Why Didn't School Desegregation Work? The Case of Milwaukee

For the past couple of days, I've been looking at the question of why many of today's schools remain racially and ethnically identifiable. The dominant view among academics and activists is that the United States was on its way to creating racially desegregated schools and achieving greater educational equality during the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to this view, aggressive governmental efforts at the redistribution of students and resources did not achieve their goals only because policy makers lost the will to push these efforts.

I don't think the actual history of school desegregation supports that dominant interpretation. Instead, I think school desegregation largely failed precisely because it was a coercive, top-down attempt at social engineering.  I began looking at this issue by tracing the history of school desegregation in two highly influential districts, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina. Both of these have been widely presented as "success stories," although I think the facts belie such a presentation. Today, I'll look at another district, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin^[i]

 When the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision, citizens of Wisconsin generally regarded the Court’s action favorably, but thought that it concerned other places. Wisconsin’s laws, like those of several other northern states and in contrast to the laws of the south, prohibited segregated schooling. Several of Milwaukee’s schools were about half black and half white, and the city’s free transfer system made it possible for black children to enroll in predominantly white schools.^[ii]

During the 1950s, a boom in manufacturing drew black Americans from the South to Milwaukee at a rapid pace. Milwaukee’s black population grew much faster than that of many other northern cities, including Chicago and Detroit. The recent migrants flowed into the center of the city, creating rapidly expanding black neighborhoods with residents of much more limited educational backgrounds than those of earlier black and white citizens.

In order to address the needs of newly arrived children with limited academic skills, Milwaukee schools in the late 1950s developed programs of compensatory education. These programs tended to separate the southern-origin black students from others precisely because compensatory education was intended to address the special requirements of the migrants. School segregation, then, came from diverse educational needs, as well as from segregated housing and various forms of discrimination.

As Milwaukee’s black population grew within the city center, so did the number of public schools with mainly black citizens. While there had been only seven predominantly black schools in 1950, there were an estimated twenty-three by 1964.^[iii] In the decade after Brown as the demand grew for schools that were truly integrated, and not simply open to enrollment without racial discrimination, many black citizens began to see the increasing number of mainly black schools as evidence of an educational ghetto.

When inner-city schools became over-crowded as a consequence of the rapidly increasing black population, the Milwaukee school board bused students from the crowded schools to other less-crowded schools, but it maintained a practice known as “intact busing.” This meant that bused black students formed separate classrooms within white schools, a phenomenon that, in retrospect, ironically mirrored later decades’ white magnet classes within black schools.

Opponents of racially identifiable schools joined together in the early 1960s under the leadership of civil rights attorney and NAACP president Lloyd Barbee. Barbee and his followers demanded that the school district place desegregation at the top of its agenda, integrate the intact busing students, and develop a comprehensive desegregation plan. When the school board delayed, the NAACP and its associates turned to protests and legal action.

During the mid-1960s, activists joined together to form the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC), demanding integration by marching and boycotting segregated black schools. Lloyd Barbee, the chairman of MUSIC and by now elected a state legislator, also acted as attorney in the desegregation case of Amos v. Board, filed in 1965 and supported in part by funds from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Long delayed by school board maneuvering, the case finally went to trial in September 197

While the case made its way through the court, there were efforts to resolve the situation by legislative means. Democratic Assemblyman Dennis J. Conta proposed, in the spring of 1975, that the state legislature merge suburban and city schools into a single school district. The mainly white suburban districts of Whitefish Bay and Shorewood, just north of the city, would be joined together with Milwaukee. At the high school level, this would make possible transfers among Milwaukee’s Lincoln High School (94 percent black), Milwaukee’s Riverside (61 percent black), Shorewood High (98 percent white), and Whitefish Bay High (99 percent white).

Assemblyman Conta proposed to use financial incentives to get the white schools to take minority students, and to cap transfer students at 20 percent of each student body in order to avoid white flight.^[iv] This recognition of the need to reconcile the divergent interests and motivations of different demographic groups held out some possibility of successful, if limited, desegregation. Conta’s attempt to move desegregation from the federal court to the legislature received insufficient support from his fellow legislators, though, and this attempt at self-imposed metropolitan desegregation failed.

