Nikole Hannah-Jones talking:
one of the reasons that integration was so successful by court order in the South was the South tends to operate countywide school systems. And that meant that white parents wanting to flee desegregation couldn’t just simply move into a white town to get away from these orders. But what we’re finding in Alabama, and really across the country, are white communities, wealthier white communities, wanting to pull away from these regional or countywide school districts and form their own racially isolated, much more wealthy school districts. And that’s happened in Jefferson County, Alabama.
The reason I looked at that case, in particular, is, most of the time when white communities want to—they’re called school district secessions. When they want to secede from a larger school district, there’s very little scrutiny, and we don’t actually get to see their motivations. But the school system that this town, this suburban community called Gardendale, wanted to split off from was under a desegregation order, so they actually had to go to trial, and there was discovery. And in that discovery, the racial motivations of the white people in that community became very clear. So it provided an unusual opportunity to actually explore why communities who say they want to break off from local control are often motivated by race.
Brown v. Board of Education, of course, is the landmark Supreme Court ruling that found legally mandated school segregation unconstitutional.
Back in 1954. Prior to that, we operated under the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine, which said segregation of black citizens was legal and constitutional as long as it was equal. Of course, it was never equal. But Brown doesn’t actually deal with that. It deals with citizenship. And it’s basically saying that the separation of black students from white denies them their full citizenship.
The way that we kind of commonly learn this history, though, is the Supreme Court makes this ruling, and then we all agree segregation was bad, and we integrate our schools, or we tried really hard. But actually what happened was there was massive resistance, both in the North and the South. And it takes a very long time for school desegregation to occur, where it occurred at all, largely because of these court orders.
What was so fascinating about this trial, though, is many federal judges have basically taken the position that these court orders, some of them 50 years old, have gone on too long and that there’s no more segregation for them to deal with. But Judge Madeline Haikala, who was appointed by President Obama, has been one of the rare federal judges who is taking these rulings very seriously. And I was reading through the court transcripts. There was just this amazing moment where she’s interviewing the superintendent that the all-white school board of Gardendale appointed, and found out that he—on cross-examination, it came out that he had never hired or worked with a black teacher in his career, even though he was coming down to, basically, Birmingham, Alabama. And so, I think—she declined to be interviewed for the story, but it’s clear that she calls a recess, she goes and gets copies of the Brown ruling and begins to question him about had he ever read the ruling, and then reads parts of it, particularly the parts about how segregation demeans black students, aloud. And it was amazing moment. I’ve written about school segregation for more than a decade. I’ve sat in on these trials. I’ve read transcripts. I’ve never seen a judge do that before.
So, she does this really interesting ruling. She finds that Gardendale was in fact motivated by racism, which is a very rare thing for a judge to find these days. But she kind of splits the baby. So, Gardendale wanted to break off. To secede, the school system
It’s evocative of kind of all the right things, I think. She allows them, in her ruling, to take over two of the elementary schools in the town, and says she’s going to watch over the case and see, you know, how do they act, basically, with the black students that they have to bus in because of this court order. And if all goes well, then she would allow them to form their own district. So, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which was fighting the secession, clearly didn’t agree with that ruling. But when you read it, you see she was very conflicted about what to do with this case, understanding that if she didn’t allow them to break off, it could be very soon that Jefferson County would be released from this court order, and Gardendale could do whatever it wanted. And by allowing them to break off, she could put them under their own desegregation order and watch them longer. I think it really gets to the challenge of undoing racial caste in this country. It is not easily done.
in that way, that suburban Birmingham is any different than any other diverse metropolitan community where people can mention certain neighborhoods or mention certain towns as a way of talking about race without being explicit. So, in this particular case, there was a flier about this effort to—for Gardendale to secede from the Jefferson County school system, and it listed a bunch of towns, and it said, you know, “We have a choice to make. Do we want to be these towns?”—and then it listed several other towns—”Or do we want to be these towns?” They never mentioned race, but it was clear to everyone who lived there the towns that the community did not want to be like were all heavily black, and the towns that the community did want to be like were all heavily white. And the white towns had seceded and broken their schools off from the larger system, and as a result, their schools and the towns were very white.
it’s called “secession”
It actually has nothing to do with the Civil War, but that is what they’re doing. It is when a community wants to split off from a larger community and run their own affairs to create basically a new form of government—in this case, a local education district.
