Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Meeting with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, White House counsel Lee White, and Keppel, Califano emphasized that LBJ was “anxious to put all the states in such condition under Title VI that he will not have to withhold federal funds from a single county.” The president’s objective was to desegregate schools, not punish local communities. Indeed, he intended ESEA funds to help lift underprivileged communities in the South and elsewhere out of the cycle of poverty. He wanted “to make sure that we are doing everything possible so that he does not have to withhold funds from a single school district.” To aid in the process, the Office of Education organized seminars for local education officials to help them design plans that would pass muster with the administration’s guidelines. The program cost $7 million over the course of several months—“money well spent,” White observed. Keppel would later claim that he “never had any doubts” about Johnson’s sincerity on the question of school desegregation. “I don’t know his life well,” he allowed, “but certainly by the time I was connected with it, every time that we came up with a rational procedure to get on with it, we were supported. I never sensed any hesitation when the thing got near the president.” Despite the steep price that he paid in lost political capital, Johnson was “no-nonsense” on the question of Title VI.

  Many newspaper editorialists, local business leaders, and public education professionals in the South greeted the administration’s school desegregation drive with “resignation,” as the Atlanta Constitution characterized the response of its own state’s education officials. In Alabama, the superintendent of education convened a meeting with most of the state’s 117 district officials and instructed them to file desegregation plans with HEW and the Department of Justice. In Mississippi, Governor Paul Johnson affirmed that “obedience to our laws is not optional”—a stark concession by a fiery defender of Jim Crow whose home state reveled in its long tradition of flouting federal laws and the constitutional rights of its citizens, both black and white. In Virginia, elected officials were “taken aback” by the specter of “mixed schools,” but the state did not contemplate shuttering its public school system, as it had done in the immediate aftermath of the Brown decision as a means to resist integrated classrooms. The Birmingham News roundly deplored the administration’s guidelines but cautioned readers that “distasteful as these requirements still are to a majority of whites in Alabama, to react to them in anything but the utmost realism would be a tragic disservice to the State and its children.” There were, as always, holdouts. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, an unreconstructed segregationist who formally switched parties in 1964, wired the secretary of health, education, and welfare to express “shock” at the administration’s determination to “force integration” of classrooms. But some local school officials quietly communicated their appreciation to Keppel, Cater, and Califano for devising parameters that provided clarity around how to develop plans that were in compliance with HEW’s expectations.

  Despite the absence of widespread “massive resistance” (the organized efforts to stop integration in the years immediately following the Brown decision), administration officials soon discerned two clear impediments to school desegregation. First, as Cater predicted might be the case, two-thirds of school districts not under court order adopted freedom-of-choice plans as their primary mode of compliance with HEW guidelines; the onus fell almost entirely on black families to overcome white hostility and bureaucratic roadblocks at the local level. Second, officials in many towns and cities preferred being placed under court order. As an assistant secretary of HEW observed, it was “politically more comfortable” for a mayor or school board chair to be compelled to undertake certain actions than to comply—or seem to comply—voluntarily. It was easier to blame unelected federal judges for school integration than to enter into a phased desegregation agreement with the Office of Education. Moreover, “HEW regulations governing the voluntary plans or compliance agreements demand complete desegregation of the entire system,” observed the Shreveport Journal, “including students, faculty, lunch workers, bus drivers, and administrators, whereas the court ordered plans can be more or less negotiated with the judge.”

  By early 1966, the loudest critics of the administration’s school desegregation efforts were not southerners—though proficient race baiters like George Wallace made a show of barring Alabama’s school districts from filing plans with HEW—but liberal northerners who voiced dismay with the slow pace of progress. The White House “was not stringent enough” in demanding real change, Congressman William Fitts Ryan of New York complained. A writer for the liberal outlet the Nation fumed that “the Guidelines were, in short, a farce: a blank map to nowhere.” In early 1966, the leadership of eight State Councils on Human Relations—interracial civil rights organizations throughout the South—urged Keppel to consider that “‘the free choice plan’ can only serve to prolong the segregated school system, not to end it.” As progressive southerners, the council directors maintained from personal experience that “every ‘fearsome’ change in the course of progress at which [local administrators] threw up their hands in horror proved a timid lion when addressed affirmatively. Most experiences to date unmistakably point to this fact: headaches are fewer and not so long if system desegregation is planned and implemented at the same time.” The message to LBJ’s staff was clear: move more quickly. Roughly around the same time, representatives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, now a more radical organization than in its earlier incarnation, admonished John Gardner: “We think time is running out. Negroes in increasingly large numbers are losing faith in the ability and will of the Federal Government. . . . Hope has turned to despair, trust has turned into suspicion, and understanding has turned into bitterness.”

