Divided we Fail (14 page)

In 1969, the NAACP had filed a complaint to the federal department of Health, Education and Welfare about the segregation in Louisville's schools. HEW inspected, and found that Central High School's all-black student population was in violation of federal law. The agency's recommendations focused on changing the student assignment system so that some white students would be zoned to attend Central. Other options were busing some black students to other schools in exchange for white students, pairing Central with a white vocational school and sharing students, or closing it.
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All of the options were bad ones. The superintendent of the Louisville schools, Newman Walker, complained that changing the zoning would just cause white students assigned to Central to move away, accelerating the already rapid decrease in the city's white population.
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(By the end of the 1960s, almost half of Louisville's students were black.)
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Surveys had found that “a considerable majority of whites and blacks” opposed busing, according
to school administrators.
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School officials worried that Central's academic program would be watered down if it were paired with a white vocational school and shop classes became the focus. And closing the school would be a public relations nightmare; as a local reporter noted, it was a “proud, closely-knit place with a long tradition.”
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The school system did nothing.
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By the following year, there was less pressure on the city from HEW: Nixon had pushed out the director, Leon Panetta, for being too enthusiastic about seeking out discrimination in the schools. As a result, the agency had essentially stopped trying to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
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Although the students of Central had been instrumental in Louisville's civil rights movement, they were not necessarily impatient for change at their own school.
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The fierce pride in Central had only grown since the first round of desegregation in 1956, in part because of the school's ascendance in that all-important arena of Kentucky culture: the basketball court.

The glory began in 1957.
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In the Louisville invitational tournament that year—only a year after Central students had begun competing against white teams—the Central team took home the trophy after trouncing a strong team from Manual, a predominantly white school. In 1965, Central broke the record for longest winning streak in Kentucky high school basketball history, then lost by two points to a small-town team in the state semifinals. In 1968, the Yellowjackets' circumspect coach, Bob Graves, abandoned his usual caution and predicted his team would take the state championship. It lost that year, but the following year, Central won the Louisville tournament and went on to the state tournament again. It played a team from a coal-mining county in western Kentucky, and seventeen thousand people packed into the stadium to see the game. “These people have come here to see you lose,” Coach Graves told his players before the game.
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Instead, the Central team broke records. One player scored 44 points, the highest number of individual points in Kentucky history. As a whole, the team broke the record for most points scored in a game, 101. And, most important, the Central players won, making them the first all-black team to win the Kentucky state championship. The team members came back heroes. The mayor threw them a banquet in Freedom Hall, a huge auditorium at the city's fairgrounds; the governor commissioned the whole team
and Coach Graves as Kentucky Colonels; and the school administration hung a huge banner across the front of the school's now nearly twenty-year-old yellow-brick building.

But in 1970, at the prodding of the NAACP, the federal agency once again questioned Louisville about the situation at Central, warning the school district that it had until September to desegregate the school.
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Central's student council president, Vernon Douglas, told the local newspaper that he was “shocked” at the NAACP's plan to try to desegregate the school. “It seemed like a plot to destroy Central,” Douglas said. “It's a black institution. And I don't see anything wrong with the way it is.”
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In April of 1970, Douglas confronted the school board at a public meeting and asked what was going to happen to his school.

The superintendent hemmed and hawed, blaming the inaction of HEW, which had not given the school district any specific advice about which option it should choose. (A federal appeals court later found HEW guilty of blatantly ignoring its duty to enforce school desegregation.)
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That month, the NAACP, which had filed the complaint in the first place, suggested its own plan: turn Central into a magnet school. The concept was a new one. The idea was to create programs “so innovative and desirable” that white students would choose to come to the school on their own. The local newspaper wondered in an editorial if this magnet idea wouldn't revive the city's old status as “a showcase for the nation” when it came to desegregation plans.
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But by 1971, when the
Swann
ruling was handed down, no action had been taken yet. The summer before, the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union (KCLU) had filed a lawsuit complaining that the Jefferson County Schools, a separate school system that encompassed the mostly white suburbs around Louisville, had purposely isolated black students living in Newburg, a factory village surrounding a GE plant not far from the Louisville city line, in their own, segregated schools.
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The following summer, the KCLU joined with the NAACP in filing a lawsuit that named as defendants the Louisville school district and the separate Jefferson County school district.
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The plaintiffs were a group of “black citizens” of Louisville, according to the lawsuit. The top plaintiff on the case, John Haycraft, had no children.
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He was a graduate of Central High School and a journalist who had marched in Washington, DC, with
Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. The lawsuit demanded that the Louisville system incorporate some white suburbs along its fringe to aid in the desegregation of the city schools.

A group of civil rights activists, among them Lyman Johnson and the Kentucky teachers' union, didn't think the lawsuit went far enough. They joined the case as intervening plaintiffs, arguing that soon enough, the fringe suburbs would experience white flight, leaving the Louisville school district in the same boat.
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In their complaint, they demanded that the Louisville and Jefferson County districts be merged, along with a tiny district within the Jefferson County system, Anchorage, which included a handful of all-white schools.

Although on its surface the merger demand seemed like a big step, in reality, the Louisville school system had been toying with the idea of dissolving itself and joining the county schools for a decade, mainly for financial reasons.
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In 1969, the county and city school boards had met to discuss a merger, but the two sides could not agree. The county wanted simply to absorb the city district into its own system, but the city administrators hoped to retain some power and control in the transition. The matter was dropped. Once the desegregation cases were filed in court, however, the idea began to look more realistic.

