The initial reaction in most liberal circles about the recent Supreme Court decision on so-called voluntary desegregation plans does not surprise me. The prevailing view is that it represents another setback to progress from a reactionary court. What you will not hear much of is the reaction from grassroots black communities, black youth or from older black folks who were educated in public schools before the period of forced busing and comprehensive court-ordered desegregation/ integration plans. You will not be reminded of the fact that there have been few, if any, community-based struggles by young blacks to get more white children into their classrooms. You will not be reminded that there was an outcry from many black communities when school integration closed most of their schools, laid off large numbers of black teachers and almost all black administrators, and decreased many of the opportunities for participation in school activities for black children, all in the name of progress.
Don't get me wrong. I was one of those children who participated in the integration of public schools in the South. But a narrative about my family's experience might help set the stage for understanding my view now, particularly given the approaching celebrations around the 50th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School in my hometown in 1957.
There were four children in my family -- all of whom might have participated in integrating the public schools in Little Rock, Ark. My oldest brother, Robert, was in the class of 1958 -- the same class as Ernest Green, the first black graduate from Little Rock Central High School. Green's story has been told repeatedly and made into movies and books. My oldest brother knew Green and was himself a good student, but chose not to make the groundbreaking group the Little Rock 10. He went instead to the newly opened Horace Mann High School, which had been built to replace Dunbar High School, which my mother and father attended. The old Dunbar High School became a junior high school, which I attended to complete my nine years of schooling in Little Rock's black schools before I went to Central High in 1964.
My sister Winifred, next in age to my oldest brother, had seen the lynch mobs on TV and heard them chanting "two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate." She had seen the hate on the faces of the segregationists and their determination not to have their way of life challenged by "uppity Negroes," and she knew from this that she "had to go to that school (Central)" when she was old enough a few years later. She told me recently that she had to prove to them that she was just as good as they were. I have said of her that she is the only person that I know who was recruited to a high school by a lynch mob.
My next brother, Richard, chose not to go to Central, instead following Robert to Horace Mann. I came along last and followed my sister. All of us graduated and went to college; two of us completed advanced degrees, the other two left college to pursue other interests. All of us became successful to outstanding by any normal measure. The decisions about which high school to attend were made within my home, by my parents and the children involved. There was never any rancor or recrimination about the choices. Each of us was part of a process to choose the path that seemed most appropriate. It was clear that success did not hinge on the choice. One could be successful, or fail either way. The particular school was just one piece of the equation, along with questions of personal ambitions, character, motivation, and needs.
For many other people of that period, before massive busing and forced integration plans came to the fore in the early 1970s, there were similar stories of children, their parents and communities deciding what was best for the children and choosing appropriately. I am sure some mistakes were made, but the likelihood that a good choice would be made was much greater when the deliberation and decisions were made by families and communities than later, when such decisions were made by courts, school boards and legislatures. I never did have much trouble with "freedom of choice" plans when they were true to their names and allowed free choice, as the plan did in Little Rock in the late '60s. The assumption that some white liberals and conservatives made then and now was that the choice of all blacks would be to go to school with whites. Not so.
What was important was the fact that the doors needed to be open -- not the notion that once open everyone would or should rush through. To say that not all blacks wanted to go to integrated schools was not to say that they were simply backward or ignorant or self-hating -- although there were some in the black community that fit all those descriptions. What was more true was that a lot of black folks knew that the quality of education was not determined by the newness of books and the shininess of waxed hallways. Education comes from the relationships of teachers and students who are endeavoring to learn. Education comes from students being motivated and nurtured. I would challenge anyone who knows me to suggest that I did not get a good educational foundation in the nine years I spent in segregated schools. And I am in no way unique. My experience was much like most of the blacks I know of that period.
bell hooks, in her book Teaching to Transgress, speaks to this point eloquently when she talks about the black women teachers she had in the segregated schools of Kentucky, where she was initially educated. She says that they were on a mission of liberatory education, although they would not have called it by those terms. They taught her that a life of the mind was possible and desirable. They inspired her. She then contrasts it with her experiences in the integrated schools, where success was determined by conformity and where she lost her love for learning.
