Divided we Fail Read online

  In 1989, on her first day at Coral Ridge in second grade, Dionne felt panicky as she watched the scenery changes through the bus window. The frilly, matching outfit picked out by her mother did not cheer her up—she cried when her mother waved good-bye, cried harder at the sight of tears on her mother’s cheeks, then sniffled all the way to her new school. The alien landscape of Fairdale sparked a renewed outburst of tears as the bus slowed and turned into the school parking lot.

  Beverly Goodwin, the principal of Coral Ridge, was ready for the forlorn band of youngsters climbing off the downtown buses.5 Goodwin had greeted them each year for more than a decade, since the city’s desegregation plan went into effect in 1975. The sight of her generally struck awe into her new charges. Dionne stopped crying when she saw the tall, elegantly dressed woman with a halo of bright blond hair and an equally bright smile. Many of the new students had already met her: Goodwin tried to ease the transition for the downtown students by holding meetings in their neighborhoods over the summer so that parents would be comforted by knowing who would be watching over their children and so the children would be comforted on the first day by a familiar face. After being promoted from guidance counselor to principal in the mid-1980s, Goodwin outfitted her wood-paneled office with stuffed animals and a worn-in couch that gave it the feel of a cozy living room. She made the rounds of all the classrooms most days, encouraging students and teachers in her Nashville twang. Soon Dionne began to settle in. Although she made it a morning ritual to protest the long trip to school, by her second year at Coral Ridge she was thriving.

  Fairdale was a relic of Jefferson County’s rural past that seemed more closely tied to Kentucky’s distant Appalachian regions than Louisville’s cosmopolitan center a few miles away. The town was an old farming village located next to an area known as the Wet Woods, once a hangout for bandits at the turn of the century.6 It was all white and about as poor as Dionne’s own all-black inner-city neighborhood. About three-quarters of the school’s children had their lunches subsidized, and there was a high concentration of students with special needs—learning disabilities, emotional problems, and/or behavior issues. The school offered no classes for gifted and talented children, or even honors classes for a lower tier of high achievers. The school didn’t enroll enough children from the wealthier families who generally demanded such programs. Yet Coral Ridge’s test scores tended to be high for a school with concentrated poverty, and by fourth grade, Dionne stood out as particularly bright and driven.7

  Dionne was talkative, sometimes too talkative according to her teachers, but she was also quick to learn, especially when it came to reading. She bonded with her classmates and teachers on camping trips to the nearby state forest, where Goodwin’s husband was a ranger. By fifth grade, Dionne thought of Goodwin as a “mother away from home.” Dionne stopped by the principal’s office often to say hello. Sometimes she came in leading Gwen, who tried to visit the school as often as possible despite the distance.

  Gwen was skeptical of Coral Ridge—she got a bad feeling from the white teachers, who, she believed, treated black children differently—but she tried to hide her opinions from her daughter. When it was time for Dionne to graduate from elementary school, after fifth grade, she didn’t want to leave. In a note on her last report card from Coral Ridge, Dionne’s teachers wrote that she “often escaped into a book,” that her writing was “wonderful,” and that she had “great potential that will be developed in her middle and high school years.” At the bottom of the paper was a note from the principal: “I can’t believe you’re leaving us. You’ve been a joy and I’ll miss you. Good luck in middle school, love, Mrs. G.”8

  Dionne had her own high expectations for herself. She believed her debating skills and her high marks in reading and writing made her a shoo-in for Central’s law program, already her goal by sixth grade. But first she had to endure another three years of early-morning travel to Robert Frost Middle School, located in a thin peninsula of Jefferson County that jutted south along the Ohio River. The school was even deeper in the South End than Coral Ridge. Demographically, Frost was similar in most ways to Dionne’s elementary school. Academically, the school didn’t surpass the low expectations for a school with so much poverty, both white and black.9

