Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  At the convention, their fears were confirmed. Parents from districts where busing was under way reported that it had decimated local PTAs and that children spent hours being transported to faraway neighborhoods. Presenters railed against the disastrous effects that busing had on learning and school communities. The stated goal was improving education, but to Joyce’s mind, it seemed clear that busing plans had nothing to do with that. She came back energized and empowered, ready to organize to keep busing from coming to Louisville. It helped that politicians in Washington finally seemed to be listening.

  1972 was an election year, and as the campaign season started up, the spreading conflict over busing took center stage. “To many Americans, the most important journeys of election year 1972 are not the candidates’ peregrinations, or even President Nixon’s visits to Moscow and Peking, but the trips that their children—black or white, Northern or Southern—take each day in school buses,” wrote one Time magazine reporter that winter.21 Nixon, getting ready to defend his presidency, clarified—and hardened—his stance on busing. “I am against busing as that term is commonly used in school desegregation cases. I have consistently opposed the busing of our nation’s children to achieve racial balance, and I am opposed to the busing of children simply for the sake of busing,” he said, adding that he had instructed HEW to make sure busing was kept to the “minimum required by law.”22

  Buoyed by the growing backlash against busing, Governor George Wallace, who had said he would defy any federal busing orders in Alabama, made his third try for the Democratic presidential nomination. In March of 1972, Wallace shocked the establishment by winning the Florida Democratic primary after promising voters that if they backed him, “they’re going to stop busing little children to Kingdom Come.”23

  It was not only white voters—people like Joyce Spond—who got worked up over the idea of busing. During the same month that Wallace won the Florida primary, black groups from across the country and the political spectrum converged in Gary, Indiana, for a National Black Political Convention. The convention included pro-integration activists: The NAACP was there; Jesse Jackson was there; Shirley Chisholm was there. But the black nationalists in attendance were more vocal, and more numerous. As Roger Wilkins, the black journalist, wrote in a dispatch from the convention for the Washington Post, “Lately, speakers have taken to asking their black audiences, ‘What time is it?’ The powerful, black-throated response, ‘Nation Time.’ ”24

  Nation time meant a lot of things, Wilkins wrote, but for most, it meant independence from—not integration with—whites. In a loud voice vote, the Nation Time faction overwhelmed the integration supporters and adopted a resolution condemning busing as “racist” and “suicidal.” The resolution argued that busing was based on the “false notion that black children are unable to learn unless they are in the same setting as white children.”25 Instead, they wanted equal funding to maintain and improve the traditional black schools that previous generations had built, often with little help from the white-controlled government at all.

  In Louisville, the lawsuits against the school districts claimed to represent the majority of black citizens in Louisville, but a few years earlier, black parents in the West End had resisted a small-scale desegregation plan that would have mixed black and white students attending two elementary schools in nearby neighborhoods.26 Nationally, polls had also tracked the resistance among blacks to busing. Although a majority of both blacks and whites favored desegregation and thought that methods like gerrymandering school zones or placing low-income housing in middle-class neighborhoods was okay, the vast majority opposed busing. A 1973 Gallup poll found that only 9 percent of blacks approved of sending black children out of their own neighborhoods in order to desegregate schools.27

  The resistance to busing in Louisville and elsewhere ignored the academic gains that blacks had made since the beginning of school desegregation, however token it was. After 1956, the gap between white and blacks in Louisville narrowed, according to a study conducted by a local researcher at the University of Louisville.28 Before desegregation, blacks in Louisville had scored about five months behind whites in reading. On some tests, they had scored as much as fourteen months behind. Five years later, the study found that they were only a month behind their white counterparts. Other research, including the nationally renowned Coleman Report, also suggested that academic achievement for black students—who were more often poor—was likely to be improved in integrated settings.

  Why were so many blacks so against busing if it appeared to help their children do better in school and, as the NAACP argued, it was the moral and just thing to do? As one black father of three in Louisville’s West End, who called himself only Phil, told the local newspaper, “It’s a step backward for black people as far as understanding who we are.” Busing felt like an effort to assimilate black people and erase their identity and culture, and, at the same time, seemed like a not-so-subtle way of reasserting white dominance over blacks. As the war over busing began to rage, there was a feeling that once again, black people had little control over their lives and their children. “It’s the federal government pitting the people on the bottom of the economic ladder against one another. The real issue is, how come there ain’t no black people out there in those neighborhoods?” Phil told the reporter.29

  The Louisville lawsuits moved forward despite the negative opinions about busing, even among blacks, and in December of 1972, the civil rights attorneys faced off with the city and county attorneys in federal court.30 The political climate had deteriorated even further for the busing proponents. A month earlier, Nixon had won reelection, helped along by his anti-busing platform. A movement was under way to introduce a constitutional amendment that would prohibit busing for school desegregation.31 And several anti-busing bills, one of them written by the Nixon administration, were moving through Congress.

