Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  Joyce stayed with her sister for only a few months in the city while she gained her footing. She got a job at White Castle, and then enrolled in comptometer school to learn how to use an accounting machine. Her pale blue eyes and pretty face made marriage a likely prospect, however. Within a year, she had married and not long after was moving into her own Shively ranch house a couple of streets away from her sister’s.

  Joyce’s husband was a Teamster who eventually took a good job working for the union. When Joyce became pregnant, she quit her own job to stay at home. She had a son, and a couple of years later, twin girls. Their house was a small bungalow with a front porch and a garage, but the most important feature, as far as Joyce was concerned, was Schaffner Elementary, two blocks away. To Joyce, the school’s proximity was a luxurious amenity: from first to fourth grade, Joyce had walked two miles each way to the local one-room schoolhouse, and the trip to her high school had taken an hour and sometimes more on a school bus, one way.

  Just as in the rural towns where the new suburbanites had come from, the school was the center of their lives. Joyce had been ambitious before her marriage, and now she poured her energy into the PTA, where she rose in the ranks to become the president. As the 1960s came to a close, her role expanded beyond organizing bake sales.

  In 1964, Congress had passed and President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act. Among other major precedents in the law, it allowed the US attorney general to sue school districts that continued to segregate and to take away their federal funding.6 The landmark law seemed to spark even more anger and violence: For five years running after the passage of the law, summer riots broke out in black ghettos.

  Baffling to white suburbanites, the Johnson administration suggested that the violence and rage in the ghetto was their fault.7 A study commissioned by the president, the Kerner Report, blamed the violence on “a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans” inside the “racial ghetto.” Whites outside the ghetto had “prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization,” while blacks were excluded even as “this affluence has been flaunted” before them. “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it,” the report said.8

  Under Johnson’s leadership, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) took on a more proactive role in the pursuit of school desegregation.9 Until 1965, the NAACP, working mostly alone, had been slogging through court case after court case trying to force school districts to comply with the Brown ruling. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the federal government finally stepped in as an enforcer.

  The new role was driven in part by another influential report commissioned by the president.10 The Coleman Report, as it came to be known, was a sweeping survey of the state of education for minority children published in 1966. It found that white and black children, particularly in the South, still attended schools where segregation was “nearly complete.” In schools where there was some integration, it was almost always a few blacks mixed in with whites, never a few whites in a black school. Looking at standardized tests, the report found a disturbing gap between black and white students. The gap started early, gradually widening as students reached the upper grades. Southern blacks, followed by Southern whites, did the worst on tests, but in the South, the gap between the two groups was largest.

  The report’s most important finding was that schools mattered less than what happened at home in the students’ lives. Yet this was less true for minority students; for them, schools mattered much more in determining whether they would achieve: “It is for the most disadvantaged children that improvements in school quality will make the most difference in achievement.” Facilities mattered, teachers mattered more, but most important was the family background of the child and of the other students the child was surrounded by, according to the Coleman Report. It concluded that if a student’s classmates came from wealthier homes where parents had higher levels of education and where achievement was emphasized, the student would perform better in school. If the classmates were poor, with parents who had weaker educational backgrounds, the student would do worse in school.

  The report gave the Johnson administration a mandate to push harder on desegregation. Just as important as its promise to cut funding for school districts that continued to segregate, in 1966, HEW created guidelines describing what a desegregated school district should look like.11 No longer could school districts hide behind the vaguely worded Brown decision. The guidelines specifically targeted freedom of choice plans, like the one in Louisville, and required school districts to prove that these plans actually led to desegregated schools or risk losing federal funding.

  The courts still had a big role to play. In the spring of 1968, an NAACP case contesting a freedom of choice plan in New Kent County, near Richmond, Virginia, reached the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs argued in Green v. New Kent County that the school district had created a complicated web of overlapping bus routes in order to ensure that the county’s two high schools remained racially segregated.12 Earl Warren, the chief justice who facilitated the passage of the unanimous Brown decision, was still on the bench. Also on the Court was a newcomer: Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who had orchestrated the Brown strategy, had been nominated a year earlier. When the lawyers stood up to make their oral arguments to the Court, on April 5, it was less than twenty-four hours since Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis.13

  The Court’s decision came swiftly. In May, the judges argued that merely telling families that their children could “freely” choose where they wanted to go was not enough to ensure equity.14 School districts must take affirmative action in ensuring racial mixing and create “a system without a ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.”

