Around 6:45 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 4, 1975, I climbed aboard Jefferson County school bus No. 207 for an historic ride. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit had ordered U.S. District Judge James F. Gordon to draw up a plan to desegregate the county’s school system, and many residents didn’t like it one bit. All summer, the resentment had simmered. Now, finally, it was the first day of school and time for Gordon’s plan to be put into action.
At the time, I was The Courier-Journal’s general columnist, having succeeded the late Joe Creason the previous year. To be honest, the term “columnist” was something of a misnomer in those days. I was expected to travel the commonwealth and southern Indiana, digging up human-interest stories, more or less as Creason had done for years. I was discouraged from expressing my opinion on serious issues. I did not, in other words, enjoy the freedom that Bob Hill does today.
The editorial page supported Gordon’s plan, but the newsroom editors were determined to report the story as straight as possible. They were so afraid of being accused of bias, or publishing something that would further inflame emotions, that Managing Editor Carol Sutton killed a column I had written about a Ku Klux Klan meeting led by David Duke on the grounds that might upset the delicate balance the editors were trying to achieve.
I was livid. I thought killing the column was as cowardly as wearing a white hood and said as much. I wanted to give the Ku Klux Klowns the derision they deserved. But Carol held firm. The mood throughout the county was simple too volatile to give the Klan any more exposure than was absolutely necessary.
When my yellow school bus pulled out of the parking lot at Waggener High School in the eastern part of the country, bound for Central High in downtown Louisville, I wasn’t certain what to expect. The anti-busing crowd had promised boycotts, rallies, and demonstration. The threat of violence shimmied in the gray, cool morning air.
Much to the relief of all aboard, our 20-minute trip was routine. At Central, I got on another bus, No. 520, to make the trip out to Westport High in the eastern part on the county. Contrary to policy set by the school board, no monitor was aboard No. 520. It was just driver William Jones, me, and 49 students.
Again, the trip was blessedly uneventful. When we got to Westport, I noticed an area in front of the school marked off with little white signs that said, in red, “Protest Area.” But it was empty. A school official told me there had been no reports of violence anywhere in the county.
But that was just for that morning. I attended a rally on Fourth Street in which anti-busing protestors clashed with policemen brandishing billy clubs. I was pointed out, booed, and threatened at an anti-busing rally in the gymnasium at Ballard High School. I was working the night that a riot broke out near Valley High School on Dixie Highway. A policeman lost an eye in the melee. School buses were vandalized and burned.
One night I interviewed a man named Doug Pedigo, the father of an eighth-grader who was being bused from nearby Iroquois Junior High to Parkland Junior High in downtown Louisville.
“I hate to be told what to do with my children by people who don’t even live here,” Pedigo said, “but I have to admit this much: We wouldn’t have done anything about segregation unless it was just jammed down our throat.”
He was right. Then, as now, Louisville is a core city surrounded by three distinctly different satellite areas. The East End, usually described as “affluent,” is predominantly white and upscale. The culture there is totally different from the South End, which is a working-class mixture of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and refugees from other nations. And then there’s the West End, which is predominantly African-American.
The three cultures mix a bit in the downtown business area, but not much. At the close of business, the white bankers and lawyers flee to their homes in the East End. Most residents of the South End and West End come downtown only to do business at the courthouse or maybe catch one of the cultural events on the riverfront. Otherwise, the walls between the three cultures are as impenetrable as they are invisible to the naked eye.
Now, almost 37 years after the morning I rode Bus No. 207, the U.S. Supreme Court has essentially undone the grand experiment ordered by the Sixth District Court of Appeals and implemented by Judge Gordon. By a 5-4 ruling, the Court threw out Jefferson County Public Schools’ desegregation policy, saying it places too much emphasis on students’ race when assigning them to schools.
But the justices left open the option of using race in student assignments, as long as it is used on a more limited basis. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., who wrote the majority opinion, said the Jefferson County school district has “failed to provide the necessary support for the proposition that there is no other way than individual racial classifications to avoid racial isolation in their school districts.”
Reaction was immediate, mixed, and heated. Old wounds were opened. Cvil-rights advocates deplored the ruling as a giant step backward, but supporters of the decision said it was vindication for those who protested court-order busing in 1975. The school board announced that student assignments for the 2007-’08 academic year would remain in place.