  In Louisville, Joyce Spond’s group, working out of church fellowship halls and living rooms, was in the process of collecting ten thousand telegrams to send to Congress opposing busing and supporting the amendment. Joyce was getting invitations from across the city to talk to other groups of concerned white parents. She now traveled to Washington and Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, frequently, hobnobbing with senators and lobbying for her cause. Her group published voting guides on local candidates based on their stances on busing. For the most part, when she showed up for a visit, the politicians were happy to oblige her.

  The one hope for those on the other side, the desegregation advocates, was the federal judge hearing the Louisville cases, James Gordon.32 He was an imposing former army M.P. from a small tobacco town in western Kentucky. His mother, a cigarette-smoking suffragette, had been the first woman to pass the bar in Kentucky, and his father was a circuit court judge. In his own law practice after World War II, he represented the coal companies that had moved into western Kentucky following the war, but Gordon also had a history in politics; he had supported the Kentucky governor who had called for the state to abide by the Brown decision in 1954, and later helped run Lyndon Johnson’s campaign in Kentucky. In 1965, Johnson rewarded him by appointing him to the federal bench. Gordon was gruff and cantankerous. Lawyers who argued before him joked that he was often in error, but never in doubt. He rarely took time to mull over a decision. Instead he often ruled the day after a trial, because otherwise he “would forget more and more of it.”

  Gordon took longer than usual to decide the two desegregation cases, however. Four months after the trial, in March of 1973, he released two long opinions in the Newburg case and the Haycraft case, dismissing both of them.33 He believed busing would result only in more white flight, and that the evidence of segregation, while deplorable, was not the fault of the school districts. It was de facto decisions by individual citizens to live in racially segregated neighborhoods, not de jure policies by the government to deliberately separate the races, that had caused the racial imbalance in the city and suburban schools. T
he activists appealed the decision, but their chance of victory seemed slim.

  Nixon, under scrutiny as the Watergate scandal began to heat up, had been at work fanning the anti-busing fervor even more vigorously than he had during his presidential campaigns. In March of 1972, he gave a speech saying that the idea to ban busing through a constitutional amendment had “a fatal flaw: It takes too long.” What the country needed was “action now.” He vowed to send a bill to Congress that would institute a moratorium on all new busing plans, effective immediately.34

  At the same time, moving through the courts was a case from Detroit, where the courts had made the unprecedented decision of forcing three suburban districts to join as defendants in a lawsuit against the city schools.35 The suburban districts had not been named as parties in the original complaint, but the local judges had reasoned—presciently—that if the suburbs were excluded from desegregation in Detroit, the city would quickly lose its white residents.36 The decision was headed to the Supreme Court, which that year had gained two new, conservative Nixon appointees, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell, to replace a pair of more moderate justices.37

  In the Louisville case, a three-judge appellate court meanwhile reversed Judge Gordon’s decision.38 Louisville, Jefferson County, and Anchorage, the tiny all-white district in an outer suburb of the city, were ordered to merge their school districts and create a desegregation plan that would go into effect the following school year.

  Joyce Spond was incensed; the telegrams, the meetings, the lobbying hadn’t worked. The courts—which were not apolitical, just slower moving in their political shifts than the legislative and executive branches—were still filled with Kennedy and Johnson appointments from the civil rights era. But slow as they were to shift, the courts were indeed beginning to reflect the politics of the Silent Majority. The Louisville case, like Detroit’s, was appealed to the Supreme Court to wait for a decision.

  Gordon ordered the city and suburban district to come up with their own desegregation plans, including the merging of their two systems. Meanwhile, the judge received dozens of letters from the Ku Klux Klan, as local politicians railed against busing. Several newly formed anti-busing groups, along with Save Our Community Schools, tried to lobby the judge to see their point of view. The groups talked about combining forces, but they could never agree on the principles they were fighting for. The newcomers were more extreme than SOCS. Those in Joyce’s group said their main concern was the quality of the schools; they even came up with their own suggestions for Judge Gordon to comply with the court of appeals order without implementing full-on busing. Students could do occasional interracial exchanges on field trips or for certain classes, for example. The other groups didn’t want to compromise. They were against desegregation, whatever form it took.

  In July 1974, it became clear the two districts would never agree on a compromise plan.39 Instead, Gordon announced his own proposal on July 20, which he called Plan X. The specifics were vague, except for the requirement that schools have student populations that were between 12 and 30 percent black. The districts were given less than a week to go over the plan and work out the details. Jean Ruffra, one of the cofounders of SOCS, told the local paper that she was not surprised by Gordon’s announcement, adding, “No plan was acceptable to us. . . . There is nothing we can do to appeal this decision.”40

  Less than a week later, before Gordon’s court reconvened, the Supreme Court declared a decision in the Detroit case, Milliken v. Bradley.41 This time the Court was split, and the conservatives won.42 They scoffed at the lower court’s reasoning that somehow the white suburban districts should be included in the case, arguing that “the inter-district remedy could extensively disrupt and alter the structure of public education.” It was uncalled for and unconstitutional, they said. Shortly after, they sent the Louisville case back to the circuit court for review in light of the Milliken decision.43 Desegregation in Louisville seemed to be dead.