In January 1976, Federal Judge John Reynolds ruled that Milwaukee schools were segregated and that the segregation had been intentionally established by the school board. The judge decreed that black enrollments needed to be driven down between 25 to 45 percent in one third of Milwaukee’s schools during the 1975-76 school year and to go down by a similar proportion in the following two years. There was indeed substantial basis to the declaration that the schools in Milwaukee were racially segregated. In 158 schools, over 100 were made up of more than 90 percent of a single race.^[v]

Judge Reynolds’ demand was mathematically implausible, though. The proportion of black students in the system had been increasing steadily, from 21 percent of students in the district when the suit began, to 34 percent by the time of the decision. Projections indicated that black students would make up 50 percent of those in the district by 1980.^[vi]  The judge does not seem to have given serious consideration to the problem of making black enrollments at specific schools go down rapidly when black enrollments overall were rising at such a rate, or to the possibility that his own decision might speed up the shrinking of white enrollments.

 Following a second desegregation trial in 1978, the Milwaukee school board began to make serious efforts at desegregation. The school system as a whole did reach the predicted half-white, half-black composition in the early 1980s. This was largely due to the disappearance of whites from the city’s public school system, though, so it did not bode well for future plans to distribute black and white students.

 Although Assemblyman Conta’s attempt at metropolitan transfers failed, the state of Wisconsin did enact legislation to promote voluntary urban-suburban desegregation throughout the state. Adopted in 1976, Wisconsin Chapter 220 law provided extra funding to white suburban schools that would accept black students from majority black districts. This program has met with some criticism because it has been extremely expensive and, while making it possible for some individual black students to have a wider range of educational choices, it has tended to funnel money into already well-heeled schools.

For Milwaukee, with the largest black population in the state, the program also did not bring about any kind of desegregation. Even with Milwaukee’s Chapter 220 inter-district transfers, only 17 percent of Milwaukee’s public school students were white in the 2004 school year. Black students, at sixty percent, made up the majority. Hispanics, at 18 percent, were slightly more numerous than whites.

Schools are generally judged to be desegregated if relevant racial or ethnic groups are within plus or minus fifteen percent of their representation as a whole in the district. For Milwaukee, this means that when Judge Reynolds made his 1976 decision, any desegregated school would have been a majority white school, but at least one in five of its students would have been black. By 2004, though, a Milwaukee school could be considered “desegregated” if only three percent of its students were white. These are the paradoxical mathematics of racial redistribution.

 As in other districts with large minority populations around the country, "diversity" came to mean more possibilities of contact between black students and the growing Hispanic population, since most of the whites had settled in the suburban fringe. In 2012-2013, Milwaukee public school students were 55.4% black, 24.0% Hispanic, and 13.9% white. Another 5.5% of students were Asian. A number of schools had almost no white students.

Carver Academy Elementary School, for example, was 91.4% black in 2012-2013. Congress Elementary was 94.4% black. Highmount Elementary was 90.1% black. Lincoln Middle School was 65.4% black and 25.3% Hispanic. The small Southeastern Middle School had only black students. Wedgewood Middle School was 91.9% black. James Madison High School was 93.0% black. Vincent High was 91.1% black.^[vii]

By 2013, the official literature on the Chapter 220 inter-district transfer described the program as aimed at giving minority students in the North, Central, and South Regions of Milwaukee the opportunity "to attend schools in suburban areas that are predominantly non-minority (white)."  This would benefit only a limited number of individual minority students and was not intended to break down district segregation. The MPS literature warned potential applicants that "seats are limited in the Chapter 220 Program and no student is guaranteed a seat."^[viii]

 The desirability of getting out of central Milwaukee and to the suburbs was clear. A planning document prepared by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment &Training Institute in 2009 reported that "[i]n the 2008-2009 school year, 92% of MPS students attended a school where over half of the children were poor [bold in original] (as measured by eligibility for free lunch, or family income below 130% of poverty). Yet, only 4% of suburban and outer ring public school students in the four-county area were in school buildings where over half of the children were poor."^[ix]

Academic results reflected the concentration of minority students and socioeconomic disadvantage within Milwaukee. The 2009 NAEP results showed that Milwaukee students scored substantially below others in the state, in other large cities, and across the nation. These results also showed that racial achievement gaps remained. Only 28% of black Milwaukee 8th graders scored at or above the basic level in mathematics, compared to 61% of whites and 43% of Hispanics. In reading, 41% of Milwaukee black 8th graders scored at or above the basic level, compared to 78% of whites and 62% of Hispanics.

