Sarah Garland - Divided We Fail: The Story of an African American Community That Ended the Era of School Desegregation

The Story of an African American Community
That Ended the Era of School Desegregation

Sarah Garland

BEACON PRESS

BOSTON

For my parents

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books

are published under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

2013 by Sarah Garland

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text design by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garland, Sarah.

Divided we fail : the story of an African American community that ended the era of school desegregation / Sarah Garland.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8070-0177-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

E-ISBN 978-0-8070-0178-3

1. Parents Involved in Community SchoolsTrials, litigation, etc. 2. Seattle Public
SchoolsTrials, litigation, etc. 3. Jefferson County Public SchoolsTrials, litigation, etc.
4. School integrationLaw and legislationKentuckyLouisville. 5. Affirmative action
programs in educationLaw and legislationKentuckyLouisville. I. Title.

KF229.G37 2012

344.730798dc23 2012027732

PREFACE

On June 28, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling that officially ended the era of school desegregation that followed Brown v. Board of Education. Five of the nine justices declared that race alone could no longer be used to assign students to a school, undermining the biggest civil rights cases of the previous century. Under the new interpretation of the law, school districts that had labored for half a century to integrate under plans once forced on them by the courts were told those plans were now unconstitutional.

Two cases led to the decision, one out of Seattle and another out of Louisville, Kentucky, the most racially integrated school system in America. The Louisville case had a long history. Ten years earlier, parents had gone to court to fight desegregation in order to save one school, Central High. The parents were angry about busing, the main tool used in Louisvilles plan. Their children were being forced into the worst schools in the city while one of the best, located in their neighborhood, was being threatened with closure. They were frustrated that their childrens educational fates were decided based solely on their race, with little attention to what parents and the community wanted for their kids. They believed the school system was violating their constitutional right to equal protection. They didnt care that their case might jeopardize a central cause of the civil rights movement, school desegregation; a few of the plaintiffs hoped that desegregation would be dismantled because of their efforts. Although they

To the plaintiffs and their supporters, the triumphant narrative of the civil rights battles that led to the long-awaited desegregation of the nations schools ignored some ugly truths. Americans commemorated James Merediths fight to attend Old Miss and the integration of the Little Rock schools, but they rarely talked about the mass firings of black teachers and widespread closings of traditionally black schools that followed. School desegregation reinforced assumptions about black inferiority, they argued, and it didnt succeed in closing the racial achievement gap.

Central High School, located in the inner city amid housing projects and industrial warehouses, was Louisvilles traditionally black school. Under the districts desegregation plan, every school had to maintain a white majority, and Central couldnt attract enough white students to stay viable. It seemed the Louisville school district might close it. Represented by an ambitious personal injury lawyer, a group of African American plaintiffs, most of them Central alumni, won a district court case to end racial quotas at the school and keep it open. The victory opened the door for other lawsuits against the citys desegregation plan. Almost immediately, a group of white parents, angry that their children couldnt attend the schools of their choice, hired the black groups lawyer and took their cause to the Supreme Court.

The black parents lawsuit was largely forgotten, but the white parents case gripped the nation. Educators and civil rights activists worried that the justices were prepared to overturn Brownthat they would decide that thirty years of desegregation was enough to compensate for more than three hundred years of slavery and segregation. Others hoped the justices would affirm their belief that racial preferences were self-defeating and that American society had entered a post-racial era. Both sides argued that the other was turning back the clock to an era when racial discrimination was the law.

In the Supreme Court case, white parents fought against mostly white school officials, and white lawyers argued in front of a mostly white Supreme Court. Few people watching the national case unfold knew about the black parents in Louisville who had made it possible. This book tells their story.

Before I delve into the experiences and motivations of others, I should disclose my own reasons for writing about this case. When the Supreme Court case decision was published in 2007, my first reaction was to question why white parents would be selfish enough to tear down something that had changed the lives of millions of children across the country for the better, including mine. The era of desegregation corresponded with the largest leaps in black achievement in the history of American public education. Researchers had documented that desegregation held significant benefits for blacks, and no downsides for whites.

Like many families, white and black, mine had been deeply affected by the desegregation of the nations schools. My grandmother volunteered to join the first group of white teachers assigned to the all-black inner-city schools of Oklahoma in the 1960s, where she spent the rest of her twenty-year teaching career. Her daughter, my mother, worked as a social worker at Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary, an inner-city school in downtown Louisville, and also in the white, working-class South End, where she witnessed firsthand the upheaval and violence that busing wrought in its early years.

As for myself, I boarded a bus in my middle-class subdivision in Louisvilles suburbs in second grade to attend the same school where my mother had worked a decade earlier, Coleridge-Taylor Elementary. The school was next door to one of the citys poorest housing projects, across the street from Central High School. Coleridge-Taylor was built like a prison, with narrow slits for windows and a tall fence around it. Fifteen years earlier, before busing, the students assigned there were all black. In the aftermath of busing, the school was transformed. By the 1980s, Coleridge-Taylor had installed an excellent Advance Program, Louisvilles version of a gifted and talented track, with experienced and enthusiastic teachers. But throughout my twelve years in the Louisville public schools, there were never more than two black students in any of my classes, a pattern that was repeated across the city.