  People in Louisville were stunned, and, in the suburbs, many were relieved. In August, lawmakers in Washington, DC, shored up the suburbanites’ sense of security. Twelve days after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign from office, Gerald Ford signed into law a major education bill that included, for the first time, a section on busing.44 The law outlawed busing a child beyond the second nearest school to his or her home.45 It seemed like a great victory for anti-busing activists. But also for the first time in federal legislation, the law explicitly required previously segregated school districts to take affirmative action to undo racial separation, and in practice, the law could not supersede court orders meant to remedy violations of the Constitution, meaning busing was still a viable option for districts.

  And so the busing fight continued to rage in many places. In Boston, white parents had taken to the streets and were boycotting the schools to protest a new desegregation plan there. But in Louisville, the 1974 school year began calmly after a soggy, humid summer.46 Despite some token integration, most suburban schools remained nearly all white.47 Many of the inner-city schools in Louisville were still exclusively black, twenty years after the Brown decision and a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Joyce’s children walked to Schaffner each day. Life was quiet without the organizing and protest work that had kept her busy for the past few years. In October, the circuit court heard rearguments in the case, but it seemed likely that it would follow the Supreme Court’s lead in Milliken and reverse its previous order to merge the two districts in Louisville.48

  Instead, the circuit court shocked everyone by ordering Louisville to move forward with the merger plan.49 In April, the Louisville school board voted to dissolve itself, forcing the merger with the Jefferson County Public Schools. Judge Gordon announced the details of the finalized busing plan in July.50 All schools in Jefferson County, including the tiny district of Anchorage, were required to have a ratio of black students that fell between 16 and 25 percent. Partly because of their larger numbers, and partly in an effort to minimize white flight, white students would be bused for only two to three years. Black students, in contrast, would be bused for eight to ten years. Five schools, all but one of them traditionally black schools located downtown and in the West End, would be closed.

  A few days before school started that summer, lawyers representing Save Our Community Schools went to beg the Supreme Court for a last-minute stay, petitioning the only two judges who were in Washington, DC, for the summer, Powell and Blackmun.51 They were denied. Joyce Spond had been busy all summer, and not only fighting against busing. She also volunteered for the school board, manning a hotline for parents confused about where their children would be assigned.52 If busing was going to happen, she wanted it go smoothly. Among anti-busing advocates, she was mostly alone in that goal.

  The anti-busing movement Joyce helped start had taken on a life of its own. Other mothers in Louisville, inspired by the civil resistance to busing in Boston that year, were planning street marches. Sue Connor, a plump, redheaded mother of four, founded a branch of Concerned Parents, a more extreme anti-busing group that had spread across the South, and began organizing an army of angry parents.53 From the kitchen of her brand-new wood-shingle house in a quiet subdivision in Jeffersontown, a suburb situated between Louisville’s tony eastern suburbs and the working-class south, Connor manned the phones, printed flyers, and strategized.

  In Boston, the resistance had unself-consciously borrowed the tactics of the civil rights marchers, but it didn’t always mimic their restraint.54 White mobs had beaten dozens of blacks, stoned buses full of black children, vandalized school buildings, and attacked police cars.55 (In several instances, blacks responded in kind.) In Louisville, Sue Connor and other anti-busing leaders called for peaceful protest, but they were mostly powerless to control their followers, many of them from poorer areas to the south: Pleasure Ridge Park, Okolona, Shively, and Fairdale.

  Connor announced that her group would hold a protest in front of the federal building
downtown on the first day of school. At the last minute, the Ku Klux Klan announced it would hold a demonstration there, too, complete with white hoods and a cross burning. Connor called off her protest. “Where the Klan goes, we don’t go,” she told reporters. Instead, she said her group would fan out to suburban churches, where protesters would hold an all-day candlelight vigil. Violence would be hard to avoid, however, she said: “I’d like for people who say there is no worry about violence to wake up. If there is violence, I am going to point my finger at the forced busing advocates and the NAACP.”56

  As the busing protests took off, Joyce retreated from the furor. She still opposed busing, but in the lead-up to the court decision, she had become friends with Bernard Minnis, a black official in the school district, and with the president of the NAACP, who occasionally invited her to parties. Years later, as the neighborhood around Schaffner shifted, Joyce stayed put. She remained active in the schools her grandchildren attended, and she got to know her new neighbors, all of them African American.

  Chapter 12

  Riccardo X’s first day working for the Jefferson County Schools was in October of 1975, following a month of angry and sometimes violent protests against the new busing plan. For any brand-new teacher, the first day of school is terrifying. Everything you learned in classes and practiced as a student teacher can never quite prepare you for the moment when you stand in front of the two dozen children who will be yours to teach and to keep under control for the rest of the year. The fact that Riccardo was only a few years out of high school himself didn’t help. The anxiety was only compounded when he learned where the district was sending him: Southern High School, in Okolona, the heart of the anti-busing protesters’ home turf.1