Fifth Circuit overturns Cleveland School Freedom of Choice plan; resegregation likely

    The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a Freedom of Choice integration (click here for decision) plan for the Cleveland School District that was ordered by U.S. District Judge Glen Davidson last year. I wrote a long post about this last year. This is bad news for Cleveland and bad news for public education in general.
    (Click here for the Bolivar Commercial story).
    (Click here for the Wall Street Journal story).
    The appeals court didn't expressly reject Freedom of Choice as an option, but said that in order for it to be allowed Davidson needed to explain in his opinion how it would help integrate all-black Eastside High School and an all-black jr. high school. Click here to read Davidson's well-reasoned opinion from last year.
    Cleveland currently has two high school districts. One has an all-black high school; the other district has a roughly 50-50 balance between black and white students.
    Well, here's the deal. Davidson is not going to be able to explain how his plan will desegregate Eastside because it won't. His order was designed to allow black students the choice to attend an integrated school or an all-black school while keeping a racial balance that would prevent white flight. His opinion noted that Cleveland was one of only two school districts in the Delta to have a substantial number of white students.
    A consolidated Cleveland Attendance District will be more than 70 percent black right off the bat. The U.S. Justice Department has insisted that there will be no white flight, and that white families are less resistant to sending their children to a mostly black school than they were in the 1960s and '70s. What the Justice Department is leaving out is that many Delta schools successfully integrated all the way through the late 1980s, when the whites just drifted away entirely, often due to mistreatment.
    If the Cleveland schools are consolidated, in 20 years the resulting school will have the same demographics as its sister schools in Clarksdale, Greenville, Greenwood, Leland, Rolling Fork, Yazoo City, Belzoni, and elsewhere. It will have virtually no white students.
    For the past 40 years the courts have pushed the notion that the only form of acceptable integration is perfect integration. So vouchers, ability grouping, or anything else that might bring black and white children together as equals have been forbidden. The courts have even gone so far as to rule that in overwhelmingly black districts two white children can't be grouped together in the same homeroom, because splitting them up prevents the creation of an all-black homeroom.
    For Cleveland, even a slight amount of white flight will tip the balance enough that a few more whites will leave. And after that there is likely to be a mad dash for the door. Bayou Academy, North Sunflower Academy, Indianola Academy, and Deer Creek School are only a short drive away. Washington School, at 35 miles, is probably the best school academically, and one that some will choose.
    Ultimately the question is whether society works to achieve desegregation plans that work on the ground but which are less than perfect, or whether we have to have perfect numerical integration.
    In every other heavily black school district in which the federal government has insisted on perfect integration the result has been white flight and almost total segregation. Cleveland will be no different. And just as Cleveland High will soon look a lot like Greenville or Clarksdale, so will the town itself.

Willie Morris' son, David Rae Morris, to screen rough cut of Yazoo resegregation documentary

    David Rae Morris, son of Willie Morris, is producing a documentary on the integration and resegregation of Yazoo City schools. A rough cut of this documentary will be shown at the Overby Center (Farley Hall) Monday, October 28, at 5:30 p.m. I hope to be able to make it.
    David Morris is essentially taking up the issue of Yazoo City school desegregation where his father left off. In the early 1970s he wrote a long magazine article that was expanded into a book entitled Yazoo: integration in a Deep-Southern town. The book ends with Morris expressing his view that everything was going to be just fine. It didn't end up that way.
    I read Morris' book over Christmas and wrote an Amazon review in January 2013. So rather than rehash the issue I will simply reprint my review, which among other things makes the point that what happened in Yazoo City happened in a number of Mississippi towns; Rolling Fork, Leland, and Clarksdale come to mind. I shared my view on what happened in many of these towns in a blog post in which I criticized efforts of the federal government to resegregate Cleveland's public schools.


My Amazon review:

To Morris' eventual dismay, he got it wrong, but an interesting read, January 7, 2013

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This review is from: Yazoo: integration in a Deep-Southern town (Hardcover)

Willie Morris certainly didn't know it at the time this book - an expansion of a long magazine article - was released, but the subtitle should have read "FAILURE of Integration in a Deep-Southern Town." It would have brought him great sadness and eventually did.

