Divided we Fail Read online

  DIVIDED WE FAIL

  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

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  I The Letters

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  II Our Beloved Central High

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  III With Our Own

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  IV The Numbers Game

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  V The Lawsuit

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  VI To the Supreme Court

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  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.1 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 Louisville’s 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 children’s 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 didn’t 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 were not the first to bring a federal case challenging desegregation, they were the first African Americans to do so.2

  To the plaintiffs and their supporters, the triumphant narrative of the civil rights battles that led to the long-awaited desegregation of the nation’s schools ignored some ugly truths. Americans commemorated James Meredith’s 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 didn’t succeed in closing the racial achievement gap.

  Central High School, located in the inner city amid housing projects and industrial warehouses, was Louisville’s traditionally black school. Under the district’s desegregation plan, every school had to maintain a white majority, and Central couldn’t 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 city’s desegregation plan. Almost immediately, a group of white parents, angry that their children couldn’t attend the schools of their choice, hired the black group’s 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 Brown—that 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 nation’s 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 Louisville’s 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 city’s 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, Louisville’s 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.3

  After the Supreme Court ruling, I traveled back to my hometown to hear reactions from black and white residents, and to learn about the earlier case that had brought it about. For the mos
t part, it was not that the black activists opposed racial integration. Several saw it as a highly desirable goal. What they opposed was how desegregation had so often worked as a one-way exchange, and the lack of concern about how the loss of their schools and their voice might affect their community. They wanted equal outcomes for black children and they also wanted equal power over the schools and over the content and trajectory of their children’s education—something they argued that racial integration in the schools never produced. Desegregation had been framed as a way to make up for what black people lacked. They wanted recognition that the African American community also had something to add to American society, that their culture had strengths, not just weaknesses.

  I was struck, as I listened to their criticisms of busing, at how similar their complaints were to the frustrations parents expressed with the current set of education reforms: the charter schools and accountability systems that replaced desegregation. As the era of desegregation ended, black communities across the nation were once again facing unilateral school closings and mass firings of black teachers. Many felt disenfranchised, wondering whether reformers cared about their own vision for their children’s education. Some took to the streets in protest. Others filed lawsuits.

  In the end, the dissatisfaction with the way desegregation was implemented—among both whites and blacks—toppled it. In the case of black parents, they wanted more from their schools than just test score gains. The story of Central High School in Louisville, and why black community members valued it so much that they helped overturn a half century of school desegregation, is not just a history lesson. It’s also a message to education reformers today.

  I

  The Letters

  Chapter 1

  The letter Dionne Hopson had been waiting for came on August 15, 1996.1 The oppressive heat of the Kentucky summer had lifted. School started in a week. On 28th Street in Louisville, the sounds of August in the West End—the bounce of basketballs in the abandoned lot next door, old ladies passing along the gossip from their front porches—would soon be replaced with the chatter of schoolchildren converging on Maupin Elementary across the alleyway behind her house. It was an old frame two-story, painted white, with a weedy front lawn and a small front porch—bigger than the shotgun houses down the block to the south, but smaller than the stately Victorians in various states of decay to the north. In these last days of summer, waiting for the mailman, Dionne found it hard to relax.

  When the first letter arrived, back in May, Dionne had felt confident. It was from Central High School, the school she had dreamed of attending since middle school. Signed by Central’s principal, the letter assured her that she was in the running to enter one of Central’s magnet academies in law, business, computers, or medicine. They were the only such programs in the city, and out of 600 applicants, the school had chosen her. True, it put her on a waiting list, but she had excellent grades and the list was relatively short, only 107 students.2 She hadn’t thought twice about the part of the letter that explained the reason for the waitlist: “Jefferson County Public Schools policy is to keep all schools within racial compliance. No school can have a population more than 42 percent African American.”3

  Dionne picked up the pile of mail and flipped through, stopping at the envelope labeled with the rainbow logo of the Jefferson County Public Schools. The letter was addressed to her mother, Gwendolyn Hopson, but Dionne couldn’t wait. She never opened her mother’s mail, but this letter was about her. She tore it open. And then she read it several times. “Many students are still unable to attend Central High School . . . in an effort to provide a viable alternative placement . . . indicate if you would like this second choice.”4

  Central was Dionne’s first and second choice. She had been daydreaming about her first day of high school for nearly three years. A year before the application was due, Dionne began writing her admissions essay and compiling letters of recommendation for Central’s selective magnet program. She wanted to be a lawyer, and she was convinced Central High School’s law magnet program was the ticket to her dream career. Dionne didn’t know many lawyers, or what applying to law school entailed. But she had long been told she had the argumentative temperament that would make her perfect for the job.

  Her mother was a cashier at AutoZone with a degree from the local community college and her father, who had divorced her mother and moved in with another woman a couple years earlier, worked the line at Louisville’s General Electric factory. The people in her neighborhood were poor; many lived on welfare. But at Central, Dionne believed she would find her way to the next step. She called out to her mom as the tears of bitter disappointment began to fall.