  In early 1966, with White House involvement, HEW prepared revised guidelines for the following school year. “While freedom of choice plans will be accepted again this year,” the department informed Cater, “districts electing this type of plan will have to demonstrate that their school systems will not be substantially segregated again next fall.” For the first time, HEW identified “the percentage of Negro children in the district who will be attending desegregated schools” as a legitimate benchmark in determining whether local officials had satisfied their obligations under Title VI. The administration would require districts that did not meet these targets to extend their “freedom of choice” enrollment periods, provide extended police protection to black families who sought to enroll their children in predominantly white schools, cooperate more closely with parents and civic groups, or—in the most recalcitrant of cases—end choice plans altogether and adopt more aggressive measures. This policy broke new ground. Before 1966, officials at the White House, the Department of Justice, and HEW insisted that their sole aim was to dismantle the South’s dual education system. Ending compulsory, state-enforced segregation—not replacing it with state-mandated integration—was their guiding principle. But the failure of choice plans to bend the South’s inelastic race line compelled a reconsideration of this policy. Too few black students had been enrolled in majority-white schools. Drawing on multiple decisions that federal district and appellate court judges had issued in the preceding months, the general counsel of the OEO concluded that the courts “recognized that the discriminatory effects of almost a century of compulsory segregation and the many years of involuntary servitude that preceded that” demanded more than just the formal removal of barriers. The same legal logic that underscored the Brown decision—that the very act of segregation injured the personalities of black children and deprived them of their due process rights as citizens—now demanded that the government require schools to integrate their student bodies and to demonstrate their compliance with this more stringent standard through hard numbers and percentages. “The fact that schools remain identifiable as intended for Negro[s]” because of the racial makeup of their staff and student bodies would now be held as proof of noncompliance
with Title VI and would render such schools ineligible for federal education funds and subject to lawsuits. Schools where black children made up 8 to 9 percent of the student body in 1965 and 1966 would be encouraged, if not required, to double that ratio the following year; those with student bodies that comprised only 4 or 5 percent minority children would be asked to triple their share. HEW and its Office of Education drove the process; Cater and Califano played a supportive role.

  Predictably, many white southerners complained that HEW was essentially compelling local authorities to produce “racial balance” in public schools. Phil Landrum, the powerful Georgia congressman who had sponsored LBJ’s Economic Opportunity Act in the House of Representatives, found “nothing in Title VI of the Act and nothing in the legislative history of the Act requiring such drastic and precipitous new regulations”; indeed, he strained to point out, the legislation stipulated that “desegregation shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” The administration not only placed the burden of proof on individual districts. It also insisted that staff and faculty ratios—not just student ratios—were a fair measure of a district’s good-faith effort to comply with the law. The superintendent of schools in North Carolina maintained that Title VI “speaks in terms of exclusion. The guidelines seem to adopt a posture of forced inclusion,” and he challenged the government’s authority to mandate that “race, color or national origin may not be a factor in the hiring or assignment to schools of teachers or other professional staff.” Despite the widespread resistance of southern districts to the integration of teachers and paraprofessionals, in its revised guidelines HEW also set hard targets for the integration of school staff members and threatened to cut off funds and file federal lawsuits against those districts that failed to comply.

  When southern members of Congress protested that the administration was imposing quotas and compulsory integration, LBJ strained credibility by responding personally that the “guidelines are not designed to compel desegregation beyond that inherent in a fairly working free choice plan. . . . The percentages to which you take exception are designed simply as an administrative guide to assist the Department in reviewing over 2,000 separate school districts.” This claim was technically true but fundamentally disingenuous. Local jurisdictions that failed to meet HEW’s “guides” and goals—both for student and for staff placement—could be denied federal education funds, a result that very few districts were willing to risk. By mid-1966, Lyndon Johnson no longer even feigned solicitousness toward southern segregationists, even those like Richard Russell, his friend and Senate mentor, whom he reminded, “You have advocated acceptance of the law and urged people to adjust themselves to it.” Later that summer, Cater informed the president that the Office of Education planned to cut off fifty districts in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, with more likely to follow. “It will be impossible to avoid political controversy on this, particularly during the election season,” he explained. “The best policy . . . is for HEW to proceed with no evasion of responsibilities, but with every attempt to be conciliatory rather than belligerent.” Johnson made no effort to stop the department.

  Much in the same way that HEW and the White House looked to appellate court decisions to justify their imposition of hard targets, judges—beginning in 1965, with the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Singleton v. Jackson Municipal Separate School District—invoked HEW’s new administrative rulings as legal grounds to issue more proscriptive rulings. Writing for the appellate panel, Judge John Minor Wisdom—one of four members of the Fifth Circuit who would earn the enmity of their fellow southerners for aggressively enforcing civil rights laws in the 1960s and 1970s—“attach[ed] great weight to the standards established by the Office of Education. The judiciary has of course functions and duties distinct from that of the executive, but in carrying out a national policy we have the same objective. There should be a close correlation . . . between the judiciary’s standards in enforcing the national policy requiring desegregation of public schools and the executive department’s standards in administering this policy. Absent legal questions, the United States Office of Education is better qualified than the courts and is the more appropriate federal body to weigh administrative difficulties inherent in school desegregation plans.” In effect, the Johnson administration’s embrace of integration targets provided federal judges with the justification they required to issue similarly proscriptive rulings.

