Washington
After three decades of tumult and pain, says Pat Todd, she and her fellow Louisville, Ky., residents have reached “the shared commitment that the best education is achieved in racially diverse schools.”
Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will scrutinize the way Louisville demonstrates its commitment, holding oral arguments on whether the city’s voluntary school desegregation plan is constitutional.
If the Supreme Court rules as some think it might, the case of Meredith vs. Jefferson County Board of Education will mark the end of the civil rights era in America by declaring the war over, the cause won, and the nation in no further need of affirmative action, or diversity plans, or other proactive race-based initiatives.
The ideal of a color-blind society, held up to white America by the activists and organizers of the civil rights movement, is now being wielded against them.
“America is becoming an increasingly multiracial, multi-ethnic society. That makes it untenable to have a legal machine sorting people because of skin color,” says Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and a veteran of the Reagan and first Bush administrations. “I think the Supreme Court is going to reject that.”
But troubled veterans of the civil rights movement see vestiges of America’s racist past – segregated neighborhoods, lagging minority test scores, economic disparities and other ills – around us. Diversity plans, they say, offer insurance against backsliding, and promote equality and equanimity in a multihued society.
“It will be a reversal of historic proportions” if the Supreme Court rules against Louisville, says attorney Theodore Shaw, the president and director of the NAACP legal defense fund.
“All that is left of Brown v. Board of Education is voluntary integration,” says Shaw, referring to the landmark 1954 school integration decision.
Todd and her Louisville neighbors took no easy road to get here. In the 1970s, when a federal judge seized control of the city’s segregated schools, hateful white parents rocked school buses carrying terrified black kids to school. The Klan marched. Thousands of white residents fled to segregated suburbs.
“It was a cataclysmic event that split our community,” former Louisville Mayor Harvey Sloan recalls.
For 25 years, the federal court governed Louisville’s schools. In that time, something happened. Like the rest of America, the city changed. For the better.
When the court lifted its order in 2000, white and black residents found they had “enough community growth” to come together around “a shared vision,” Todd recalls.
Louisville, via trial and error, forged its own desegregation plan. Race is just one of several factors that apply to academic placement, but the school district strives to ensure that no student body is less than 15 percent or more than 50 percent black.
Todd, who started in Louisville’s schools as a teacher, now administers the program. Four out of five parents support it, she says, and notes how a candidate who ran for the board of education two years ago, opposing the plan, got trounced.
Today, in Louisville, students tell those who ask that “race is not an issue,” says Todd.
“Do you know why they can say that?” she says. “Because in 1954 and 1975 we made race an issue.” Today, the voluntary desegregation plan recognizes that there is still a way to go, says Todd, as housing patterns lag behind rosier indications of social change.
Shaw agrees. Warmly.
“The notion that we gouge out our eyes in terms of race in a way that prevents us from addressing the accumulated inequality is an argument that is bankrupt intellectually, should be bankrupt legally and I certainly think is bankrupt morally,” he says.
When it comes to the high court, Shaw isn’t optimistic. Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor occasionally joined the court’s four liberals and cast the deciding fifth vote on affirmative action cases. The Meredith decision, with a companion Seattle case, will be the first test for President Bush’s nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
“We’ll find out what the addition of the two new justices means,” Shaw says. There may be “no fifth vote for us” anymore.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Read and comment on his columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington).