  ________

  Dionne was accustomed to getting what she wanted. She was the youngest of five children, the rest of them boys. At age four, her brother Dejuan had jealously guarded his chubby-cheeked baby sister. “She’s my baby,” the little boy scolded admiring strangers who approached to coo at her. Her father, Thurman, doted on her, putting aside money from his GE paycheck so Dionne could have new clothes from Sears. Her brothers shared rooms in their modest white frame house on 28th Street, but Dionne had her own, filled with toys. Before she could walk, her uncles often dropped by the house to pick her up and plunk her on a blanket by the basketball court, where they could watch over her and show her off. Time with her mother, Gwen, was often spent shopping—Gwen wanted to make sure Dionne never felt the sting of the poverty that surrounded them. But in second grade, Dionne was removed from her sheltered life.

  Under the desegregation policy of the Jefferson County Public Schools, which included Louisville and its suburbs, Dionne was assigned to an elementary school twelve miles to the south, in a white working-class village called Fairdale. Every morning for the next seven years, Dionne’s mother shook her awake before dawn to catch the bus for the hour-long ride. On most mornings, she whined, argued, and stalled as long as possible. At age eight, Dionne was still a tiny girl, but she made up for it with her stubbornness. The view of the neighborhood elementary school from their windows added fuel to her griping. For first grade, Dionne had crossed through their yard to Catalpa Street to attend Maupin Elementary. Why should she have to travel to the outer reaches of the county when a school sat a few steps from their back door?

  Dionne, her family said, got her strong will and strong voice from her mother. Arguments between them were frequent, and they were not for the fainthearted. Gwen’s deep voice, trained from years singing in the church choir, dominated a room even when she wasn’t annoyed. Yet Gwen’s fierceness often dissolved for her daughter. She had always had a soft spot for Dionne, who was encouraged by the sympathy she detected in her mother’s face.

  Gwen’s childhood had been similar to Dionne’s—seven brothers protected her from most of childhood’s difficulties. Girls didn’t tease her and only the bravest boys asked her out. Her mother, who ran a home for orphans and foster children out of an old Victorian on Catalpa, buttressed the defensive dome surrounding her. When they shopped downtown or in their neighborhood, Parkland, her mother didn’t explain why they couldn’t go in the stores with the pretty mannequins except to say simply, “We’re not allowed.” When they walked to the back section of a diner to eat or to order takeaway at a lunch counter, the staff greeted Gwen’s mother by name, as a cherished customer. Gwen never thought about the segregation that prevented them from sitting down or from taking a seat by the window. The boundaries between black and white that Jim Crow imposed on their lives didn’t register, partly because in the 1950s, when Gwen went to elementary school in Parkland, suburban flight hadn’t emptied the city of its white residents. Most of the students in her classes were white.

  She had attended Maupin Elementary herself in the 1950s, walking a block from the three-story house where she grew up on Catalpa. Since she had attended, the school district had replaced the building with a modern new facility. Gwen was incensed that her daughter was forced to go to school an hour
away when there was a brand-new school next door. She felt a pang each morning as she nudged her youngest out of bed and endured her arguments, but she never let Dionne skip school. Gwen wouldn’t allow her daughter to miss out on her education. Every day, Gwen was out the door with the two youngest of her five children, Dionne and Dejuan, by 6:30 a.m., and she waited with them on the corner until the bus arrived and took them away to Fairdale.

  After the bus picked them up, it circled through the shabby shotguns of Parkland and the Cotter Homes, a rundown housing project nearby. Children stood on corners loaded down with backpacks, expectantly holding their parents’ hands. Once the bus was full, it rumbled away from Parkland’s familiar streets, with their Baptist churches and fastidiously painted houses fighting the decay around them as well as those that had succumbed to graffiti and rot. The fastest route took them along the ring expressway, which passed through Shively, once a stronghold of white resistance to busing. From the expressway, Shively’s small bungalows were hidden amid the trees. To the north of their route sat Churchill Downs; the storied racetrack’s elegant white spires contrasted with the gritty urban neighborhood around them. Next they passed the acres of parking lots and bland hotel buildings surrounding the airport and fairgrounds. Finally, they entered the South End. Low windowless factory buildings and industrial parks gave way to flat patches of farmland. Stalled in the traffic going the opposite direction were commuters and buses filled with white children.

  Dionne’s bus exited onto an old two-lane highway that dipped and wound toward the ridgeline along the far southern edge of Jefferson County, which encompassed the city of Louisville and most of its suburbs. Trailer parks and vinyl-sided farmhouses sat back from the road. The traffic, mostly pickup trucks and rust-pocked Pontiacs, was light. Less than a mile from the county border was Dionne’s school, Coral Ridge Elementary.