  For civil rights activists, the decision, although it was still vague about what school districts should actually do to end segregation in the schools, was something to celebrate during an otherwise traumatic year. Along with the death of Martin Luther King, Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam, and that June Robert Kennedy, a favorite of many blacks because of his efforts to help African American communities and his association with Dr. King, was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.15 But for white Southerners in the suburbs, the court’s decision was added to other ominous signs—the riots, the antiwar protests, the spread of drugs, sex, and crime—that the security of their place in the world was in danger.

  That summer, a Republican presidential candidate responded to their fears. Richard Nixon, carefully positioning himself between the segregationist third-party candidate, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, and the liberal Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, pitched his campaign to voters living in places like Shively in what would later be called “The Southern Strategy.”16 It was these people—white suburbanites, many not too many years removed from the farm, living in cities under siege by the civil rights movement—who had almost won him the 1960 election against Kennedy.17 He understood what they wanted to hear. He spoke about the need to restore “law and order.” He sounded reasonable on Vietnam, vowing to end the war, but responsibly.18 And, most important to his Southern constituents after the Green decision, he laid out a reassuring stance on school integration.

  Brown, Nixon said, speaking during a television interview in Charlotte, North Carolina, “was a correct decision.”19 “But on the other hand,” he added, “the proactive desegregation of the schools, as the justices had ordered in the Green decision, “should be very scrupulously examined and in many cases I think should be rescinded.” The setting for the interview most likely wasn’t an accident. Charlotte was the setting for one of the nearly two hundred cases questioning freedom of choice plans.

  In 1965, encouraged by the new provisions in the Civil Righ
ts Act, local NAACP lawyers in Charlotte had sued the school board on behalf of a black family whose son had been assigned to a black school farther from their home than the local neighborhood school.20 In April 1971, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in the case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education.

  Green, which had focused on a small town, had not settled what large cities like Charlotte and Louisville—where there was significant residential segregation—should do to create racial balance in their schools. The Swann case was more precise: “We find no basis for holding that the local school authorities may not be required to employ bus transportation as one tool of school desegregation. Desegregation plans cannot be limited to the walk-in school.”21 In other words, the justices believed busing was a potential and even preferable tool for rooting out school segregation. The Court foresaw the potential arguments against this solution, but believed it was worth it, even if it was “administratively awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre in some situations.” They also argued that though it might be inconvenient, busing students across town certainly wasn’t a novel idea. After all, students had been bused ever since the country began shifting away from one-room schoolhouses. About 40 percent of students traveled to school by bus in 1970, the Court noted.

  The justices may have predicted there would be resistance to their ruling, but it’s unlikely they could have predicted how much.

  Chapter 11

  In the fall of 1971, dozens of school districts started the school year with new student assignment plans, many of them involving busing.1 Joyce Spond watched these developments with concern. The Shively Newsweek, which had floated the idea that the Wades and Bradens had been co-conspirators in the house bombing, followed the desegregation cases closely, and Joyce read it regularly. Louisville, where most schools were as segregated as they had been before 1954, was ripe for a court case.

  In 1969, the NAACP had filed a complaint to the federal department of Health, Education and Welfare about the segregation in Louisville’s schools. HEW inspected, and found that Central High School’s all-black student population was in violation of federal law. The agency’s recommendations focused on changing the student assignment system so that some white students would be zoned to attend Central. Other options were busing some black students to other schools in exchange for white students, pairing Central with a white vocational school and sharing students, or closing it.2

  All of the options were bad ones. The superintendent of the Louisville schools, Newman Walker, complained that changing the zoning would just cause white students assigned to Central to move away, accelerating the already rapid decrease in the city’s white population.3 (By the end of the 1960s, almost half of Louisville’s students were black.)4 Surveys had found that “a considerable majority of whites and blacks” opposed busing, according to school administrators.5 School officials worried that Central’s academic program would be watered down if it were paired with a white vocational school and shop classes became the focus. And closing the school would be a public relations nightmare; as a local reporter noted, it was a “proud, closely-knit place with a long tradition.”6

  The school system did nothing.7 By the following year, there was less pressure on the city from HEW: Nixon had pushed out the director, Leon Panetta, for being too enthusiastic about seeking out discrimination in the schools. As a result, the agency had essentially stopped trying to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act.8 Although the students of Central had been instrumental in Louisville’s civil rights movement, they were not necessarily impatient for change at their own school.9 The fierce pride in Central had only grown since the first round of desegregation in 1956, in part because of the school’s ascendance in that all-important arena of Kentucky culture: the basketball court.