  The school was located at the end of a street in a subdivision of identical one-story houses the size of double-wide trailers. The blocks of homes were hemmed in by railroad tracks on one side and the Ohio River on the other. Nearby, Dixie Highway, the South End’s main drag, led to the army airfield at Fort Knox. It was lined with fast food outlets, bait shops, and gun stores. Steep, forested hills surrounded Coral Ridge; at Frost, the skeletal skyline of the city’s power plant loomed over the campus. All day, giant cooling towers belched clouds of white smoke into the sky and trains roared past on the way to drop off loads of coal. Levies hid a view of the river and an industrial waste pond a few hundred feet from the schoolyard.

  More ominous to Dionne were the packs of white teenagers that roamed the subdivision’s streets after school. During her years at Frost, Dionne ran track and often stayed after school for practice. To get home, she and a small group of other black students involved in after-school activities waited for a city bus headed downtown. Standing on a corner near the school, they were easy targets for high school boys cruising by in low-riding cars, screaming curses from their rolled-down windows. The one that bothered Dionne the most was, “Go back to your country, niggers!” She wondered where they thought she came from.

  More than anything during her time at Frost, Dionne needed a haven where she would be loved and cared for. Her parents divorced when she was in middle school. Her father, Thurman, moved across town to Newburg, a black suburban neighborhood near the GE plant. Dionne remained close to her dad, but her mother loathed Thurman’s new girlfriend. The conflict was devastating for Dionne. The only thing that might have hurt more was losing him for good. She began dreaming of going to Central around the time her dad left.

  The magnet law program wasn’t the only reason Dionne wanted to go to Central. It was a five-minute drive from her house in Parkland and, more important, the school was Louisville’s traditionally black public high school. In the 1950s, Central had been an organizing ground for Louisville’s civil rights movement and cultivated many of the city’s leading black figures, from lawyers and intellectuals to boxing legend Muhammad Ali. It was the city’s only black public high school until the 1960s. Tales of basketball and football victories from its early years, and the elaborate parades that accompanied them, were still repeated in Louisville barbershops decades later. The booming voice of its head disciplinarian for fifteen years, Maude Brown Porter, haunted Louisville’s black senior citizens half a century after they had graduated.

  Central was also the alma mater of Dionne’s parents. Dionne grew up hearing stories from Gwen and Thurman about the legendary high school at West Chestnut Street and Ninth. Gwen could still conjure the mix of smells that met her each day as she filed to class—pressed hair from the cosmetology department, sawdust from the carpentry shop, and motor oil from the auto mechanic garage. She could hear the dignified click of Mrs. Metcalf’s four-inch heels on the tile floors, see the grimace on her face as she glanced over Gwen’s math homework and scolded her to study harder.

  The school was all black when Gwen graduated in 1969, but she didn’t notice the deprivations of segregation—the shabby secondhand books and aging facilities. What Gwen remembered was the fierce love of her teachers. It was their life’s mission to help their students succeed in life. To Gwen, this was the caring that she believed was missing from white-dominated schools like Coral Ridge and Frost.

  Gwen had never thought much of desegregation as a cause, although as a child, she had grown up in a mostly white neighborhood. Her mother had inherited money from her husband, who had worked for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, and after he died she moved her family to the house on Catalpa, two blocks from Parkland’s town center
. They were the second black family to move onto the street.

  After they arrived, the number of blacks grew quickly as whites fled to new neighborhoods in the east and south. The white congregation of the Baptist church on the corner sold the building to a black congregation. In Parkland’s quaint business district, the shops that had thrived as an alternative to downtown—the pharmacy, the bakery, and the A&P—stayed longer. Eventually, the Masonic hall was taken over by the African American division, the Prince Hall Masons. As the 1950s progressed, a few of the businesses closed, and some were taken over by black owners. To the north of Gwen’s house, Virginia Avenue’s Queen Anne and Victorian homes were subdivided, and swaths of buildings in Little Africa, a former black shantytown on the outskirts of the neighborhood, were razed to make way for housing projects. The Cotter Homes that replaced them in 1953 became known as the worst projects in the city.