That isn't the way the book leaves off. In fact, Morris completed the book in January 1971 firmly believing that the Yazoo City schools - his home town - had gotten over the "hump" and would successfully integrate. Roughly 150 whites who had fled the public schools at desegregation in January 1970 had returned in September of that year. Morris was confident that whites would continue to return and that the private Manchester Academy would either close or shrink into insignificance.

The Yazoo City integration success was trumpeted by many throughout the 1970s and even the 1980s. But the schools suffered the same fate as many other heavily black public schools that weathered the first wave of white flight. Slowly the whites drifted away, either to private schools or to other school districts. In 1971 the Yazoo City schools remained roughly 40 percent white, even after substantial white flight. Today Yazoo City High School is 99% black.

I purchased the original edition of this book as I got it for a low price used. It was re-released in 2012 with an Afterword by Morris' widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris. It's possible to read most of this Afterword by looking at the Amazon preview, but unless you can get a good deal on a used book it's worth paying extra to have her short Afterword. Morris had first met Prichard when he wrote Yazoo; she was one of two Yazoo City white teachers who volunteered to teach in the formerly all-black school in 1969 under Freedom of Choice. Years later, in 1990, they would marry when Prichard edited a collection of essays that Morris produced for the University of Mississippi Press.

Prichard taught in the Yazoo schools through the 1980s. She sent her children to Yazoo City schools and saw the white enrollment slowly dwindle away. She said Morris was tormented by the fact that he had gotten it so wrong and asks in her Afterword why school integration failed. "What happened?"

The answers are, in part, are actually in Morris' book. He interviews a Yazoo City attorney and former ABA president John Satterfield - an integration opponent - who shared his opinion that the schools would be integrated without violence or incident, but that if the classrooms were fully integrated eventually the school system would be all or almost all black. Satterfield cited the experience of the Washington, D.C., schools, which were desegregated by President Eisenhower and by 1970 were 93 percent black. Satterfield said he saw no basic difference in the character of the people of Washington, D.C. and the people of Yazoo City that would allow full integration to succeed in Yazoo city where it failed with the full support of the federal government.

Morris also has a footnote where he cites claims by others that there are "tipping points," or a certain black percentage that will trigger white flight, citing for example the unpublished Princeton thesis by Luther Munford which pointed out that every school with more than a 50 percent black student population had lost at least 20 percent of its white student population at the point of integration.

I think ultimately where Morris got it wrong is that he agreed with Yazoo City mayor Jeppie Barbour, who said the citizens would just have to stay put and make integration work. "They're here to stay and we're here to stay, and we don't have much other choice," Barbour said. But people did have a choice; they could leave, and many eventually did.

Prichard seems to have made the same mistake in her afterword when she notes that in the 1980s white students began transferring in increasing numbers to white academies. Certainly this may have happened, but this is not what really happened. If you take time to visit the various white-flight academies in Mississippi and count the number of white students in their school composites for the years 1971 to 1975, then count the number of students in the same town's public school composites, what you will find is that the white students haven't simply left the public schools, they have completely left the areas served by almost-all-black schools. If whites had simply transferred to Manchester Academy that school would today have an enrollment of about 1,500. Instead it has an enrollment of under 500. Essentially most of the white working class has moved elsewhere along with much of the middle class; in the case of Yazoo City some have moved to the county schools, some have moved to Madison County, some have even left the state. This has taken place all over Mississippi.

A great irony in recent years is that many of the formerly all-white "segregation" academies are now integrated. The black student presence isn't high, but in many of these private schools five to eight percent of the student body is black. Thus in many towns the white-flight schools are actually more integrated than the public school.