Within each racial/ethnic group Milwaukee 8th graders were less likely to be at or above the basic level than their peers in the rest of the state, in big cities throughout the country, or in national public schools.^[x] Going to school in Milwaukee, rather than outside of it, greatly increased the probability that schoolmates would be low achievers. The more minority students in the classroom, the lower the general level of achievement, and the general level of achievement would be particularly low in a minority concentration classroom inside Milwaukee.

Individual minority families, then, had a genuine interest in getting to schools out in the suburbs. The Chapter 220 transfers, therefore, could provide good options in the educational marketplace for them. By the same token, though, families in the suburbs had a genuine interest in minimizing the flow of students out of the central city. As a consequence, the voluntary transfers could make greater educational opportunities to some, but they could not erase racial and socioeconomic inequalities.

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^[i] Much of the account of the Wisconsin case is drawn from Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

^[ii]Ibid., 36-39.

^[iii]Ibid., 149.

^[iv] Paul Delaney, “Wisconsin Ponders a Plan for State to Legislate Desegregation of Four Schools in Milwaukee and Suburbs,” New York Times, April 13, 1975, 22.

^[v] Dougherty, More Than One Struggle, 153.

^[vi] Ibid.

[vii]Wisconsin Information System for Education, Data Dashboard, accessed October 24, 2013, http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp.

[viii]Milwaukee Public Schools. Suburban School Opportunities: Chapter 220 Program for Milwaukee Students for Fall 2013. (Milwaukee: Office of Family Services, February 2013), 1.

[ix] University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute. Socio-Economic Analysis of Issues Facing Milwaukee Public School Students and Their Families.(Milwaukee: Employment & Training Institute: 2013), 21.

[x]MPS NAEP Data, Mathematics; MPS NAEP Data, Reading, the Milwaukee Public Schools website, accessed October 25, 2013, http://mpsportal.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/portal/server.pt/comm/assessment/415/assessment/38462.

Why Didn't School Desegregation Work? The Case of Charlotte-Meckenburg

After well over a half-century of efforts to desegregate American schools, many schools and even school districts continue to be concentrations of racial and ethnic minority students. Why is this? In academic and activist circles, the common answer is the “failure of will” explanation. This holds that we would have created schools that were not identifiable by race or ethnicity if only the courts and the federal government had continued to pursue the aggressive policies of coercive student redistribution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I think, though, that if we look at what actually happened in school districts over the decades, it becomes obvious that top-down programs of forcing social change ran counter to deeply ingrained social patterns that did not involve only prejudice, but also rational self-interest.

Yesterday, I started looking at what happened in desegregating districts with a brief history of one of the most celebrated cases, Little Rock. Today, I’ll continue this by examining another historically important district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, which, like Little Rock, is often presented as one of the success stories of school desegregation.

Charlotte, North Carolina

               Charlotte offers an important and interesting case for any survey of desegregating school districts. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system was historically significant because it began the national move to judicially mandated busing as a means of achieving desegregation. The district is even more worthy of a brief examination, though, because Charlotte acquired the reputation as “The City that Made It Work,” and it was held up as a model for efforts at student redistribution throughout the nation.^[i]

               If, in fact, Charlotte was as successful as often suggested, we should look carefully at it and see why. Even if this were a case with a relatively positive outcome, though, it would be wise to be skeptical of claims that these outcomes could be repeated in other locations. Good public policy does not assume that exceptions can become the general rule.

               The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system dates back to 1959, when the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, which contains it, voted to merge their two school systems. The system made some attempts to desegregate following Brown, and some black students did attend predominantly white schools in the region in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The schools were still largely segregated by race by the mid-1960s, though.

                In 1965, Darius and Vera Swann sued the school district because their son, James, was not allowed to attend the school nearest his home, which was an all-white school. The Swanns, then, only wanted to send their child to a school in their own neighborhood. Ironically, their legal case would help to send hundreds of thousands of students away from their own neighborhood schools.              