Naturally, the decision will revive the old debates about race, the one topic that nobody in our society can discuss openly and freely without fear of retribution. It’s impossible for any of us to talk about race without pride and prejudice rearing their heads, not to mention passion. On both sides, feelings are hyper-sensitive and easily bruised. Meanings are read into statements, inflections, body language, often incorrectly.
So it will be difficult to have a calm, thoughtful and meaningful discussion about the questions I would like to see addressed: Has busing worked as intended? Are our children, both black and white, better educated because of it? Is our society more or less segregated than it was in 1975? What has the desegregation of the schools accomplished in terms of promoting the ideals of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion?
Hard, tough questions that deserve dispassionate, honest answers.
As I’ve always understood it, the main purpose of busing was to level the educational playing field. The theory was that if students from underprivileged neighborhoodss were provided the same learning tools as their more affluent peers, they would have a greater chance of succeeding in the classroom.
Is that how it’s worked out?
A secondary goal was more of a social experiment. The theory was that if blacks and whites were put together in the classrooms, they would learn, almost by osmosis, to have a greater respect for each other. Many of the cultural barriers would come tumbling down. Getting to know each other would eliminate fear, prejudice, and ignorance.
Is that how it’s worked out?
Go into any school today and listen to the way the students talk. Check out their tastes in clothing, movies, and music. Consider their role models in the worlds of sports and entertainment. Listen to their attitudes about sex, drugs, and violence. Then ask why black students who want to achieve in the classroom are denigrated by other black students for “trying to be white.”
What conclusions may be drawn from what you observe? Has the quality of education in our schools become better or worse, in all sections of the city, since desegregation? Is a higher percentage of black students going to college? What about classroom discipline? Are as many college students interested in teaching careers as there were in 1975? Why or why not?
I still believe in the noble intentions and theories that inspired the desegreation order of 1975. I still believe that embracing diversity, inclusion, and tolerance is the only way Louisville and Kentucky are ever going to fulfill their potential. I still oppose segregation in any way, shape or form.
I also deplore the way the Bush administration is blatantly trying to load the court system with judges who, given their head, would love to turn the clock back to the 1950s. The ultimate goal is to strike down Roe v. Wade, and you have to wonder about Brown v. Board of Education.
Still, I must ask: Has school busing worked in Jefferson County as hoped and intended? I want a report card. I want to see the “F’s” as well as the “A’s” so we all can make rational judgements based on fact instead of emotion.
I’d also like to know how many citizens have fled to one of our surrounding counties to avoid busing or segregation or both. And I’d like to know how many private Christian schools have been founded to avoid busing or segregation. And I’d like to know how much home schooling has increased in Jefferson County since 1975.
Hopefully, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision will force everyone to confront the issue that nobody wants to discuss openly, some for fear of being branded as a “racist.” The sort of stereotyping and name-calling serves no purpose. We need serious and thoughtful debate conducted in an arena of mutal respect for each other and love for our children.
Whether or not that possible is as problematic today as it was on Sept. 4, 1975, the day I boarded those yellow school buses to begin a journey that still hasn’t ended.
1 response so far ↓
1 Oliver Brown // Jul 25, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Billy, with all due respect, here is your report card on compulsory integration: F. We all recall the events of 1974 and the hope that shipping busloads of students around Jefferson County would solve our racial and academic problems. Surprise! It didn’t work. Columnist Fred Reed explains why in his July 24 internet column:
“I wonder whether the time for compulsory racial integration of the schools hasn’t passed. It doesn’t seem to accomplish anything that anyone wants.
The lunge toward integration of course began after 1953, and made a certain moral and intellectual sense at the time. Regardless of denials and justifications, blacks were indeed oppressed until then, and did indeed have schools hopelessly underfunded in comparison to those of white children. (I was a kid in small-town Alabama in 1956-57. Don’t even try to tell me that it wasn’t so.)
Things being very bad, some form of remediation was morally desirable, and the various solutions proposed were both well-intentioned and at least superficially plausible. If whites persisted in giving blacks wretched schools and ignorant teachers, which they did, then, it was thought, putting all children in the same school would settle that. Blacks had never amounted to much scholastically, but then they had always been slaves or serfs; it was not implausible to hope that with better schools they might rise. Certainly it was worth a try.