In response to the Newburg lawsuit, Joyce Spond, along with three other mothers, founded Save Our Community Schools, also known as SOCS. They were not original—other groups had formed in other cities facing busing under the same name. The mothers believed the Newburg case was a harbinger of the busing schemes they were reading about elsewhere. In 1972, their concerns were validated when the civil rights lawyers proposed the merger. They invited their neighbors and church friends to join them, and more than four hundred people showed up at their first meeting in the Shively Heights Baptist Church.

Joyce told the standing room–only crowd there was an upcoming convention about busing in Washington, DC. She got a resounding response: “Go!” The participants passed a collection, and by the end of the night, they had enough to send three of the organizers, Joyce and two others, to Washington. Soon after, the three women drove to the airport with $270 in hand—most of it in $1 bills—to buy three plane tickets at $90 each.

At the convention, their fears were confirmed. Parents from districts where busing was under way reported that it had decimated local PTAs
and that children spent hours being transported to faraway neighborhoods. Presenters railed against the disastrous effects that busing had on learning and school communities. The stated goal was improving education, but to Joyce's mind, it seemed clear that busing plans had nothing to do with that. She came back energized and empowered, ready to organize to keep busing from coming to Louisville. It helped that politicians in Washington finally seemed to be listening.

1972 was an election year, and as the campaign season started up, the spreading conflict over busing took center stage. “To many Americans, the most important journeys of election year 1972 are not the candidates' peregrinations, or even President Nixon's visits to Moscow and Peking, but the trips that their children—black or white, Northern or Southern—take each day in school buses,” wrote one
Time
magazine reporter that winter.
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Nixon, getting ready to defend his presidency, clarified—and hardened—his stance on busing. “I am against busing as that term is commonly used in school desegregation cases. I have consistently opposed the busing of our nation's children to achieve racial balance, and I am opposed to the busing of children simply for the sake of busing,” he said, adding that he had instructed HEW to make sure busing was kept to the “minimum required by law.”
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Buoyed by the growing backlash against busing, Governor George Wallace, who had said he would defy any federal busing orders in Alabama, made his third try for the Democratic presidential nomination. In March of 1972, Wallace shocked the establishment by winning the Florida Democratic primary after promising voters that if they backed him, “they're going to stop busing little children to Kingdom Come.”
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It was not only white voters—people like Joyce Spond—who got worked up over the idea of busing. During the same month that Wallace won the Florida primary, black groups from across the country and the political spectrum converged in Gary, Indiana, for a National Black Political Convention. The convention included pro-integration activists: The NAACP was there; Jesse Jackson was there; Shirley Chisholm was there. But the black nationalists in attendance were more vocal, and more numerous. As Roger Wilkins, the black journalist, wrote in a dispatch from the convention for the
Washington Post
, “Lately, speakers have taken to asking their black audiences, ‘What time is it?' The powerful, black-throated response, ‘Nation Time.' ”
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Nation time meant a lot of things, Wilkins wrote, but for most, it meant independence from—not integration with—whites. In a loud voice vote, the Nation Time faction overwhelmed the integration supporters and adopted a resolution condemning busing as “racist” and “suicidal.” The resolution argued that busing was based on the “false notion that black children are unable to learn unless they are in the same setting as white children.”
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Instead, they wanted equal funding to maintain and improve the traditional black schools that previous generations had built, often with little help from the white-controlled government at all.

In Louisville, the lawsuits against the school districts claimed to represent the majority of black citizens in Louisville, but a few years earlier, black parents in the West End had resisted a small-scale desegregation plan that would have mixed black and white students attending two elementary schools in nearby neighborhoods.
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Nationally, polls had also tracked the resistance among blacks to busing. Although a majority of both blacks and whites favored desegregation and thought that methods like gerrymandering school zones or placing low-income housing in middle-class neighborhoods was okay, the vast majority opposed busing. A 1973 Gallup poll found that only 9 percent of blacks approved of sending black children out of their own neighborhoods in order to desegregate schools.
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The resistance to busing in Louisville and elsewhere ignored the academic gains that blacks had made since the beginning of school desegregation, however token it was. After 1956, the gap between white and blacks in Louisville narrowed, according to a study conducted by a local researcher at the University of Louisville.
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Before desegregation, blacks in Louisville had scored about five months behind whites in reading. On some tests, they had scored as much as fourteen months behind. Five years later, the study found that they were only a month behind their white counterparts. Other research, including the nationally renowned Coleman Report, also suggested that academic achievement for black students—who were more often poor—was likely to be improved in integrated settings.

Why were so many blacks so against busing if it appeared to help their children do better in school and, as the NAACP argued, it was the moral and just thing to do? As one black father of three in Louisville's West End, who called himself only Phil, told the local newspaper, “It's a step backward for black people as far as understanding who we are.” Busing felt like an effort to assimilate black people and erase their identity and culture,
and, at the same time, seemed like a not-so-subtle way of reasserting white dominance over blacks. As the war over busing began to rage, there was a feeling that once again, black people had little control over their lives and their children. “It's the federal government pitting the people on the bottom of the economic ladder against one another. The real issue is, how come there ain't no black people out there in those neighborhoods?” Phil told the reporter.
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