So, part of the reason that this community wanted to secede is Jefferson County operates under a 50-year-old school desegregation order. And so, the schools that are located in Gardendale are part of this larger school system.
And that comes out of Brown v. Board of Education. It came out of—Jefferson County, a decade after Brown v. Board, had not desegregated a single school, and so, finally, was forced by the courts to implement a zoning plan to integrate the schools. So there are large numbers of black students who are bused in to Gardendale from a neighboring working-class black community and some other communities. And the people in Gardendale didn’t want those students coming into their schools anymore, so the way that they thought they could avoid that would be to break off from the school system, and then those children would no longer be a part of their children’s schools.
I mean, clearly, the people in the black community in North Smithfield objected to that. These were schools that their parents paid taxes for, as well. These were often the only chance that their children would get for an integrated education, was because of this court order. And suddenly they were being told, “These aren’t your schools anymore. You’re not welcome, and we don’t want your children here.” So they fought it.
U.W. Clemon is like a reporter’s dream. I’m originally writing about a lawsuit and a secession, and I come across a current lawyer on the case who I find out was actually the same lawyer on that case in 1968. So, U.W. Clemon was born right outside of this area, a native Alabamian, who, because of segregation, had to go out of state to get his law degree, got his law degree at Columbia and then came home and immediately began to tackle the very system that had discriminated against him. He went on to become the first black federal judge in the history of the state of Alabama.
So, he graduates college in 1965, which is 11 years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in schools. And the University of Alabama, which operated the only law school in the state of Alabama, still refused to admit black students 11 years after the Supreme Court ruled this practice unconstitutional. What it did instead was it would pay black students to get their law degrees out of state. So he actually got a great deal out of it. He got to go to Columbia—clearly, he was one of the brightest students in the state. He got to go to Columbia on Alabama’s dime, graduates from Columbia Law School
I’d say he likely got a superior legal education, uses that, and, as soon as he graduates, comes back to Alabama and works for the Legal Defense Fund to try to force desegregation on the schools and to get for black children the constitutional rights that he had been denied.
the only reason Alabama was paying was the Supreme Court had ruled before Brown that in order to comply with the “separate but equal” doctrine, you had to provide opportunities for professional and graduate education for black students in the state. They didn’t want to do that in Alabama, because, they bet, if you are a bright student who was able to get into a college out of state and able to breathe freer air, you weren’t going to come back to Alabama, which had some of the most repressive racial laws on the books. And I think, often, that was a good bet for them to make. I think when a lot of bright black student were able to escape the South, they didn’t return. But there were students also that they didn’t account for who were like U.W. Clemon, who were very determined that they were going to get this degree and come back and take down the whole system.
he comes back, and immediately, his very first—one of his very first cases is the Jefferson County school desegregation case, where he goes in and argues that the Supreme Court has ruled that actual integration has to happen, that these white schools and black schools have to be eliminated. And he wins. And he actually goes—sets precedent that goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and precedent that still stands today. Again, on top of that, he becomes the first black senator—one of the first black senators in the state since Reconstruction. He becomes the first black federal judge in the history of the state.
He has changed that state in indelible ways. And I think a large part of that is because he was able to get one of the best legal educations in the country. When he went to Columbia, that is actually when he came in contact with the Legal Defense Fund, because Jack Greenberg, who was a lawyer who actually worked on the Brown v. Board of Education case, was running a clinic there. So, Alabama’s racism actually provided him the opportunity to dismantle segregation in the state. It’s kind of a beautiful story.
under conservative administrations, really reticence to enforce school desegregation orders, and, in fact, to try to bring them to a close, with a sense that these had gone on long enough. Now, it should be clear that there was never a moment where school systems stopped fighting desegregation. School officials didn’t want integration because white communities didn’t want integration, and they fought them all the whole way. And it was only under strong enforcement that you started to see integration.
