Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  In newspaper articles, black parents voiced frustration about difficulties visiting their children’s distant schools for meetings, and about a loss of community ties without neighborhood schools. One parent mourned the death of the old, majority-black city school system, where black children had experienced “a personal touch.”25

  Not everyone was unhappy. Carolyn, a fifth grader, told the newspaper that she thought the adults should just “bug off for a while.” “It’s not the kids who are disagreeing. It’s the adults,” she said.26 Maria, a white student at Valley High School in a white working-class neighborhood near the army base, said, “It’s like when you tear something down, you gotta give it time to build back up. And I think that’s what we did—or whoever did—whenever busing started. We tore down the school and tried to rearrange it so it would be better. And it is getting better, I think—gradually.”27

  “Gradually” was not a time frame that was generally acceptable in public education reform, however. During his first year in Louisville, Ingwerson went on a listening tour to churches, PTA meetings, and living rooms, both black and white, to get his bearings and hear from people on the ground. Although polls had shown that Louisvillians mostly accepted desegregation as a work in progress, despite its shortcomings, Ingwerson came away with one conclusion: Louisville’s busing system was broken.28

  In early 1983, he appointed a committee of citizens to come up with a way to fix it.29 Ingwerson wanted to reduce the amount of busing for all students and to shore up Central’s ailing enrollment numbers. His preference was to revive the magnet school idea from the 1960s and turn the school into a “flagship” for the district, rather than trying to force white students to attend there against their will.30 Above all, he told parents, his goal was to steer the district away from the numbers game of busing, and change the focus to quality and results.

  Ingwerson was not alone in this goal. Around the same time Louisville welcomed the new superintendent from Southern California, a commission appointed by the Reagan administration published a scathing report in April 1983 about the status of the schools nationwide. Entitled A Nation at Risk, the report scandalized the country. SATs scores had dropped as much as fifty points since the 1960s, the report said. Two in five minority youths were “functionally illiterate.” Although the commission acknowledged that the average American citizen was better educated than earlier generations, it nevertheless made the contrasting claim that for the first time in American history, “the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents.” Americans shouldn’t have been surprised by these statistics, the report argued, “given the multitude of often conflicting demands we have placed on our Nation’s schools and colleges.” The implication was that while the United States had been dilly-dallying with “social” issues in schools, such as civil rights and busing, other countries had surged ahead in educating their youth.31

  The report tapped into what the public already felt: a deep sense that the public schools were deteriorating fast. A 1981 Gallup poll had found that the public’s faith in the schools had been shaken during the 1970s, the era of busing. The culprits behind the failing schools were, according to the people who were surveyed, a lack of discipline, an increase in drug use, poor standards, lack of money and, for 11 percent of all parents (and 18 percent of private school parents), integration.32

  President Reagan trumpeted the report’s findings. He had been on a mission to dismantle the Department of Education, and in A Nation at Risk he found support for his arguments. “I think you can make a case that it began to deteriorate when the federal government started interfering in education,” he said.33 It was a not-so-subtle signal to the white middle class that federal intervention in their schools—including court-ordered busing—was coming to an end. While this turned out to be a premature hope, the Nation at Risk report did mark a new philosophy in education reform that would pick up steam over the next three decades. American public education had begun its seismic shift from a focus on providing equal opportunities to a focus on producing equal outcomes. Raising expectations and standards, not ensuring equity and sufficient resources through integration, was becoming the new mantra.

  The Nation at Risk report ignored some major developments in American education, however. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, something fundamentally good happened in American schools. Despite panic about widespread functional illiteracy, reading scores for all students rose on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card.34 And, even more significantly, the black-white achievement gap had shrunk rapidly.

  A Nation at Risk studied high schools, not the young students who were entering school in the wake of busing. So the report missed out on the most significant gains for black students who had started school from 1978 until 1980. Black high school students had gone from scores that lagged fifty-three points behind those of whites in 1971 to a score gap of thirty-one in 1984 (over the next four years, the gap continued to close). In particular, black students in the South saw huge jumps in their performance. The increase was as much as it would have been if black students had attended school for an extra year and a half.35

  Changes to the black family, including an increase in parental education levels, were only a small factor driving these huge leaps forward. Changes in the curriculum, such as more challenging requirements in math and reading, likewise only explained part of the story. School factors, like smaller class sizes and more funding, seemed to have played a bigger role. So did desegregation, along with social changes like affirmative action and the War on Poverty programs that accompanied it.36 But these outcomes were largely ignored. As the Reagan administration, politicians, education experts, and school districts around the country fretted about a rise in school violence and the need to improve standards and excellence, the historic leaps on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s tests were swept aside, as were the policies behind them.

  For those in the black community who had always viewed busing with skepticism, the new focus on outcomes and standards was greeted with enthusiasm. Here was an idea they could embrace: judging progress by how well black children performed in school, not by how many black children were seated next to white ones.