Even though this book is a period piece it is an interesting read. There is some accidental name-dropping by Morris. For example, he describes having dinner with a white Mississippi civil rights lawyer and his black wife - perhaps the first mixed-race couple in Mississippi - and describes the young woman as a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate and aspiring writer by the name of Alice Walker. In recounting the names of 1970 class officers at the newly integrated Yazoo City school Morris mentions the name of newly elected junior class president "Gentle Ben" Williams. In 1972 Williams would become the first black football player on the Ole Miss football team.

I also found it interesting that Morris mentions in passing the extreme violence that black leaders admit and even boast of using against other blacks to enforce a black boycott of white-owned businesses.

One impediment to integration that Morris mentions throughout the book is the difference in ability levels between black and white students. The first semester of integration at Yazoo City (Spring 1970) the school was integrated but the classes remained segregated, which actually helped with the transition. The black classes simply moved to the white high school over the Christmas holidays with no other changes. The next year the classes were integrated. Yet any type of ability grouping has been heavily discouraged if not banned by the federal courts, and I believe the lack of such grouping may have led to much of the white flight in those schools which had at first successfully integrated. Today the ability gap is greater than ever as the white working class has fled, leaving only a more-educated white elite that can afford private school tuition.

(Another cause of white flight that I have casually observed in a number of Mississippi school districts over the years is black-on-black violence. While white students might sometimes be tormented, black-on-white violence is quite rare in most school districts; however, whites frequently respond to serious black-on-black violence events by pulling their children out of public school.)

I had the pleasure of knowing Morris as an Ole Miss student. I never had him as a teacher, but we would frequently visit at the Hoka Theater over Irish coffee and spent a few evenings talking, laughing and arguing almost until the sun came up. My hometown is similar to Yazoo City - a formerly wealthy hill town where cotton was king in 1860 - and I could easily relate to much of his upbringing because much of it was my own. As a student he was editor of the Daily Texan. I would eventually become editor of the Daily Mississippian. I was as conservative as he was liberal. He loved Mississippi, loved history, loved people of all stripes, and absolutely hated social problems which seemed insoluble.

If we truly have a desire to make school integration work, or at least make school desegregation work, I think we have to come to certain agreements. First, few well-to-do black people would want to send their children to a school made up of 90 to 95 percent very poor, white children. No white person wants the opposite. We need to find a way to allow some cluster grouping of students who are friends or relatives outside the classroom, so that even where a school district is 90 percent black a small group of white friends might be allowed to remain in classes together -- or vice versa.

Second, parents want their children to be equally yoked in their classrooms, both in terms of ability and behavior. Students should be grouped both by achievement and a willingness to behave, and such groupings will almost certainly not be racially balanced. One need but read the many blogs of Teacher Corps teachers to know that there are some serious behavioral problems with many students in Delta schools, many of which seem to be far worse than when Morris wrote this book in 1971. These problems simply do not exist at most private schools. I suppose these Teacher Corps teachers - who do wonderful work - will some day be told to stop recording their experiences, because few educated, middle-class, white people of my acquaintance would ever send their child into such an environment, and as I said earlier many blacks are now finding their way to private schools for the same reason.

In short, if we want to have racial integration we have to be willing to have segregation by achievement and behavior. The courts and the black leadership have shown little willingness to allow this; until they do, in heavily black areas there can be no school integration.

I happen to support school vouchers. Vouchers take the left-wing, California-educator types out of the equation and allows parents to find schools with academic, dress, and behavior standards that suit their children's needs. But again, such vouchers would result in school integration and there are too many people out there opposed to school integration except on the government's terms.

I don't think I ever visited with Morris after I graduated from law school in 1988; maybe once. While he enjoyed being back in Mississippi, his years at Ole Miss were often spent in a bit of an off-and-on depressed funk. I heard through friends after a couple of years that he had remarried and that his wife was like a tonic for him and had made him truly happy. He was described as a new man. So I'm glad he and Prichard found each other and had almost 10 years together, and I'm glad she released this book.

My understanding is that Morris' son David has done the field work for a short film on Yazoo School integration and why it failed. I wish he or another documentary maker would expand it to include all the other school districts which seemed to have integrated successfully only to become 99 percent black 30 years later. In any event, I look forward to seeing this film should it ever be released.