  The schools Gwen attended became increasingly black. When she started at Central High School in the mid-1960s, her classmates were all African American. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the race riots sweeping the nation came to Louisville. Gwen was a junior in high school when the Black Panthers held a rally in Parkland. A few of the men came knocking on her mother’s door and asked her to put up a sign of support in the family’s window, but she slammed the door in their faces. Gwen wasn’t allowed to leave the house for days. Instead, she watched on television as her neighborhood ignited in fury and flames. Two blocks away, shops burned and looters rampaged. When she finally left the house, she walked into a wasteland. Owners had abandoned their ravaged stores in Parkland and most never came back.10 The business district stayed boarded up for nearly two decades, and many of the black middle class left, too, encouraged by the relaxation of housing segregation in the suburbs.

  Watching her neighborhood disintegrate in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death left Gwen angry. She looked around at her once close-knit community and saw a desolate ghetto full of strangers. She didn’t understand where their fury came from, but she saw what the turbulence of the 1960s had done to her home. She had not thought much about racism before, but now she knew to look for it. She moved away from Parkland when she got married, but when her grandmother died and left her a house on 28th Street in the early 1980s, she came back.

  By then urban renewal had come to the neighborhood, but to Gwen, everything seemed worse.11 There were new apartment buildings, but Parkland’s shops were still mostly boarded up. The streets were filled with idle people—gang members and hustlers and the elderly. The well-dressed church people came to the Baptist church on the corner and then left.

  Gwen blamed the decline of the neighborhood partly on a school desegregation system that sent the neighborhood’s children out to all parts of the city. She believed it undermined Parkland’s already fragile community. In the 1950s, the neighborhood elementary school had been housed in an old brick building on the east side of Catalpa. Then it was called simply Parkland Elementary, after the neighborhood. A few years after the school district began busing in white students, a new building was constructed on the west side of the street. Perhaps to erase the uncomfortable memories conjured up by the name Parkland, the school’s name was changed in 1985 to honor Milburn Maupin, Jefferson County’s first African American central office administrator.12

  After Parkland was looted in the riots, Gwen found security and comfort among her peers and teachers at Central. After what she had seen, a black school, where children would be insulated from racism and hate, made sense to her. Dionne’s experiences at Frost showed her that nothing much had changed in forty years. When Dionne decided on Central as her first choice for high school, Gwen was relieved that her daughter would soon be enveloped in Central’s protective armor.

  Dionne’s fixation on Central gathered force as her family fell apart. Not long after her father moved away, her worst fear came true. After years of stooping over refrigerator doors and washing machines as they slid down the line at the GE plant, Thurman was diagnosed with spinal cancer. He continued working at the factory until a month before his death. For Dionne, watching him spiral into dementia drained her of the spunk her teachers had praised her for in elementary school. After he died, Dionne, once the tiny girl with the big personality, became quiet and withdrawn.

  Around the same time, a favorite aunt died suddenly of an aneurysm. The unfairness of the double tragedy was almost unbearable to Dionne. Gwen felt frantic as her daughter grew more distant. She didn’t know how to help her, and she was grieving, too. Her older boys were struggling in high school, and Gwen—a housewife for years—now had to support all of them. It would get easier, both mother and daughter felt, once Dionne reached high school and finally came home.

  To get into Central would not be easy. For seventy-five years, it had been the default school for all of Louisville’s black students. But by 1995, as Dionne was preparing to apply, the school had been transformed into a selective magnet school under the leadership of a new principal, Harold Fenderson. The change had been implemented ostensibly to draw in more white students and to shed Central’s reputation as a black school.

