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A Different View on School Desegregation
by Edward Whitfield
www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-whitfield
Posted August 13, 2007
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.
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