Wellington Webb, take a bow. You sided with hope rather than fear during your first successful run for Denver mayor, and state birth records have just vindicated your vision.
Coloradans don’t need to be force- fed integration, Webb suggested when he came out against court-ordered school busing in 1991. Over time, they’ll choose it on their own.
Evidently so. “The metro area’s black population has become integrated in neighborhoods throughout Denver and Arapahoe County,” The Denver Post’s Burt Hubbard reported Sunday. “Not a single neighborhood in Denver has more than 50 percent of its births to African-Americans.”
For that matter, “the entire metro area is becoming more integrated.”
Talk about momentous news. Back when many of us were growing up, such residential integration seemed a pipe dream. Even as recently as 20 years ago, civil-rights activists were pushing schemes in many cities for metrowide school busing as well as aggressive interventions in the housing market to prod more people of different ethnic groups to mix.
Webb bucked the trend in Denver (the busing order was actually lifted in 1995). He sensed that middle-class families of all races would spurn the city so long as they had no control, for example, over the choice of schools for their kids. “We’re living in different times,” he said to those wedded to the pessimism of the past.
We were living, it turned out, in an era that so transformed America that voters would soon elect a black man president.
And the lesson? Social engineering rarely jump-starts progress. But freedom often does.
Once housing and employment barriers fell, it was only a matter of time (and income, to be sure) before minorities began to disperse throughout the larger community — and whites themselves began choosing to move back into town.
Not all is bliss on the integration front, of course. For example, many immigrants gravitate to the same neighborhoods (and therefore schools) for cultural and economic reasons. And many urban centers lag Denver in interracial neighborhoods.
Yet every now and then it’s worth savoring the good news rather than dwelling on the bad. As the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.N. ambassador under President Reagan, once quipped, “We must learn to bear the truth about our society, no matter how pleasant it may be.”
• • •
From the White House press office, April 1, 2009:
“President Barack Obama announced today that Ron Gettelfinger, head of the United Auto Workers since 2002, would be stepping down from his post, effective immediately. ‘When we forced General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner to resign, we sent a message to management and creditors,’ the president said. ‘We think we need to send a message to the UAW, too.’
” ‘While we have no desire to run a union,’ the president explained, ‘we cannot, we must not, and we will not let the UAW simply vanish while we continue to excuse poor decisions. We appreciate the painful concessions the union has already made. But after careful analysis, we have determined that it has not been willing to go nearly far enough to warrant the investments it expects the government to make in GM and Chrysler.’ ”
White House insiders said the president was irked to learn of a speech in which Gettelfinger derided “the cartoon version of the domestic auto industry” in which “the UAW has sat with its head in the sand while our employers faced financial disaster.”
“Enough with the excuses,” the president reportedly barked. “I want these union leaders to understand that just because we’ve adopted their legislative agenda doesn’t mean we’re going to empty the Treasury on their behalf.”
Happy April Fool’s Day!
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com
