him on a quick errand to the local white high school to retrieve some papers from the superintendent.2 Lyman trotted over to the school and reported his message to a clerk, who told him he would have to wait for a few minutes. Lyman perched in an office chair next door to the superintendent’s door. As he sat, the black janitor passed by the doorway to the office.

  Lyman knew him as Mr. Graham, a friend of the family. Mr. Graham peeked in, his eyes on the school clerk. When she looked away, the janitor gestured to Lyman. “While you’re waiting, don’t you want to walk around with me?” he said.