               The Swann case went before Federal District Judge James B. McMillan. In April 1969, Judge McMillan issued his decision, arguing that neighborhood schools were discriminatory because black residents lived mainly in a single section of the city. Judge McMillan maintained that “as a group Negro students score quite low on achievement tests (the most objective method now in use for measuring educational achievement)”^[ii] as a consequence of attending all-black schools. The judge ordered the district to employ all means of desegregating, including busing.

               The school board appealed Judge McMillan’s ruling. The case reached the Supreme Court, and two years later the high court upheld the decision. The result was an explosion of similar desegregation plans. The 1971 school year opened with new plans for assigning students by race in over 100 school districts.^[iii]

               Judge McMillan, the plaintiffs, and the school board came to agreement on a plan of action in 1974. The judge declared himself satisfied and removed the school from direct supervision, although the school board would have to continue to follow the 1974 plan. One of the key features of Charlotte’s program was the pairing of elementary schools. A school in a majority white neighborhood would be paired with a school in a majority black neighborhood and enough students would be transported from each to create racial balances.

               The desired racial mixture could frequently not be created with just two schools, so students were drawn from other locations, known as “satellites.” Most of the students who came from the satellites were black. This placed greater inconvenience on black students than on white, but most involved parties were convinced that sending white children into mostly low-income, black neighborhoods, would cause whites to leave the public schools.^[iv]

From the beginning, then, those in the Charlotte- Mecklenburg district carrying out school desegregation did recognize the possibility of white flight, and they made serious efforts to avoid it. The pairing strategy was not used at the junior high or high school levels. The higher grades had larger enrollments, so they drew on larger numbers of satellites. Again, these mainly came from black neighborhoods.

               There was one important exception to the placement of satellites in black neighborhoods, though. White students in the well-to-do neighborhood of Eastover were sent into the formerly black West Charlotte. To make this palatable to whites, school authorities had to put new educational programs in West Charlotte. The district also re-drew the boundaries of West Charlotte so that these would include more middle class black families and exclude many of the poor black families previously within the area.

               Unlike many of the other cases in this chapter, Charlotte did not lose its white students. The changes in the district’s overall make-up during the years of aggressive desegregation were comparatively small. In the 1974-75 school year, the system was 34% black. By 2001-2002, it was 42% black. Charlotte continued to retain its racial diversity during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

               According to the district’s statistics, in the 2012-2013 school year blacks still made up 42% of the overall population. Whites had indeed declined as a proportion, from just under 50% of the school population to 32%, while Hispanic and Asian representation had grown to 18% and 5%, respectively. However, changes in student make-up were gradual, and small enough to be attributed almost entirely to demographic shifts having nothing to do with the schools.

               At first glance, then, Charlotte does look like the rare success story in school desegregation. It managed to put students of different races together in its schools. It did not cause whites to flee the system. There was no downward spiral in the quality of education in the district. A closer look, though, suggests that Charlotte does bear out the economic model of schooling that we described in the previous chapter.

               White families did not leave the system, at least in part, because the district substituted segregated classrooms for segregated schools. Desegregation expert Roslyn Mickelson observed that “The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system instituted widespread curricular tracking at the secondary level at about the same time that it began to comply with the Supreme Court’s Swann orders to desegregate. Since the mid-1970s, the top tracks—those with the best teachers and most challenging curricula and pedagogy—have been overwhelmingly white while the lowest tracks have remained disproportionately black.”^[v]

               At the end of the 1970s, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) denied the school district a major grant on the grounds of excessive within-school segregation. By the early 1980s, Charlotte’s schools appeared to have student bodies that were highly mixed in race. Beneath this appearance, though, a 1981-82 survey of tracking in English classes showed that “in this district acclaimed for its desegregation successes, relatively few black students experienced a genuinely desegregated education, even in its showcase high school.”^[vi]

               Even with the segregation inside of schools, the institutions themselves tended to move slowly toward more racial separation. In a study of Charlotte schools from 1991 to 1993, the Charlotte League of Women voters concluded, “the system appears to be continuing to drift toward blacker and whiter schools. Across the three year period, with few exceptions, the whitest schools got whiter and the blackest schools got blacker, whether they were elementary, middle, or high schools.”^[vii]

               At the beginning of the 1990s, the district largely replaced busing with a magnet school program as a strategy for achieving desegregation. Magnet school enrollments would be kept at 40% black and 60% white. This meant that whites, with (as we will see) much higher achievement levels than blacks, were limited in their access to magnet schools. White parents therefore sued the district, calling for unitary status and an end to race-conscious enrollment policies.