Everything old is new again -- judge orders Freedom of Choice for Cleveland schools

    In a rather interesting judicial opinion, District Judge Glen Davidson has ordered the Cleveland School District to adopt a Freedom of Choice policy for the high schools in the district. In doing so he rejected efforts by the U.S. Justice department to force the school district to merge the schools, one virtually-all-black, the other almost perfectly racially balanced with a near 50-50 racial split.

A History of Freedom of Choice
    A brief history of Freedom of Choice is in order. In the 1960s, under court pressure to desegregate, school districts across the South adopted Freedom of Choice desegregation plans whereby students were allowed to attend the school of their choice. In practice this meant few or no whites chose to attend the formerly "black" schools while a relatively small number of blacks attended the former "white" schools, thus desegregating them but not fulling integrating the schools. In many cases blacks were pressured into not enrolling their children in the formerly "white" schools.
    The Supreme Court essentially outlawed the notion of "Freedom of Choice" in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968). In that case most black school children in New Kent County, Va., continued to choose to attend the formerly black school after being given a choice of schools to attend.
    This case was applied to Mississippi with the Alexander v. Holmes County Bd. of Ed., 396 US 19 (1969) ruling and later Singleton v. Jackson Municipal Separate School Dist., 419 F. 2d 1211, 5th Circuit (1970). Of interest is the Court's ruling that the Holly Springs, Miss., school district could not assign students to differing schools based on achievement: "...testing cannot be employed in any event until unitary school systems have been established." Given the disparities in student achievement for many parents this was simply unacceptable. (For smaller communities a "unitary" school system generally meant a consolidated school. For larger ones it meant that there were no racially identifiable schools and that race was not being used as a limiting factor in school assignments or district mapping).

The end of Delta integrated schools
    After 1970 lots of Mississippi schools successfully integrated. The key factor on whether or not a school successfully integrated was the percentage of minority students -- often referred to as the "tipping point" -- living in the district. In the Delta and former cotton towns most public schools either never integrated at all or integrated successfully and then resegregated as whites drifted away. Most small-town and rural schools with less than a 45 percent black student population managed to successfully integrate.
    But as Judge Davidson noted in his opinion on the Cleveland schools, there are only two school districts in the entire Delta with a substantial white enrollment: the Western Line School District in Washington County and the Cleveland School District. Although Davidson didn't quite say so, by seeking force Cleveland to consolidate its schools, the U.S. Justice Department sought to reduce that number to one. From his opinion:

After the United States Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools "with all deliberate speed," private schools began to dot the landscape, and Caucasian families pulled their children out of the public school system to send them to those private schools in an effort to bypass desegregation. What resulted was a majority-African-American enrollment in Delta school districts -- far from the racially integrated utopia contemplated by Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny. Currently, most Delta school districts have 95% or greater African-American enrollment and 5% or less Caucasian enrollment. Most Delta school districts also fare poorly in state testing.

    The federal courts of the 1970 integration era took an amazingly cavalier attitude towards the long-term effects of their rulings on the communities affected by them. Thus the Fifth Circuit, in United States v. Sunflower County School District, 430 F. 2d 839, 5th Circuit (1970), declared,

We are not unmindful of the difficulties involved in this case where the population of students of the entire School District reflects a marked racial imbalance — 85.7% black and 14.3% white. But we cannot alter the requirements of the law because of this factor.

    And so the courts instead imposed remedies that ensured that many Delta communities would be served only by all-black public schools. The courts intentionally turned entire swaths of America and many of our inner cities into wastelands by ruling in ways that they knew or should have known would result in the long-term failure of integration. The courts succeeded, but at what cost?