  Chapter 14

  Carman Weathers was born in 1935 and grew up in Beecher Terrace, a village of two-story housing projects built in the 1930s just west of downtown.1 His mother had died in childbirth, so his great-grandmother raised him. Her mother, Carman’s great-great-grandmother, had been a slave on a plantation in Jefferson County. Her portrait hung on their apartment wall, and Carman’s childhood was steeped in stories of her strength and stubbornness in the face of hardship. She had fought her master to keep her children from being sold “down the river” in the lead-up to the Civil War, when the slave trade was slowing and enslaved children in the United States were commanding a higher price. She also taught herself to read and believed deeply in education as the way up and out for her children. Carman lived in awe of her, and also of his great-grandmother, who inherited her mother’s steely personality. They were self-made women who, despite their poverty and lack of resources, seemed dignified and powerful in Carman’s eyes.

  During the day, his great-grandmother served as a maid to the family of a Jewish lawyer and his wife who had emigrated from Germany. The rest of the time, she reigned over Beecher Terrace, settling disputes, giving out advice and dispatching Carman to do chores for the needy. He mowed grass on the weekends for elderly neighbors and each day carried the extra bottle of milk his great-grandmother always ordered for the single mother next door, with her six boys, or for another struggling family on the block. Even the white ladies she worked for called on her often for advice.

  Carman’s interaction with white people, however, was limited to the few times a year that he was invited to play with the two children of his great-grandmother’s employers. It was more integration t
han most of his friends in the neighborhood ever experienced. They attended Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary School, named after a black English composer, in an old building near the projects. The school served whites when it opened in 1853 as the Tenth Ward School until the population in the West End shifted from white to black and the school was renamed. By the time white students returned to the school on buses, the old building had been torn down and replaced with more housing projects.

  For high school, Carman’s only choice was Central—Jim Crow was still in full force. During his tenure there in the early 1950s, the high school moved to its new building, just a few blocks from his home. Carman was leader of the jocks. He was short but stocky, strong and loud. He spent his school years chasing a football and, when he was off the field, girls. When he could get away with it, he avoided schoolwork, although he admired his teachers, including Lyman Johnson, who taught him civics. He didn’t care much about academics, in spite of his great-grandmother’s admonitions to study, but Carman was very bright and he did like to talk about politics and ideas with his best friend, Robert Douglas. The two were an odd pair, but Robert had picked out Carman from the crowd on the first day of school and decided they would be friends. Robert was tall and thin, and read a lot of books. He was introspective and a daydreamer. But both liked to talk, and when they got together, they spent hours discussing the bad situation of blacks in America and what to do about it.

  They stayed in touch after they graduated and went to college, and then on to graduate school. Robert became an artist and immersed himself in civil rights activism, working as an open-housing organizer. At one point, he was involved with the activists who organized the rally that sparked the 1968 riots. Carman pursued his own version of protest.

  Carman’s first job was as an assistant football coach at his alma mater, Jackson State University, a historically black school in Mississippi. He loved the job. The team won often, and the school sent nearly fifty players to the pros in the 1960s and ’70s.2 But after four years, he became frustrated. As formerly white public and private universities dropped their ban on black students, they seemed to be drawing away some of the best black players. It was Carman’s first taste of desegregation, and he didn’t like it. He left for a new job at the all-black Crispus Attucks High School in Hopkinsville, a town south of Louisville with a relatively large black population for Kentucky.

  Crispus Attucks took black students from two counties, and competed in football with black teams around the state. After five years as an assistant football coach at the school, Carman picked up the local paper one day and read the list of school salaries that reporters gathered and printed annually. The assistant coach at the white school, Hopkinsville High, was making about $3,000 a year more than he was. Carman knew the man. He didn’t have a master’s degree, as Carman did, and he had only been there three years. Carman made an appointment to see the superintendent.

  As Carman tells the story, the superintendent agreed to meet with him, and then explained that while he was sorry about the discrepancy, white people needed bigger salaries because their cost of living was higher. “That’s the same way I feel about my lawyer, because he needs more money,” Carman replied. “And he’s about to get more money.” Shortly after, Carman got a raise.

  His victory was short-lived. In 1968, the school board closed Crispus Attucks High School to comply with a federal order to desegregate the county’s schools.3 The black teachers and administrators scattered to the formerly white schools. Many went to Louisville to look for jobs. Carman’s head coach was sent to Hopkinsville High School. Carman was offered an assistant coach job at Christian County High School, in a different district. He took it, although in moving out of his district, he lost his tenure status. Carman and a librarian also imported from Crispus Attucks were the only black teachers in the building.

