Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  “Educational outcome is the only key to unlock the chains of poverty,” he said, reading from the page in front of him. “African Americans in Jefferson County, Kentucky, the largest percent go to the worst performing schools. The lowest percent go to the better performing schools. That can’t be constitutional.”

  Frank Mellen faced an onslaught of questions from the right-leaning justices, Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Kennedy. Thomas, as he usually did during oral arguments, kept quiet. Mellen’s focus, however, was on winning over Justice Kennedy.

  Earlier that morning during the arguments in the Seattle case, Kennedy had suggested that the limitations on choice bothered him. “The question is whether or not you can get into the school that you really prefer,” he said. “And that in some cases depends solely on skin color. You know, it’s like saying that everybody can have a meal but only people with separate skin can get the dessert.”24

  For both lawyers, the hour seemed to last only a few minutes. Before it ran out entirely, Teddy stood up again. He had reserved two minutes of his time, and now he had the last word. He used it to read the last paragraph typed on his piece of paper: “All I can say is that, may this day be the embryonic beginning of Dr. King’s dream, as paraphrased, that all children are now judged by the content of their character and their education, not by the color of their skin.”

  Chapter 25

  Teddy Gordon was going about his usual business, handling a traffic ticket for an old client, when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the Louisville and Seattle cases on June 28, 2007, the last day of the Court’s session that year. Within a few hours, he was presiding over a press conference, flanked by Crystal Meredith and Deborah Stallworth.1 They had won.

  In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts condemned the Seattle and Louisville desegregation plans as “extreme,” suggesting that they were in fact vestiges of the discrimination they were intended to uproot.2 “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote. In a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas was also sharply critical, comparing Seattle and Louisville to the five segregationist school districts in the Brown case. As to the school districts’ arguments that racial integration promoted academic achievement and long-term career outcomes, Thomas wrote, “If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.”

  Justice Kennedy agreed with the majority’s decision, but only in part. He wrote his own concurring opinion, and because he was the swing vote, it was his opinion that mattered most. He did not approve of the Louisville and Seattle plans, but wrote that racial integration was still a compelling government goal. “That the school districts consider these plans to be necessary should remind us that our highest aspirations are yet unfulfilled,” he wrote. “But the solutions mandated by these school districts must themselves be lawful. To make race matter now so that it might not matter later may entrench the very prejudices we seek to overcome.” While Justice Harlan’s call for color blindness in his Plessy v. Ferguson dissent was a noble aspiration, he wrote, in the “real world” it was not a “universal constitutional principle.”

  School districts that wanted to reduce the achievement gap could not ignore race, his argument suggested. But Kennedy believed Louisville’s racial guidelines were too “broad and imprecise,” basing this belief mainly on the unexplained clerical error that had prevented Meredith’s son from attending his elementary school of choice.

  Teddy was triumphant at the press conference. “All the schools are equal,” he told reporters. “We will no longer accept that an African-American majority within a school is unacceptable.”3

  Crystal stood up and read a short statement in shaky voice. “The day my wonderful son was born, I promised I would do everything I could to do what’s best for him,” she said. “Going to the US Supreme Court is not really what I had in mind.” But it was “exactly where I had to go to keep my promise,” she added.4 Afterward, Deborah Stallworth, the only member of CEASE who attended the press conference, gave her a hug.

  The other members of CEASE didn’t show up. They felt similarly to Riccardo X: the Meredith case wasn’t their fight. By that time, Central appeared to have regained some of its former glory: once again, it functioned much like a prep school for the black community’s most promising students. Its students tended to come from lower-income families, but the school selected them based on grades and recommendations, and even after the departure of its beloved principal, Harold Fenderson, Central’s graduation rate had held steady.5 Carman Weathers, Fran Thomas, Robert Douglas, and the other members of CEASE were pleased at their victory and saw CEASE’s work as done.

  After the Central High School case, Fran Thomas left her position as director of Anne Braden’s group, the Kentucky Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. The case had highlighted their differences: Fran was fighting for black self-determination; Anne had fought on the side of the desegregationists. Fran couldn’t bring herself to retire from activism, however. Instead, she joined the board of the NAACP, where she occasionally clashed with members over support of integration, but was otherwise satisfied that she was still in the thick of the fight against racism.

  Anne Braden, who remained in the same West End house she had lived in fifty years earlier, died in 2006. Not long after, Fran and her husband moved from their West End home overlooking the Ohio River, where CEASE had first formed, to an immaculate new colonial-style house with a large porch and lawn. This time, the house was not deep in the suburbs, but on the same land that had once been stripped during urban renewal and turned into the housing projects where Riccardo X grew up. The government had come back to the neighborhood, this time to build attractive, single-family housing that would draw a mix of incomes back into the city. It seemed to work. Middle-income families moved into a pocket of the city once known as a haven for gangs, and a few white families even moved in, too. Fran picked a house on a quiet block named after her former teacher and adversary, Lyman T. Johnson.