It didn't have to be this way
    Had the courts been willing to allow the creation of schools in which blacks and whites were roughly equal in number then today our state would be served by a lot more integrated schools. Schools like Cleveland High School. Instead the courts insisted on schools and districts with a perfect racial balance, even if that balance was achieved by making the schools all black.
    The idea of assigning students to schools based on ability, once sought by many districts, is a good one. My one observation from my school years is that students of limited ability do everything they can to disrupt the education of better students. This is true of both blacks and whites. If white parents could have been assured that their children would be in a school setting where their peers were their academic and behavioral equals, many would not have fled the public schools.
    In fact, the best way to find out how to make integration work is to ask some of the people who started out with the most devotion to making it work. Yazoo City, Rolling Fork, Leland, and other communities all had prominent families who very publicly supported public schools following integration. They sent their children to public school; some graduated, some transferred to private schools after a few years. Of those white children who did graduate from most Delta public schools, virtually all have moved or send their children to private schools. Has anyone ever bothered to ask them what happened?
    Pulitzer-winner Douglas Blackmon penned a Harper's Magazine article in 1992, "The Resegregation of a Southern School," in which he laments the failure of integration in Leland. Blackmon was a first-grader in 1970 when the Leland schools fully integrated.

That spring, sixty white faces peered out from the Leland senior-class portrait. In 1982, when my class was the first to graduate after twelve full years of black and white children studying together, only two dozen whites remained in a class of just under ninety.

    To Blackmon's credit he doesn't gloss over problems facing white students attending the Leland schools.

 At school, racial tension characterized the daily dynamic. Fistfights on the playground between whites and blacks were routine, and being harassed by blacks as I walked home through their neighborhood after school was so common that I was amazed later to learn that anyone else had grown up differently. The school stopped sponsoring senior proms, student banquets, senior trips, and other social gatherings long before I was old enough to know what they were.

     Amid the conflict, Blackmon feels he was well served by attending the Leland Public Schools and decries the fact that local residents are no longer devoted to making an integrated school system work:

Despite the racial tensions, we whites were well served by the integrated public schools. We gained from the rough-and-tumble mix of cultures and, I think, were strengthened by the confrontations it sparked.

* * * *

Personal convenience has prevailed over community good. The moral conviction that integrated my school has given way to an indifference and numbness – the same numbness that allowed me (and most white Deltans) to accept abject black poverty just a stone’s throw away from our own homes. Today, many of the children of the early white graduates of Leland’s integrated public schools are attending private academies.

    While I would not deny Blackmon or others things which they value, I think most parents and students aren't looking for a "rough-and-tumble" environment for their children. Most parents and students don't want a school where petty racial violence and harassment is routine.
    To understand why communities such as Leland, Yazoo City, or many others supported integrated schools in the 1970s but fail to do so today to read a review of Ellen Brantlinger's Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage written by Peter Schmidt, an editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The newspaper review, entitled "When Loving Parents Choose Segregation," describes how Brantlinger interviewed 20 liberal parents -- many her friends -- and found that they all supported progressive educational ideas and racial and socio-economic integration. But when it came to their kids -- Whoa Nelly! -- they all wanted their children in schools populated almost exclusively with children of their own social class and they wanted their children to benefit from traditional, not progressive, teaching techniques.
    Schmidt's review ought to be required reading for every jurist, congressman and government worker in America. He sums the issue up perfectly:

I have watched enough of the Discovery Channel to know not to get between a bear and its cub. If they have not learned the lesson already, school districts that ask parents to compromise their children's future for some greater social good need to realize that they are up against a similarly primal force.

    If Leland had maintained two schools, with students assigned to one or the other based on academic achievement and ability, today Leland would have one fully integrated school and one mostly black school. Most whites of limited academic ability would leave or go to private school before attending an all-black school, just as whites have done today. But so what? Leland would have an integrated school.
    If the courts had allowed the assignment of students based on achievement most or all of this bullying and friction would have been eliminated. Leland and Clarksdale and Greenwood and Rolling Fork and Yazoo City and Helena, Arkansas and Holly Springs would all today have a quality, integrated school system like that in Cleveland. But the courts didn't allow that, and so today communities across Mississippi are served by segregated rather than integrated schools.