I regularly ask older black folks who experienced the schools before the period of massive busing began and I am constantly confirmed in this viewpoint, although most blacks admit not having many opportunities to tell this to the whites they know. One NAACP friend of mine who is high up in their national leadership once told me, "You're right, but you can't say that." I assured them that if I was right, then I could say it, because I would much rather be right than be popular. And I am not worried about making sure I am on the opposite side of these issues with conservatives. I am forced instead to look into the situation itself and try to see what makes sense.
What the Harvard Civil Rights Project and folks like Jonathan Kozol have been saying for years about the resegregation of schools does not make sense to me. Their fundamental argument is that the inherent inequality of black schools was proven by the '54 Brown decision, and that black children can only get a good education if they are in a classroom situation with middle class white children whose parents will fight to assure the quality of the education in those classrooms. What happened here to the "agency" of the black community? What happened to the ability of black parents to look out for the education of their children? Would honest white parents only concern themselves with the education of black children if their children were also in the room? If, indeed, that is the case, might not those parents find ways to look out for their own children at the expense of black children, even in the same room?
I am thoroughly convinced that what is wrong with education -- its tendency to coerce rather than facilitate learning, its tendency to push people toward accepting the status quo and fitting into the existing social order rather than thinking critically and questioning accepted notions -- is wrong for everyone. The implications of these faults of schooling differ depending on one's position in that social order. Real critical thinking skills are seldom effectively taught since they are hard to measure. We need to be looking at how education will help to prepare young people to be meaningful parts of their community's future, but to do this, we have to have some sense of what their community's future is. The "new economic order" just doesn't cut it for me. The gap between the haves and the have-nots cannot keep getting wider while we destroy the planet and anger and alienate most of the people in the world by trying to twist every human relationship into something from which a few powerful people can make ever growing profits. We have got to find -- no, we have got to create a better way. Schooling should play an important role in this, but not simply by virtue of giving diverse groups opportunities to study with and play with each other. The children of slaves and slave masters sometimes played together, but everyone came to know their place. The fact that they played together did not change the social order then, nor will it now, not unless we take up the task of social change consciously.
Young people raised to have self-confidence and a mastery of their environment are capable of building responsible, respectful and respected relationships with all sorts of people with whom they have never had contact. Such children will be able to get along with Chinese or Japanese or Iranian or Polish folks they meet in the world, whether or not they were ever in their classroom.
This whole issue of school diversity is a distraction from a substantive discussion about what type of education would be required to build that level of self-confidence and competency in all of our young people.
Many people might not realize that the young people in Wilmington, NC, whose struggle led to the disturbances that created the Wilmington 10 case in the early '70s were fighting against the closing of their black school and forced integration. Gary Orfield and Jonathan Kozol learned nothing about the needs and aspiration of blacks from that. Maybe they haven't even heard about the yearlong school boycott and independent schooling that developed in Hyde County, NC around the closing of black schools due to integration. They would do well to follow me around and talk to some of the folks they dismiss as incapable of advocating for their own children.
I tire of hearing people talk about the resegregation of schools being a betrayal of the struggle for integrated education that required so much sacrifice by so many. I was one of those who sacrificed a portion of my youth in that effort. I went into it with my eyes open. I had some idea of what I would be gaining and what I would lose, but my choices were not for everyone. I am still involved in fighting for the real values that motivated our community during that period, but I think that those values are not well understood. I think that a good deal of what was intended by the struggle to integrate schools was what my sister Winifred was about. She didn't say that she had to go to that school (for all the hardships that she knew it would mean) in order to get some thing she would not have been able to otherwise get. She didn't endure what she endured to gain access to newer books or some special elective class. No. She went essentially to "show-off;" to "show those people I am just as good as they are."
Perhaps when we look at issues of school reform we could look at what it took for her to develop a strong enough sense of herself to know that she had something to show. Too many of our children lack this, and better balancing schools while ignoring the agency of the black community to advocate and struggle for our own children will not help them get it.
Challenge me, if you will, on my facts or my analysis. I have only spent 40 years thinking about these questions nearly every day, but I am sure there might be things I have not considered. We need to talk about this stuff and get past the well-meaning but often arrogant assumptions that have brought us to where we are.