  Carman Weathers stopped writing letters to the Courier-Journal. The newspaper no longer printed his essays. After retiring from his job at Buechel, the majority-black school for students with discipline problems, he decided to start up his own school, inspired by the home- and church-based schools run by Southern blacks in the aftermath of Reconstruction, and later by the civil rights activists during the height of the desegregation fight. He called it the Freedom School. The first year, five students met for seven weeks during the summer on the deck in his backyard.

  The idea was to combat the summer learning loss that was a key factor in the achievement gap: Poor children might be able to keep up with their middle-class counterparts during the school year, but they often fell far behind in the summertime, when wealthier children traveled with their families, went to camp, or participated in other educational activities.6 Carman’s students studied math, reading, and other basic subjects. He also tried to instill a sense of self-esteem and purpose. After four years, the group of students had grown from five to seventy, and he had recruited a dedicated group of volunteer teachers. The school had to move to a church basement to accommodate them all.

  Meanwhile, Central’s success began to teeter. In 2004, the school was placed on notice under the new rules of the No Child Left Behind law that it was falling behind in student achievement. In subsequent years, it underwent “restructuring,” but performance in mathematics in particular still lagged. In 2010, only a quarter of students passed state math tests. Nearly two-thirds passed reading tests, but the percentage was dropping from year to year. The graduation rate dropped slightly, from nearly 94 percent to about 92 percent.7

  Riccardo X was increasingly disappointed in the caliber of students who signed up for his black history courses. He was also disappointed in the school’s administration and his fellow teachers. He stopped running the Liberation Bowl because he couldn’t get funding. He holed himself up in
his classroom, the Black Cultural Center, but was suspended twice for arguing with white teachers in the school. In February 2010, Black History Month, he played a song about reparations during the morning announcements, angering a white teacher who believed the song was divisive and offensive. In 2012, he announced he was quitting after thirty-five years in the school system and eighteen years as a history teacher at Central. As he put it, he was “leaving the plantation.”

  Despite its decline, Central’s performance still outstripped some schools in the district. Many black students, usually the ones lacking the wherewithal to get into Central or the better schools in the East End, were still confined to even lower-achieving schools in the southern part of the city. As was the case with many highly regarded and beloved segregated high schools under Jim Crow, Central served only a small sector of the black community. The racial achievement divide still gaped wide. One unique example of a relatively successful black-majority school didn’t necessarily solve the wider problems of how to reach Du Bois’s dual goals for black America: integrating with and finding success in the larger society while keeping its sense of identity, pride, and community intact.

  Louisville’s school administrators and black leaders who had fought for desegregation were dismayed at the Supreme Court ruling. Writing for the liberal wing of the Court, Justice Stephen Breyer, a Clinton appointee, wrote that the Meredith decision undermined Brown’s promise of racially integrated schooling—a tool that had demonstrated effectiveness in narrowing the gap. Democratic candidates on the presidential campaign trail that summer, including Senator Barack Obama, lambasted the ruling.8 But despite their dismay at Gordon’s partial victory, district officials in Louisville still saw a door left open in Kennedy’s opinion. He had argued that districts could still be “race conscious,” using factors that correlated with race, like income, geography, and parental education to assign students, as long as they didn’t use race as the deciding factor in assigning a child to school.

  As Teddy crowed, the school district began adjusting its plan to incorporate these new criteria.9 School officials in Louisville were not about to throw out desegregation entirely if they didn’t have to. Poll numbers favored diversity, and the school board still believed that desegregation raised test scores, helped students adjust to a diverse world, and boosted the city’s image. The district followed in the footsteps of a handful of cities, including Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Raleigh, North Carolina, which had already begun to create student assignment plans that relied on income instead of race.10

  Socioeconomic status was an imperfect measure. The income of students was often derived from whether they applied for free- or reduced-price school lunch. Especially at the high school level, students who needed it did not always apply. At the same time, black children were, on average, more likely to live in long-term poverty than white students.11 And income alone did not encompass the deep divide in wealth between whites and blacks, including home ownership, assets, and other measures of economic well-being.12 Where should the limit be set? Was a child with a family making a few hundred dollars more than the poverty level less needy than one who fell just below the cutoff?

  Yet high concentrations of poverty were correlated with low student achievement, and the racial achievement gap among whites and blacks at the same socioeconomic level was generally small.13 Students who were poor were more likely to experience unstable family situations, including parents with low levels of education, domestic violence, homelessness, and abuse. All of these things tended made it harder for them to learn than their wealthier peers. Race was a socially constructed concept; income was more material and concrete, and much less controversial.