               Nearly thirty years after the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system had made desegregation history, Judge Robert Potter ruled in September 1999 that the system had achieved desegregation, and he decreed that race could no longer be considered in school assignments.^[viii] With the end of judicial control, “the previous twenty year drift toward re-segregation accelerated markedly.”^[ix] Students began to return to schools in their own neighborhoods, which were still largely black or white.

               In 2009, looking back on the decade since the end of court-ordered desegregation, The Charlotte Observer noted that “in the ensuing decade, suburban schools became more numerous, more crowded, and generally remained higher performing. Last year about two-thirds of CMS’s white students attended majority white schools in the suburbs. Center-city schools, including many magnets, have seen white and middle-class students dwindle. About two-thirds of the black and Hispanic students who make up CMS’s majority attended schools where less than 25 percent of students are white.”^[x]

               On the North Carolina Writing Assessment test for 2004, among CMS seventh graders, 62.3% of whites were in the top two levels, compared to 27.5% of black students. On the tenth grade portion of this test, 73.6% of whites and 41.8% of blacks were in the top two levels. On the North Carolina high school comprehensive test for reading in 2004, 82.2% of whites and 43.9% of blacks were in the top two levels. On the math test, the two top levels contained 84.8% of whites and 45.9% of blacks.^[xi]

               The black-white achievement gap had been given by Judge McMillan as his reason for ordering desegregation by any possible means. The judge's mandate did not eliminate this gap. It continued to exist after desegregation had been in effect for nearly a third of a century.

Relatively speaking, then, Charlotte-Mecklenburg did indeed have one of the most successful desegregation histories. The redistribution of students did not destroy the system. But neither did it end inequality in educational outcomes.  For a time, at least, it created the illusion of a desegregated district by replacing segregated schools with segregated classrooms.

               The only way families of children with relatively strong academic performance were willing to place their children into schools filled with children of relatively weak academic performance was through in-school racially segregated classrooms. Yet even then, like a centralized economic authority suppressing market forces, the authorities would have to use continual coercion to suppress individual choices. As soon as the judiciary removed itself from the school system, the schools began to re-segregate almost immediately and the re-segregation by neighborhoods continued over the years that followed.

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^[i] On the “lavish praise” heaped on the Charlotte school system after desegregation, see Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom For Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

^[ii] Quoted in Ibid., 60.

^[iii]Ibid., 62.

^[iv]Ibid., 63.

^[v] Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, “White Privilege in a Desegregating School System: The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Thirty Years After Swann,” in The End of Desegregation?eds. Stephen J. Caldas and Carl L. Bankston III (New York: Nova Science Publications, 2003) 97-119.

^[vi] Smith, Boom for Whom?, 83.

^[vii]Quoted in Alison Moranta, “Desegregation at Risk,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, eds. Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation (New York: New Press, 1996), 195.

^[viii] Sue Anne Presley, “Charlotte Schools are Scrambling,” Washington Post, November 8, 1999, A3.

^[ix] Smith, Boom for Whom?, 6.

[x] Ann Doss Helms, “Schools Ruling Led to a Decade of Change – End of Race-Based Assignment Launched Ripples Whose Merit is Still Debated, and Fresh Calls for Vision,” The Charlotte Observer, September 10, 2009, B1.

^[xi] Test results are taken from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools website, accessed November 8, 2013, http://www.cms.k12.nc.us/departments/instrAccountability/schoolPerformance.asp.

 

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.

Little Rock, Arkansas

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 101^st 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.

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^[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.

Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals

The recent controversy over Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech at Yale reminded me of a review I published back in 2011 of Paul Berman's book The Flight of the Intellectuals. I'm posting the review here:

Two criticisms lie at the heart of Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals. First, Berman criticizes the work of prominent Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan. Second, he criticizes the generally favorable reception of Ramadan by the non-Western press. Throughout the book, Berman tends to move back and forth between these two issues. He clearly regards Ramadan as an attractive but troubling figure. Ramadan, according to Berman, rose to public prominence in 1993 during controversy over the performance in Geneva of a play about the Prophet Mohammad written by Voltaire. Since then, Berman maintains, Ramadan has managed to present himself as a moderate reformer to non-Muslims while retaining support among many Muslims from a range of ideological perspectives. Berman’s main objection to Ramadan is that the philosopher maintains a highly flexible program, supporting moderation or radicalism depending on the audience. Berman sees the central event in the reception of Ramadan by non-Muslim intellectuals as an article by Ian Buruma, published in the February 4, 2007, issue of The New York Times Magazine. 

The British-Dutch author Buruma had recently published a book on the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic radical incensed by a short film Van Gogh had made about the treatment of women in Islam. Despite this background, Buruma treated Ramadan too favorably in the magazine article, in Berman’s view. The magazine did present Ramadan as a complex individual, combining a leftist perspective on issues such as globalization with social conservatism. Still, Buruma found Ramadan to be a sympathetic and moderate spokesman for Islam. Berman asks whether Ramadan is really a moderate, though. If he is not, then Berman wants to consider why Buruma and other intellectuals are so eager to see the Swiss-Egyptian thinker in this way.

The investigation into Ramadan’s supposed moderation leads Berman to Ramadan’s maternal grandfather, Ḥasan al-Bannā՚. He was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization long at odds with the Egyptian government and one of the most influential groups in the rise of Islam as a modern social movement. Ramadan wrote his doctoral dissertation and a later book on the reformism of al-Bannā՚. In these works, he portrays his grandfather as a champion of anticolonialism and as the humane, visionary leader of a social-reform movement. Ramadan also treats other leading figures of the Muslim Brotherhood, most notably Sayyid Qụtb, a Muslim writer who became an intellectual inspiration for the radicals of al-Qaeda. In Ramadan’s version, Qụtb is also much more moderate than generally portrayed and has been misinterpreted by Osama bin Laden and his followers.

Berman argues that Ramadan’s presentation of al-Bannā՚ and other prominent Muslim leaders is inaccurate and plays to European and American wishes for a moderate Islam. Berman points out actions and statements made by al-Bannā՚ that were utterly inconsistent with Western ideas of liberal democracy and that many of the influences on Ramadan, including al-Bannā՚, have held political values and ideals dramatically at variance with those generally accepted in North America and Europe. In questioning the implications of Ramadan’s intellectual heritage, Berman considers the connections between al-Bannā՚ and Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini. This last individual opposed Jewish settlement in Palestine, as well as British colonial policy in the area, and allied himself with Nazi Germany. This alliance was not simply tactical, but shared an anti-Jewish ideology with the Nazis. Al-Husseini collaborated in forming troops under the Nazis and in encouraging the mass killing of Jews.

Even apart from a misleading reinterpretation of his own intellectual background, Ramadan has offered questionable views on current international events according to Berman. In his responses to allegations of the mistreatment of women and the denial of women’s rights under Islamic law he has failed to take any definite moral positions. His criticisms of the defenders of Israel have unreasonably dismissed anti-Jewish prejudices, in Berman’s view, and he has been too ready to accuse those defenders of raising anti-Judaism as a false issue. Ramadan’s views of Israel are especially troubling to the author. These views are almost uniformly negative and they tend to lay all responsibility for problems of terrorism and violence in the region at Israel’s door. Ramadan does express disapproval of Palestinian bombings and acts of violence. However, he describes these types of actions as those of an oppressed people who have no other way to strike back at their oppressor. Thus, even when Palestinians kill Israeli civilians the killings have ultimately been produced by Israeli state terror.