But Jeff Sessions, though he says he was a champion of civil rights, the record speaks very differently. And that’s true of a lot of federal judges, as well, who are also very eager to end these orders. And they were helped by a Supreme Court that was conservative-leaning and began to say you didn’t actually—school systems didn’t actually have to fully desegregate, they just had to show that they tried. And if they showed that they did it to—the actual wording is—”the extent practicable,” they could be released from their desegregation orders, even if large numbers of black students never attended integrated schools.
what’s so powerful about school desegregation orders is, any segregation that you find in a district, it is assumed that it is illegal, because the reason you came under the order is for violating the constitutional rights of black children. Once a school district is released from its court order, the assumption is that the segregation is not intentional, and so plaintiffs have to prove motive. Plaintiffs in desegregation cases don’t have to prove motive. This is what makes kind of the judge’s ruling in the Gardendale case so remarkable, as not only did she find that they shouldn’t be able to secede because it was going to thwart the desegregation of Jefferson County, but she found intentional racial animus and motivation on behalf of Gardendale’s citizens in wanting to create a district so that their schools would be more white.
– 1963, to Alabama’s Governor George Wallace openly embracing segregation during his inaugural address.
GOV. GEORGE WALLACE: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
Alabama is a—it still has the second-highest number of school systems under desegregation in the country. And in those school systems, they’re kind of holding the ground. I think it’s important to point out that because of court orders, the South went from being the most segregated part of the country for black children to the most integrated part of the country. And it remains so. So, though we Northerners like to look down on the South, the South actually is far more integrated when it comes to schools than we are.
The problem is, these orders are being closed out, and school systems are resegregating. And so, a lot of the gains that were forced upon the South, we’re losing. And black students are starting to—I mean, I chronicled what happened in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, once its school desegregation order closed. You have a third of black students now who attend entirely all-black schools for the entire 13 years that they’re in public education. So we’ve gone backwards. And we’ve gone backwards in, I think, very, very harmful ways.
I could not get a single one of them to speak to me on the record—not one of the secession activists, no one on the elected school board, no one on the elected city council, not the superintendent. All of them declined to be interviewed on the record for the story.
it was interesting, because, on the one hand, all I write about is how racism still exists in this country and the many forms that it takes. And often there’s a disbelief, I think, amongst readers that the problems are still this bad, that there are still large numbers of people in this country who are motivated by race. And so, Charlottesville kind of burst that into the open. It was hard to deny, because these weren’t the way that many in the mainstream media described kind of the right and Trump supporters. These were not folks who looked like working-class people in Appalachia, right? They looked very clean-cut. They looked like someone who could be your office mate. And it was—ended up being a very violent event.
I think my concern was—which is always my concern, and I tweeted about this—is, you know, even during the civil rights movement, the White Citizens’ Councils, who were businessmen and very buttoned-up, they despised the Klan, because the Klan exposed—brought a certain type of heat and light to their much more sinister efforts to repress black rights, which they did in a very civilized way. And so I think it was very easy for people to call out Charlottesville, because that’s a type of racism anyone can reject. But the things that I write about every day are not people walking around with torches and not people running over people in crowds. They are folks who would protest at a rally like that—and then fight to keep their daughter out of a school like my daughter goes to.
New York City, residentially, is the third most segregated city in the country. And in terms of schools, it’s among the most segregated large school systems in the country. And so there’s a very cerebral disconnect in this community, in this city, where we call ourselves the great melting pot, but we’re not actually a melting pot. We’re a diverse city, and we’re a very segregated city.
And I had written about segregated schools since my very first reporting job back in 2003, but never as a parent. And then I found myself with my own child getting ready to start school in New York City and then having to deal with, on a very personal level, what it is like to try to make a school choice in a city that is very segregated and very unequal.
I actually never intended to write about my daughter’s school. I had been writing about school segregation. People knew this was kind of my area of expertise. And meanwhile, my husband and I decide that we’re going to enroll our daughter in one of the city’s segregated high-poverty schools, that it was important for me not to write that school segregation was wrong and that people needed to make choices for equity and justice, and then use my privilege to get my daughter into one of the city’s few higher-wealth and integrated schools. So we made the decision to enroll her in the segregated school, but didn’t know that, very quickly, our daughter’s school would become embroiled in its own integration battle.
my daughter’s school is about 93 percent black and Latino, and it is almost entirely free and reduced lunch. Its attendance zone is drawn around a federal housing project, and my husband and I are among a small handful of black parents, middle-class parents, who attend the school from outside of the attendance zone. So, it is representative of the experience of large numbers of black and Latino students in this district, which is they are isolated in schools with almost no white or Asian students and where every student is poor. So we intentionally decided to go into a school like that.