Southerners said it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t. This failure was probably the greatest misfortune ever to afflict the US. A half-century later, a yawning gap persists between the scholastic performance of blacks and whites. The gap has proved intractable under every nostrum, program, fad, or form of social shuffling. Nobody in his right mind can argue that the country hasn’t tried. The gap doesn’t close.
What now?
Distinctions exist between segregation, desegregation, and integration. Segregation is compulsory separation. Integration is compulsory togetherness. Desegregation is freedom of choice. That is, parents send their children to schools of their choosing. This, I submit, should be the law of the land. The result would be voluntary segregation since the races don’t much want to be together, but why isn’t it their business?
It seems to me that we should ask: What is better for the children? Has integration benefited the kids? If so, which kids? How? Or has it harmed them?
Integration does not appear to have helped black kids, who almost always end up at the bottom scholastically. The reasons can perhaps be debated, but it is what happens, and it shows no signs of changing. Further, being with white kids is not necessary to the advancement of blacks. The best schools I have encountered for blacks in terms of academics are the Catholic schools of downtown Washington, DC, almost entirely black.
However, compulsory integration does hurt white children. Whatever the reasons, whites have a greater interest in studying. White parents tend to want their progeny to learn mathematics, history, the sciences, occasionally the English language, literature, and the arts. White parents, or many white parents at any rate, want rigor in these courses. The enstupidation of America has reached the point that much of the population ruts and gobbles at the moo-cow level, yes. Still, the aspirations of whites remain much higher than those of blacks.
Blacks do not seem interested in European history, or literature, or languages, or the sciences, or mathematics. Neither in integrated schools nor in de facto black schools does one hear them demanding thicker books with bigger words and smaller pictures. I would happily provide these things, but they don’t ask. Perhaps the current policy of trying to impose on them a European culture that isn’t theirs, and that they show no signs of wanting, should end.
Since it has not proved possible to raise black children to the levels preferred by whites, the schools have sought to disguise the failure by diminishing academic rigor for all. This harms whites.
Why not let black parents decide what should be taught to their children? It is their business. I am perfectly content that black kids study physical chemistry and classical Greek, or Swahili and Ebonics, or anything they choose, or nothing at all. It is neither my business nor my problem. Should blacks ask me, I would suggest that in my view being able to read well should be an aim. I would recommend for them the course of study that I want for my own children. But if they did not want these things, as they seem not to, I would suggest that they manage their own schools as they saw fit.
Would it not be better to offer the races a choice and let things settle out as people chose? You could call this policy something like, say, “democracy,” or even “freedom.” Note please that I am specifically not suggesting reinstitution of compulsory segregation anywhere, and particularly not in the schools. A black child who wanted to go to an academically rigorous, predominantly white school should be permitted to do so.
My interest here is partly selfish—to avoid condemning white children to schools dumbed down and unable to insist on standards of schooling and behavior that, as a white, I regard as important. To avoid charges of consigning black children to poor schools, I would happily agree to provide black schools with twice the money per student of the white schools. They could set standards as they chose, choose such courses as they chose, and hire such teachers as they chose. I do not see how this could be called mistreatment.
It could, however, be called “multiculturalism.”
One hears much chatter about “diversity” and its never-explained virtues. But I note that those who most promote it least practice it. How many professors at Harvard bus their own progeny to deep black schools in downtown Boston? Do congressmen in Washington send their budding gifts to eternity to schools in, say, Anacostia? Any city has large regions of almost pure diversity to which these rich white kids might be consigned, and I promise that they would learn a great deal from it. Almost instantly. Oh yes. Do we have any takers?
Let me have my culture, and I will let you have yours. I do not question your right to teach your children as you think best. Do not question my equal right. In fact, whatever your culture, if you want to attend the schools of my children, I will require no more than minimal criminality, civilized comportment, and academic compatibility. Welcome, whatever your color. If you are, say, Chinese, and want to maintain your Chineseness at home, or want egg rolls served in the school cafeteria, or want Chinese taught along with French and Spanish, I say, “Great.” We can do this. When diversity means learning something instead of screwing up the schools, sign me on. But it usually doesn’t.
One thing seems certain: You cannot have in the schools two readily distinguishable groups, one of them being politically sensitive, the two differing utterly in academic intentions and achievement, in behavior and language, without shortchanging one and probably both. Differences in outcome are invidious and invariably engender lower standards. Experience shows that when the races can separate, they do. The benefits desired from forced integration have not materialized. Perhaps it is time to try something else.”
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