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| Ruby Bridges in 1960 |
Fifty-four years ago yesterday, six year-old Ruby Bridges
played a dramatic role in the desegregation of American schools. Speaking
of this event, Ms. Bridges lamented the continuing de facto segregation of
American schools "How did we integrate schools back in the 1960s? If those
people did it back then, I can't understand why we can't do it today for the
betterment of a community or for a society," she exclaimed.
After having studied the question of school desegregation
for some years, my response would be that there is a vast difference between
opening up schools to students regardless of race and trying to use the law to
determine racial compositions by command and control. Now that we do have over a half century of
experience, we can move beyond politically correct pieties and look at what
actually happened in school districts during the desegregation era. In districts
around the country, command and control desegregation approaches were followed
by three outcomes: the abandonment of urban school public schools,
suburbanization, and/or increases in private school enrollments. School
desegregation was not the only factor in population shifts, since immigration,
particularly of Hispanic populations, increasingly changed the racial/ethnic
make-up of districts in ways that could not be controlled by governmental
authorities. However, as we saw in case after case in the school districts in
the previous chapter, it was simply futile and pretentious to assume that
courts and planners can redistribute populations at will.
I’ll start looking at different districts by beginning with
some of the supposed “success stories” of school desegregation, looking first
at one of the oldest and most celebrated cases, that of Little Rock, Arkansas.
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| Little Rock Central High |
Little
Rock was one of the earliest and most celebrated of American desegregation
cases. It began before governmental attempts to redistribute students, when the
goal was still to simply enable black students to enjoy the legal right to
enroll in schools near their own homes. After the Supreme Court made its
historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, it appeared as if Little Rock
schools would quietly follow the orders of the Supreme Court.
On May
22, 1954, the Little Rock school board announced that it would comply with the
Supreme Court order as soon as the Court established a method and a schedule
for desegregation. A year later, in May 1955, the Little Rock school board
voted to adopt a policy of gradual desegregation to start in 1957. Under the
plan devised by School Superintendent Virgil Blossom, Little Rock would first
integrate the city’s Central High School, and then gradually integrate lower
grades.
The
crisis broke out in 1957, the year that the school board had hoped to manage
the quiet admission of a few African American pupils into white schools.
Seventeen students were selected to be the first to break down the racial
lines, but only nine of them decided to go ahead and enroll. Just before the
beginning of the school year, on August 27, the Little Rock’s Mothers League
sought an injunction to halt integration.
The
injunction was granted by Pulaski County Chancellor Murray Reed, but it was
rejected three days later by Federal District Judge Ronald Davies. The
enrollment of the African American students might still have proceeded in a
relatively peaceful manner if the governor had not used the situation for
political advantage. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus was searching for political
support to win a third term in office.
Governor
Faubus decided that he could appeal to whites eager to preserve segregation. He
declared that he would not be able to maintain order if Central High School
were integrated, and on September 2 he ordered the National Guard to surround
the school. His stand drew public attention to the situation and attracted
white segregationist mobs into the streets. The next day, Judge Davies ordered
that the integration of Central should continue.
The
NAACP, under the local leadership of Daisy Bates, organized the African
American students slated to enroll in Central High to arrive in a group. They
were met by National Guardsmen who turned the students away with bayonets. One
of the students arrived after the others and was confronted by screaming
segregationists.
Television,
which occupied a central place in most American homes by 1957, broadcast the
scenes from Little Rock around the nation. On September 20, Judge Davies ruled
that Governor Faubus had misused the National Guard to prevent integration and
forbade the Guard’s employment in this way. Faubus then replaced the Guard with
local police. The nine black students entered Central High School through a
side door on September 23. As they made their way into the school, an unruly
mob of over one thousand people massed on the streets outside.
President
Dwight D. Eisenhower met with Governor Faubus on September 14. Although the president
believed that the governor had agreed to allow school integration to continue,
it soon became evident that Governor Faubus had no such intention. Alarmed by
the developments in his city, on September 24 Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann
asked President Eisenhower for federal troops to maintain order.
Eisenhower
responded by sending 1,000 troops of the 101st Airborne and then
placing the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control. The troops escorted
the nine students to the school each day. Some Americans were shocked to see
that military protection was needed to guarantee the basic rights of citizens.