Our school was underenrolled, and less than a mile away was a very wealthy, predominantly white school that was bursting at the seams, because in this city, as in many cities, in a segregated system, white students go—white parents put their kids in the school with all the white kids. And so the school was very full. And because of that, the New York City public school system decided to send some of those white students to my daughter’s school. And one can guess how those white parents felt about that.
Those white parents didn’t want to send their children to this school, even though, for many of them, it was their neighborhood school. Many of them lived directly across the street from my daughter’s school. So, at this point, I was a parent, and I was attending meetings.
daughter was in pre-K. So I was attending meetings where parents were—white parents whose children were being rezoned for my daughter’s school were fighting against coming to the school. They were saying many of the same things that I’ve heard in Gardendale and that I’ve heard in Southern districts about why they didn’t want to send their children into a heavily black and Latino school.
And I started to get a lot of—it became a national news story because it’s Brooklyn. And, of course, the reputation of Brooklyn is that it is a very liberal borough and has very liberal white people. And so the headlines would be something like, you know, “White Liberals Fight Integration.” It was a story that got a lot of media attention. And people were emailing me, like, “Are you going to write about what’s happening at this school?”—of course, not knowing that my daughter was in the school. So, after a while, as all journalists, I think, as writers, it becomes—you write because you feel like you have to. And so, even though I didn’t want to write a personal story, it felt impossible, knowing that I cover these issues all the time, not to write about what it was like to be right in the middle of one of these battles.
so, she was in pre-K at the time, and my daughter just started second grade. So it’s been a while. But the school—the New York City public schools did rezone large numbers of white parents to the school, and they haven’t come. I don’t know where they are, but they’re not at my daughter’s school.
My daughter is doing great. It’s a beautiful school, and she’s excelling academically. But more than that, she learns a lot from her classmates that other parents are afraid of. And she’s doing great.
I think that what I always say is, the inequality in New York City and other school districts, it is structural. But it also is upheld by individual choices. In my work, I’m not even trying to convince conservatives or Trump supporters to believe in integration. I’m trying to convince progressives, who say they believe in integration, to actually live their values.
I think that the research shows pre-K, particularly for low-income parents, is very, very valuable and that it is one of the things that can close the achievement gap. I think, in this city, it has been a huge missed opportunity for integration. Pre-K in the city is actually more segregated than the already very segregated public school system, K through 12. And a lot of people in the city have been very disappointed with Mayor de Blasio’s unwillingness to address and to lead on the issue of integration in schools.
at this point, he doesn’t like to publicly speak about it. He’s not even using the bully pulpit that he has. And under a lot of pressure last year, his Department of Education—or, this year—released a so-called diversity plan, that refuses to even say the word “integration” or “segregation.” What he has typically said is that these are very old problems and not something that any one mayor can fix. But I think advocates for school integration, who understand that it is necessary for equity, think that there are lots of big problems and that that’s what you go to leadership for, is to take these issues on.
I think that there are a couple things that really drive it. One is housing segregation. Particularly elementary school children are mostly zoned to neighborhood schools, and we are a very segregated city. So, that’s a little harder to address. But we have a city that from sixth through 12th grade is all choice, which means no student is zoned to a particular school. But the best schools all require applications. They require entry exams. And so that leads to a great deal of segregation. I think if this city really was serious about integration, it would implement a zoning plan that would draw from segregated communities and take away a lot of the choice that allows white parents to get their kids into the most advantaged schools.
Gentrification could actually benefit school integration, because, of course, you have white people moving into formerly all-black neighborhoods. The problem is just like my daughter’s school. So, my daughter’s school is located in the DUMBO, Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, which is heavily gentrifying, but those parents are not enrolling their children in my daughter’s school.
even when we have neighborhoods that are gentrifying, white parents are choosing not to enroll their kids in their neighborhood schools. And we don’t have leadership, so you don’t have the mayor or Carmen Fariña, who is over the Department of Education, who are saying, “We’re going to try to capture those parents to go into these schools.” So, it is a tremendous missed opportunity.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones
award-winning reporter at The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice. Her most recent piece is headlined “The Resegregation of Jefferson County.” Her article about choosing a school for her daughter in a segregated school system won a National Magazine Award this year.
— source democracynow.org