Can the courts dare say "We were wrong"?
    In 1992 I was sharing a cocktail with a prominent planter who strongly supported the public schools during integration and urged his fellow citizens not to open a private school. He sent his children to public school. But he eventually came to the conclusion that the private academy was both an asset and a necessity to the community. In other words, he was wrong. I rarely remember conversations well enough 20 years later to quote them, but I recall our conversation well enough to quote him almost verbatim:

I did everything I could to stop them from opening that private school. They burned three crosses in my front yard. I wouldn't dare set foot on that campus today for fear that some redneck might try to beat me up. But all I can say now is thank God for that private school because if we didn't have it there would have been an explosion by now. Either that or all the white people would have just packed up and left.

    The problem with the school integration rulings of 1968-70 is that the courts essentially guaranteed the failure of integration in many communities. Instead of attempting to successfully integrate the schools the courts seemed hell-bent on punishing white people. What the courts failed to consider is that people have feet. People can move. And they did. Some went to private schools. Even more just packed up and left, leaving behind regions and cities in economic ruin.
    Imagine if the courts had taken the time to review the facts on the ground in each community and issue orders that would have been designed to promote integration and ensure academic excellence. For some communities a single, consolidated school might work fine. For others, assignment by achievement and ability would have maintained academic excellence and community support. For larger cities, a tiered system like that used in New York -- with admission to all schools based on test scores -- would have created outstanding, integrated schools. And no, the demographics of such tiered schools never reflect those of the community at large; they aren't supposed to. They are supposed to group students by achievement so that each child can be in a classroom of equally yoked children learning as much as possible as quickly as possible.

What's ahead for Cleveland?
    It's rather amazing that Cleveland was not targeted by the Justice Department years ago. The East Side schools are clearly racially identifiable -- they apparently have no white students enrolled.
    Some fraternity brothers of mine told me years ago that former Sen. Jim Eastland struck a deal with the Justice Dept. whereby Cleveland was to be let alone in exchange for some favor or another. If so, it is ironic that the senator known for years as a staunch segregationist is responsible for more Delta whites attending integrated schools than any other elected official or federal judge who ever held office.
    But for the two attendance zones Cleveland's story would be identical to that of every other city in the Delta. A consolidated school, either in 1970 or today, would push Cleveland well over the "tipping point" at which affluent whites start to abandon public schools. So now the question is, will Judge Davidson's ruling be allowed to stand? Will Cleveland be allowed to have an integrated public school?
    A report submitted by the school district recounted the recent sad story of the McComb School District after a court ordered it to sprinkle the tiny number of white students it had equally among homerooms. White enrollment dropped from 13.5 percent white to eight percent white. "It cannot be emphasized enough that there can be no integration without whites. An all-black school system may be racially balanced, but it is not integrated in a way that most sensible people would define that word," the report said. Unfortunately Judge Davidson did not cite this report in his opinion.
    In ordering the Freedom of Choice plan, Judge Davidson said a major factor was the fact that the East Side schools were in better condition that the racially mixed Cleveland High, and both the school board chairman and school superintendent are black. From his opinion:

The Court does not order consolidation of the two high schools and two junior high schools. However, the Court is of the opinion that the attendance zones, as defined by the former railroad tracks in Cleveland, perpetuate vestiges of racial segregation. The high school and junior high school students should have a true freedom of choice to attend either high school and either junior high school. Accordingly, the Court orders that the heretofore-established attendance zones shall be abolished, thus establishing an open-enrollment procedure.

There can be no question but that Judge Davidson's ruling will produce the maximum amount of school integration in the Cleveland School District. Now the question is which the federal government or appeals courts want more: integration or perfect balance.

Ruling says Delta doesn't begin at the Peabody Hotel
    For possibly the first time there has been a judicial finding of fact that the Mississippi Delta does not begin in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel. From Davidson's opinion:

Although it has been said that the Mississippi Delta "begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg," the Mississippi Delta actually consists of about fifteen Mississippi counties with an approximate total population of 350,575 persons, 225,653 of which are African American and 119,499 of which are Caucasian.

    I guess the judge couldn't get it all right.