  Fenderson, a Baptist preacher in his spare time, aggressively promoted the school and courted new partnerships with local businesses and universities to augment the school’s programs, but his efforts seemed to be backfiring, at least when it came to attracting more whites.13 Many of the career tracks focused on preparing for jobs, rather than for college. The business magnet included classes on managing a Super America convenience store, a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and a bank branch. The medical program focused on nursing, veterinary science, and dentistry. The offerings did not necessarily evoke the sorts of careers that might draw elite white suburbanites whose sights were set on graduate degrees and six-figure salaries.

  And most Louisvillians still thought of Central as the black school. The flow of white applications for Central remained anemic, but enthusiasm for Central among black students grew and applications poured in.14 Under Louisville’s desegregation plan, which was still in place twenty years after it had been implemented by court order in 1975, Central had to keep its percentage of black students under 42 percent. As fewer white students applied, more black students were turned away.

  Dionne wasn’t worried about her chances. It didn’t occur to her that she might be turned down. She could already picture herself walking through the hushed hallways described to her by her parents and reading legal texts that would propel her toward a high-powered career in law. The thought that she would be able to sleep past sunrise on schooldays for the first time since second grade made the vision sweeter. Her mother called a church acquaintance employed at Central for advice. They attended a school fair, where they visited only Central’s booth. She sent her application materials months early just to be safe. When Frost Middle School mistakenly sent Dionne’s seventh-grade transcripts to their house instead of Central, Gwen wrote an urgent letter to the high school explaining the error to make sure it wouldn’t affect Dionne’s chances.15

  The day Dionne received her rejection letter, Gwen began making phone calls. She called family members and the woman she knew from church who worked at Central, but there was nothing anyone could do. Another letter arrived a day later, this one from Pleasure Ridge Park High School, Dionne’s assigned home school, a forty-five-minute bus ride away in the South End. The letter invited them to attend an orientation, but it had arrived late. The orientation had taken place earlier that week.16

  Dionne was despondent. Gwen was angry. On August 16, the Louisville Courier-Journal ran an article about a protest at Central. Around a dozen black parents and community activists had gathered at the school to rally against the racial guidelines. Their picket signs read, “Let our children choose,” and one protester told the paper that they were there to challenge a system that “always put the burden on African Americans.”17

  Not long after, Gwen received a phone call. The activists were meeti
ng again to organize another protest at Central and Dionne had been identified as one of the students who had been denied admission. Parents who thought their children had been unfairly treated were invited to come and express themselves. Gwen promised that she and Dionne would be there.

  Chapter 2

  Ja’Mekia Stoner’s first rejection letter had come a year earlier, in the summer of 1995.1 It was stamped with the Jefferson County Public Schools logo and addressed to her mother, Jacquelyn, who had just arrived home on the bus from her job at a nursing home in time for the mail. The West End was steamy after days of rain, and a rambunctious crowd of cousins and neighborhood children was cooped up on the front porch that served as their living room in the summer.

  Ja’Mekia and her little brother, La’Quinn, spent summer days throwing water balloons from the bathroom window at their cousins outside, playing ball in the street or, if no one was around to play with, hunkered down with a book in one of the shabby but comfortable blue chairs on the porch. Curfew was late, but they were confined to a range within sight of the house. The pulse of activity on the block contrasted with the shuttered and silent campus of Shawnee High School down the street. The truants and gang members who had spent school days lingering around its periphery were elsewhere for the season. Jacquelyn picked up the mail and rifled through to the letter with the rainbow logo. She slipped it open and read it to herself.

  Jacquelyn decided not to show it to Ja’Mekia—she wanted to break the news more gently. She explained that it looked like there wasn’t enough room for her at Central High School that year. Ja’Mekia was on a waitlist, but she would probably have to choose another school. The explanation did not satisfy Ja’Mekia. Central was a big school with plenty of space and she was in the Advance Program. She had worked so hard to ace her courses, usually as the only black student in class. What more did they want? Jacquelyn tried to comfort her daughter as she began to cry, and then to argue.