  The glory began in 1957.10 In the Louisville invitational tournament that year—only a year after Central students had begun competing against white teams—the Central team took home the trophy after trouncing a strong team from Manual, a predominantly white school. In 1965, Central broke the record for longest winning streak in Kentucky high school basketball history, then lost by two points to a small-town team in the state semifinals. In 1968, the Yellowjackets’ circumspect coach, Bob Graves, abandoned his usual caution and predicted his team would take the state championship. It lost that year, but the following year, Central won the Louisville tournament and went on to the state tournament again. It played a team from a coal-mining county in western Kentucky, and seventeen thousand people packed into the stadium to see the game. “These people have come here to see you lose,” Coach Graves told his players before the game.11

  Instead, the Central team broke records. One player scored 44 points, the highest number of individual points in Kentucky history. As a whole, the team broke the record for most points scored in a game, 101. And, most important, the Central players won, making them the first all-black team to win the Kentucky state championship. The team members came back heroes. The mayor threw them a banquet in Freedom Hall, a huge auditorium at the city’s fairgrounds; the governor commissioned the whole team and Coach Graves as Kentucky Colonels; and the school administration hung a huge banner across the front of the school’s now nearly twenty-year-old yellow-brick building.

  But in 1970, at the prodding of the NAACP, the federal agency once again questioned Louisville about the situation at Central, warning the school district that it had until September to desegregate the school.12 Central’s student council president, Vernon Douglas, told the local newspaper that he was “shocked” at the NAACP’s plan to try to desegregate the school. “It seemed like a plot to destroy Central,” Douglas said. “It’s a black institution. And I don’t see anything wrong with the way it is.”13 In April of 1970, Douglas confronted the school board at a public meeting and asked what was going to happen to his school.

  The superintendent hemmed and hawed, blaming the inaction of HEW, which had not given the school district any specific advice about which option it should choose. (A federal appeals court later found HEW guilty of blatantly ignoring its duty to enforce school desegregation.)14 That month, the NAACP, which had filed the complaint in the first place, suggested its own plan: turn Central into a magnet school. The concept was a new one. The idea was to create programs “so innovative and desirable” that white students would choose to come to the school on their own. The local newspaper wondered in an editorial if this magnet idea wouldn’t revive the city’s old status as “a showcase for the nation” when it came to desegregation plans.15

  But by 1971, when the Swann ruling was handed down, no action had been taken yet. The summer before, the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union (KCLU) had filed a lawsuit complaining that the Jefferson County Schools, a separate school system that encompassed the mostly white suburbs around Louisville, had purposely isolated black students living in Newburg, a factory village surrounding a GE plant not far from the Louisville city line, in their own, segregated schools.16

  The following summer, the KCLU joined with the NAACP in filing a lawsuit that named as defendants the Louisville school district and the separate Jefferson County school district.17 The plaintiffs were a group of “black citizens” of Louisville, according to the lawsuit. The top plaintiff on the case, John Haycraft, had no children.18 He was a graduate of Central High School and a journalist who had marched in Washington, DC, with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. The lawsuit demanded that the Louisville system incorporate some white suburbs along its fringe to aid in the desegregation of the city schools.

  A group of civil rights activists, among them Lyman Johnson and the Kentucky teachers’ union, didn’t think the lawsuit went far enough. They joined the case as intervening plaintiffs, arguing that soon enough, the fringe suburbs would experience white flight, leaving the Louisville school district in the same boat.19 In their complaint, they demanded that the Louisville and Jefferson County districts be merged, along with a tiny district within the Jefferson County system, Anchorage, w
hich included a handful of all-white schools.

  Although on its surface the merger demand seemed like a big step, in reality, the Louisville school system had been toying with the idea of dissolving itself and joining the county schools for a decade, mainly for financial reasons.20 In 1969, the county and city school boards had met to discuss a merger, but the two sides could not agree. The county wanted simply to absorb the city district into its own system, but the city administrators hoped to retain some power and control in the transition. The matter was dropped. Once the desegregation cases were filed in court, however, the idea began to look more realistic.

  In response to the Newburg lawsuit, Joyce Spond, along with three other mothers, founded Save Our Community Schools, also known as SOCS. They were not original—other groups had formed in other cities facing busing under the same name. The mothers believed the Newburg case was a harbinger of the busing schemes they were reading about elsewhere. In 1972, their concerns were validated when the civil rights lawyers proposed the merger. They invited their neighbors and church friends to join them, and more than four hundred people showed up at their first meeting in the Shively Heights Baptist Church.

  Joyce told the standing room–only crowd there was an upcoming convention about busing in Washington, DC. She got a resounding response: “Go!” The participants passed a collection, and by the end of the night, they had enough to send three of the organizers, Joyce and two others, to Washington. Soon after, the three women drove to the airport with $270 in hand—most of it in $1 bills—to buy three plane tickets at $90 each.