  The combination of administrative and judicial firepower worked. Between 1965 and 1968, the number of black students in the South who attended majority-white schools rose from roughly 2.3 percent to almost 23.4 percent. That ratio would continue to climb over the following two decades until it peaked at 43.5 percent in 1988. More arresting still, between 1968 and 1980 the portion of southern black children attending deeply segregated schools—schools where they made up over 90 percent of the student population—fell from 77.5 percent to 26.5 percent. In those same years, the portion of white southern students attending deeply segregated public schools dropped from 68.8 percent to 26 percent.

  Southern compliance testified to the success of LBJ’s carrot-and-stick method. But many southern school districts attempted to comply minimally with HEW’s requirements or played sleight-of-hand games—for instance, clustering black students in the same classrooms—that invited closer scrutiny. That scrutiny became more standard in 1967 when the Fifth Circuit, whose jurisdiction then extended to the Deep South states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, ruled in United States v. Jefferson County Board of Education that freedom-of-choice and pupil placement plans were invalid and that districts had an “affirmative duty” to achieve racial balance in their schools. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court went a step further, ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia that jurisdictions with dual school systems “must be required to convert promptly to a system without a ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” In effect, the Court signaled that the time for “all deliberate speed” had unquestionably ended.

  It was one matter to integrate southern schools, where local officials had for the better part of a century flagrantly maintained racially segregated and unequal systems. It was another matter to monitor districts outside the Deep South, where segregation appeared more coincidental in nature. As Califano, Cater, and HEW devised new guidelines for the 1966–1967 school year, the state of affairs in northern and western states influenced the Johnson administration’s thinking about race and education nationwide. Writing to Cater, Peter Libassi, a special assistant to HEW’s secretary, John Gardner, affirmed that there was in fact widespread segregation in non-southern schools, though most of the segregation in these states appeared to be the result of de facto residential segregation rather than the willful maintenance of dual systems. Libassi acknowledged that the department knew less about the situation outside the South. “While we are investigating complaints of discrimination against Northern and Western schools,” he explained, “we simply have not had enough experience in these areas to issue guidelines of general applicability.”

  There were hard limits to LBJ’s tolerance for action outside the South. In the summer of 1965, a coalition of civil rights organizations filed a complaint with HEW that charged the city of Chicago with maintaining separate school systems for black and white pupils. The accusation was both compelling and a harbinger of the deep complications that liberal Democrats would confront when the black freedom movement set its sights on northern cities, where a powerful complex of discriminatory banking, residential, and employment practices concealed itself behind the curtain of de facto segregation. In Chicago, many blue-collar unions aggressively locked African Americans out of well-paying building trades and industrial jobs—jobs that directly and indirectly relied on the public sector’s spending power and recognition of collective bargaining rights. African Americans were also consigned t
o the worst, most cramped, and most overpriced housing stock—not because black residents chose to live in all-black neighborhoods, but because no landlord in a white ethnic neighborhood would rent to them, and banks would not issue mortgages in integrated neighborhoods, per the federal government’s long-standing custom of redlining such census tracks as undesirable. As in thousands of cities and towns throughout the North and the Midwest, de facto segregation was a direct by-product of state-sanctioned and state-sponsored housing and employment discrimination.

  If Chicago’s de facto segregation was in reality no accident or expression of natural preference, city officials nevertheless went the extra mile to maintain dual schools for black and white children. Under the leadership of Superintendent Benjamin Willis, a close ally of Mayor Richard Daley’s, hundreds of classrooms in white neighborhood schools lay vacant, while schools in black neighborhoods were dangerously over capacity, aging, and decrepit. In cases where overcrowding stretched even the moral limits of the city’s white leaders, school authorities furnished schools with mobile trailers—which civil rights activists dubbed “Willis Wagons”—rather than reassign black students to all-white classrooms. Though the Board of Education did not sanction a “junior high” tier between elementary and high school, when student populations at black primary schools swelled, authorities created “upper grade centers”—a blunt conceit that effectively manufactured ad hoc junior high schools to avoid busing black children to white neighborhoods. When authorities did authorize new construction (between 1951 and 1962, the city built two hundred schools), they concentrated efforts in primarily black or white neighborhoods in a manner that perpetuated the city’s dual system. Black schools often lacked gymnasiums, had inferior library facilities, and employed a higher ratio of noncertified teachers. Few offered honors or advanced placement courses in English, chemistry, algebra, biology, physics, or American history. Vocational schools, which the city operated in coordination with trade unions and which functioned as a pipeline to well-paying trade occupations, were almost all lily-white. At the start of the 1964–1965 school year, over four-fifths of Chicago’s elementary schools and almost three-quarters of its high schools were either “absolutely segregated” or “segregated”—meaning over 90 percent of their student populations comprised one race. More arresting still, 90 percent of the city’s black children and teenagers attended such institutions.