  The following year, Jefferson County Public School officials divided the city and suburbs into two regions, A and B, defined by the concentration of poverty, parent education levels, and race.14 Region A encompassed most of the city’s black neighborhoods, while B encompassed most of its white areas. Schools were required to draw between 15 and 50 percent of their students from Region A.

  The new system closely resembled the old one. Teddy was furious at what he saw as the school district’s intransigence. He promised lawsuits, and soon was receiving a steady stream of parents—mostly from the white suburbs—who were unhappy with their children’s school assignments and ready to file complaints against Louisville’s new plan.

  Teddy filed another federal lawsuit, but he was defeated in district court. Judge Heyburn sided with the school district, as he largely had in the earlier cases. Teddy tried the state courts instead, arguing that Kentucky law required that students be allowed to attend the school nearest their home. As Teddy’s case moved to the Kentucky Supreme Court in the spring of 2012, a federal lawsuit was filed in Texas challenging a university affirmative action program there. The Supreme Court accepted the case on appeal. The University of Michigan decision upholding the use of race in higher education admissions—which Judge Heyburn had once relied on to preserve Louisville’s desegregation plan—was now also under threat.

  The era of desegregation had been fading for nearly two decades: The Supreme Court cases simply marked the end. Louisville was one of the few cities in the country that still aimed to create diversity in its schools.15 Most other American cities had long before given up. Even Seattle let its plan sunset rather than try to find another way to increase racial diversity in its schools. Soon, many of its schools were racially homogenous.16

  Was Louisville’s fight to keep its desegregation plan intact worth it? Integration may have helped Kentucky shrink its achievement gap between whites and blacks, but by 2009, the gap was still wide on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and only average in comparison with other states. What had the district gained? More specifically, what had black students and the black community gained? Had white Louisvillians learned to share their resources equally? Had black Louisvillians been empowered to be equal members of society? Were the old divisions and inequities based on race being dissolved?

  Under desegregation, the achievement gap closed as it had never before. Black and white students got to know one another, and became more prepared for a diverse world. Well-off families were forced—at least in theory—to redistribute not only tax money but the best teachers, the best principals, the attention of the best colleges and universities, and the high expectations for their schools. But some of these families had used their clout to undermine this exchange of resources, demanding gifted and talented programs that tended to favor their children and other special programs within schools that ended up with tiny percentages of minorities.

  Desegregation plans had been geared toward placating whites, so that they wouldn’t flee the system and take the money and the good teachers with them. In the name of preventing white flight, black communities lost schools, teachers, and principals, while black children spent hours on buses and years of their life attending schools outside of their neighborhoods. Many black students ended up in schools where the white children were just as poor as they were, like Fairdale, or in disciplinary alternatives, like Buechel. Even as the test scores and college enrollments for black students skyrocketed during the era of desegregation, they did not catch up with whites.

  Ja’Mekia Stoner, ten years after the Central court case ended, still found the experience infuriating. “We got lucky because we did get the opportunity to go to better schools, but why did I have to get up at five in the morning and travel halfway across town to get a better education?” she would ask as a poised, confident twenty-five year old. The Central experience had been “hurtful,” but the lesson she took from it was that as a black woman, she would have to work harder for the things she wanted. So she did. She went on to college and then graduate school to become a social worker and a therapist. Despite the fear of public speaking that had kept her from pursuing law, she spoke with the passion and precision of an experienced debater. Once, however, her confident façade had broken, during an interview for a state job. Th
e interviewer asked if she had ever been discriminated against, and she broke down in tears.

  Dionne Hopson was more ambivalent about desegregation, even though she had stuck with the Central High School case to the end. She was able to see both the upsides and the downsides of a system that, though flawed, tried to bring students of different backgrounds together to learn from each other.

  In high school in the South End, Dionne stayed close to black friends from her neighborhood and tried to avoid the racial fights that occasionally broke out in the hallways. But there, it was harder to be the bright, motivated student that the teachers and principal at Coral Ridge Elementary once had high hopes for. In her last years of high school, she lost interest in academics, hurting still from the loss of her father and the disappointment of the Central case. She started cutting classes, and then dropped out. But in 2000, a counselor convinced her to earn her GED. Dionne still believed she might return to school someday to become a lawyer, and eventually, she began taking classes at the local community college with that goal in mind. When people asked her about the Central case, she told them she never intended for the school to become all black. “Desegregation was a good thing,” she said, because it led to open-mindedness. She just wanted students to have a choice.

  EPILOGUE

  In 2009, I sat in Carman Weathers’s darkened living room as he leaned into his blue leather couch and reached back into his memory. “There have been two main black struggles over how best to repatriate these ex-slaves,” he said. “Some people said the best way to do it is to put them around their slave masters, and they’ll catch on. And other people said we need to retreat. We need to build up strength so that we can do things for ourselves. We were never allowed to assimilate on our terms. We were assimilated on somebody else’s terms.”