The flight referred to in the title of the book is one from the clear position on terrorism of intellectuals in an earlier time. When the Iranian religious authorities issued a death sentence against author Salman Rushdie, Western intellectuals largely rallied to Rushdie’s defense, according to Berman. Later, however, the support for Ramadan by Buruma and others represents desperate efforts to come to terms with radical Islam by looking for someone who can present radical ideas in a mild and moderate form. Berman contrasts the support for Ramadan with the hostility of many intellectuals for the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is in some respects a version of Rushdie. Hirsi Ali, the daughter of a prominent Somali political opposition leader, fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to avoid being forced into an arranged marriage. There, she became a prominent feminist and an outspoken critic of Islam and of the treatment of women within Muslim cultures. Hirsi Ali began receiving death threats for her statements of her views. She worked with Dutch filmmaker Van Gogh on the controversial film Submission, which condemned what Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh saw as the oppressed status of women within Islam.

On November 2, 2004, the Moroccan-Dutch Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Van Gogh and stuck a letter to the filmmaker’s body with a knife. The letter was addressed to Hirsi Ali and threatened her and other supposed enemies of Islam. Since then, Hirsi Ali has had to live under constant guard. Her situation became worse when the Dutch government threatened to take away her citizenship on the grounds that she had given false information when she first applied for asylum. Although she retained her Dutch passport, she left the country for the United States.

Despite Buruma’s book on the Van Gogh assassination, Buruma has been consistently unsympathetic toward Hirsi Ali, even while he has portrayed Ramadan in a highly favorable light. Buruma’s fellow intellectual, the political writer Timothy Garton Ash, joined Buruma in a series of disparaging statements about the Somali-born feminist. In Berman’s view, the persecution of Hirsi Ali has been a clear case of a public figure threatened with death for exercising the right to freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Therefore, Berman believes that all supporters of liberal democratic values should support her, whether they agree with her views on Islam and feminism or not. He argues that modern Western intellectuals have fled to a relativistic multiculturalism.

In accepting the differences of cultural and religious groups, writers such as Buruma have concluded that they must not judge other cultures in universal moral terms. Individuals such as Ramadan, who offer the appearance of moderation, give Buruma and his colleagues a way of avoiding the aspects of Islam that may contradict liberal democracy. Hirsi Ali, on the other hand, presents them with a stark choice: They can either support her and the right to free speech or they can oppose her and abandon liberal democratic values. They avoid doing this, in Berman’s opinion, by describing Hirsi Ali as too strident or too outspoken about her own ideas. In this way, the supposed enemy of Islam becomes the opponent of the intellectuals who are reluctant to criticize Islam.

The Flight of the Intellectuals is clearly a polarizing book and one that will evoke both strong agreement and intense disagreement from readers. This response may depend largely on the preexisting views of readers on relations among cultures and world religions. The book sometimes comes across as a ramble, moving from meditations on Ramadan to more general thoughts on the roots of Islamic radicalism to criticisms of the responses of Western intellectuals. It therefore often falls short of a completely coherent organization or a clear line of argument. In his objections to Ramadan, Berman may obscure the very real differences between this philosopher and more radical advocates of a militant Islam. If there are genuine distinctions between Ramadan and exponents of European and American liberal democracy, there are also distinctions between Ramadan and various other Muslim thinkers and activists. Ramadan’s ambiguity is not necessarily a result of being two-faced or of showing different sides of himself to different audiences but could be the consequence of attempts to tread carefully through sensitive and complicated issues. Readers may also wonder at times whether Berman makes too much out of the single 2007 article by Buruma and a few other published pieces, since in several places Berman also refers to other intellectuals who have been quite critical of Ramadan. Even if the reader accepts the argument that Buruma has let his own reason become tainted by excessive multiculturalism, it does not necessarily follow that this represents a more general flight from liberal democratic principles by twenty-first century writers and thinkers.

While Berman should be read critically, he makes valuable contributions. He brings the work of Ramadan, an influential thinker about the direction of Islam and about the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, to wide public attention. He raises the general question of the problematic relation between a religiously inspired view of human society and secular political values, as well as the more specific question about the consistency between modern Islam as it is practiced and liberal democratic values. Perhaps most important, he causes the reader to ask whether the eagerness to be open and tolerant toward religions and cultures may have led to acceptance of intolerance and persecution. The failure of many intellectuals to protest the persecution of Hirsi Ali and to defend her right to free speech may strike readers as one of Berman’s most significant points.