  Carman told the white Christian County administrators that he didn’t want them to bring all the “black problems” to his door, but soon enough, he was flooded with requests to deal with disciplinary cases and political struggles, including a dispute over whether the football team—now nearly all black—should give up the preintegration tradition of choosing the homecoming queen. Carman refused to step in, and the football team selected a black girl as queen.

  He didn’t last long at Christian County. In the early 1970s, Carman returned to Louisville, gave up coaching, and took a job at Russell Junior High in the West End, working with students at risk of dropping out. Once again, all of his students were black. He loved the work, and the students responded well to his voluble pied-piper personality.

  Then, in 1975, Carman discovered his job was once again on desegregation’s chopping block. Judge Gordon announced the details of Plan X that fall; Russell Junior High was among the five schools that the judge planned to close.4 Four were traditionally black. Carman was stunned. He joined protests to save the school, to no avail. Why should Russell be punished because white people won’t come? Carman asked. The judges and school administrators and lawyers fighting for desegregation weren’t interested. The black students at his school were needed to integrate the schools in the suburbs, and Russell was housed in an old building in one of the West End’s rougher neighborhoods. In September 1975, the doors were unceremoniously shuttered and Carman once again had to find a new job.

  He was not alone. In years following Brown v. Board, thirty-eight thousand black teachers lost their jobs.5 Other staff—coaches, principals, counselors, cafeteria workers—were also let go.6 One report at the time said what happened to black school staff was not integration, but disintegration: “the near total disintegration of Black authority in every area of the system of public education.”7 Some teachers were fired outright, but in later years, the decline in black teachers was in part due to a decline in hiring.8 A 1972 report about Louisville argued the city was one of the worst culprits in the South.9 About 600 teachers in the city system were black. The schools would have needed to hire an additional 450 to bring their numbers up so they matched the level of black students in the system. Another report found that while Kentucky had employed 350 black principals in 1954, there were only 36 black principals left by 1970.10

  After Russell closed, Carman moved to Thomas Jefferson High School in Newburg. The school was exempt from busing because it was naturally desegregated with blacks from the Newburg enclave and low-income whites from nearby Okolona. To Carman, it was a beautiful school. The principal, Stanley Whitaker, was a dynamic leader and the atmosphere was mostly calm. Carman settled in and once again felt at home.

  Other schools that were struggling to stay diverse shut down around them—a vocational high school downtown, Shawnee Junior High, and several elementary schools.11 In 1980, a controversy erupted over a proposal to close several traditionally white high schools in the South End.12 During the public hearings to discuss the plan, hundreds of parents and students turned out to protest, chanting, singing, and carrying signs, including one that read, “White People Wake Up!” The deputy superintendent, David DeRuzzo, acknowledged their frustration: “Closing a high school leaves a void in the community,” he told the newspaper. “Communities look to their high schools not only as a place where their children will be educated, but also as a place that binds the community together.”13

  The school board scuttled the plan to close the formerly white schools. Instead, a year later, it turned to four other high schools.14 Three traditionally white schools, including Fern Creek, in the suburbs on the outer edge of Jefferson County, and Thomas Jefferson were slated for closure. The middle-class parents who sent their children to Fern Creek protested against the closing of their school and won.15 The other three, located in poor and working-class neighborhoods, were shut down; if there were parents, students, or teachers who were upset, they got little attention from school officials or the press. Thomas Jefferson was reopened as a middle school that drew from far beyond the borders of its previous boundaries. Its former students were split up and
bused elsewhere. For the third time, Carman was left without a job after his school had been closed to accommodate desegregation.

  In Carman’s eyes, the closure of Thomas Jefferson tore the Newburg community apart, draining its unity and spirit. The promise that busing would help black children seemed ridiculous to him if it meant simultaneously undermining the strength of the communities they lived in. In the eyes of the school board, the closures were unavoidable: African Americans had demanded desegregation; to make it work, they would have to make sacrifices. But as black schools and teachers were discarded with little concern for how their loss might impact black communities, patience began to give way.

  Chapter 15

  Lyman Johnson stood at the podium in Central High School’s auditorium. His gray hair was combed back from his lined forehead, and large, slightly tinted glasses hid his tired eyes. It had been more than a decade since he’d walked these halls as a teacher and, later, an administrator. He had served on and then retired from the school board, but he was unwilling to sit out the brewing fight over Ingwerson’s plan to overhaul the desegregation system in Louisville.

  It was March 19, 1984, and two hundred black activists and students, along with a handful of whites, had gathered at Central to protest the superintendent’s alternative busing plan, finally released that winter after months of debate. “Young people, I’ve run out of gas,” Lyman said. “I’ve done the best I could. Don’t let the wagon roll back downhill.” The crowd gave him a standing ovation as he made his way back to his seat. Audience members yelled that Ingwerson should go back to Orange County and leave Louisville alone.1