Others were disturbed at what they believed was a federal military occupation
of a state, reviving historical memories of the military occupation of the
South during Reconstruction, in the years following the Civil War.
The
struggle continued even after the mobs in front of Central returned to their
homes and jobs. On February 8, 1958, after several angry confrontations with
white students, one of the nine, Minnijean Brown, was suspended for the rest of
the year for dumping a bowl of chili on her white antagonists. Shortly after,
the school board asked the federal court for a delay of the integration order
until the concept of “all deliberate speed” was defined. The delay was granted
in June and then reversed in August. In the meantime, the first African
American student graduated from Central in May.
At the
opening of the 1958-59 school year, Governor Faubus ordered Little Rock public
schools closed, and white students enrolled in private schools or in other
districts. On September 27, 1958, Little Rock voters overwhelmingly rejected
school integration. However, on June 18, 1959 a federal court declared that
Little Rock’s public school closing was unconstitutional. Little Rock schools
opened a month early for the 1959-60 school year and enrolled African American
and white students.
Eventually,
Little Rock calmed down, and for many Central High School became a story of the
success of school integration. After opening its doors to students from all
backgrounds, Central went on to become something of a showcase. In 1982, the
Los Angeles Times proclaimed that Central was the best school in Arkansas, and
that it had proved the critics of integration wrong. With a student population
that was 53% black, it had 14 National Merit semifinalists, and one of its
black students had made the highest score ever recorded in Arkansas on the
National Merit examination. [i]
While there is a great deal of truth to the success story, a
realistic view will acknowledge that the success was not quite as clear and
unblemished as sometimes claimed. In the decades after the Little Rock crisis,
both the school district and Central High increasingly became concentrations of
minority students. When President Bill Clinton made a celebrated visit to
Central High in 1997, the year that the Little Rock school district was finally
removed from court supervision, that formerly all-white school was about
two-thirds black, and was heavily segregated internally
“Despite their overall numbers,” observed The Washington Post during President
Clinton’s visit, “African Americans occupy just 13 percent of the seats in
advanced classes and, in general, they tend to score worse, drop out more
often, and draw more discipline than their white classmates.”[ii] The
national newspaper USA Today,
reporting on continuing controversies over school segregation in Little Rock,
observed in September 2011 that many Little Rock schools remained segregated. USA Today wrote that “achieving racial
balance is becoming more difficult as families leave the suburbs that supply
white students to majority-black neighborhoods.”
The newspaper quoted U.S. District Judge Brian Miller as
saying that schools with minority students were plagued by low achievement and
discipline problems.[iii] In
the 2012-2013 school year, 66% of all the students in the Little Rock School
District were black. More than two-thirds of Little Rock students were below
the poverty level, as measured by free and reduced lunch eligibility.[iv]
After the heroic struggles of black citizens to integrate
Central in the 1950s, the most satisfying conclusion would be one of
unqualified triumph. In a world that rarely follows the plots of good stories,
though, the evaluation of events in Little Rock must be more measured. Simply
striking down the barriers forbidding black students from enrolling in a local
school did give them greater access to educational opportunities. This did not
destroy Central as an educational institution, but it also did not create ideal
racial balances in the school or eliminate substantial segregation at the
classroom level.
Did the desegregating school districts that followed Little
Rock, and which generally aimed at explicitly engineering racial balances, meet
with better outcomes? Over the next few days, I’ll look some of the supposed “success
stories” that followed Little Rock.
[i]Rone Tempest, “Troubled
Arkansas School Becomes Best in State,” Los Angeles Times, February 28,
1982, 1.
[ii] Peter Baker, “40 Years
Later, 9 Are Welcomed,” Washington Post, September 26, 1997, A1+.
Quotation taken from p. A9.
[iii]USA Today. “Little Rock Desegregation Plans Go Back to Court,” USA Today, September 18, 2011, accessed
December 12, 2013, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-09-18/little-rock-desegregation/50455078/1.
[iv] Richard D. Kahlenberg. A
Report to the Little Rock School District on Using Student Socioeconomic Status
in the Inter-district Remedy for Little Rock School District v. Pulaski
County Special School District. August 9, 2013.
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