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South sees integration gains slip into past
By Dahleen Glanton Tribune national correspondent Millicent Hall is supposed to be part of the multiracial society that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about, where black and white students would be educated side by side. But this month, she will graduate from Southwest DeKalb High School with 300 other African-American students who never have attended an integrated school.
No one expected this to happen in a public school in the South, the region that most successfully achieved desegregation during the 1970s and 1980s. But in a trend that is sweeping the South, schools that once were all-white, then fully integrated, are segregating again, this time with African-Americans.
Hall has attended classes with only two white students during 12 years of public school in the Atlanta suburbs. Most black students at her school in southern DeKalb County, as well as at many other metropolitan Atlanta schools, never have had a white classmate.
In 1954, the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education was designed to ensure that public schools in America would be proportionally integrated, particularly in the South where Jim Crow laws had created two distinct societies based on race. Though integration worked for two decades in the region, a reverse trend began in the 1990s.
In 1988, the peak year of integration, 43.5 percent of the students in majority-white schools in the South were African-American. By 2000 the percentage had decreased to about 31 percent, the lowest since 1968, according to a study by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.
While the nation is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, most Southern schools are resegregating not only by race but by socioeconomic class, according to educators. The primary reasons, they said, are changing racial demographics of neighborhoods; a growing number of court cases that have released school districts from desegregation orders and federal oversight; and the proliferation of private schools that have drained public schools of white students.
Southwest DeKalb's all-black graduating class of 2004 is a sharp contrast to its graduating classes during the 1970s, when the student body was almost evenly black and white, part of a 15-year period of integration in DeKalb County made possible because of the Brown decision.
Fifty years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were "inherently unequal," the student body was all white. Today, all but three of Southwest DeKalb's 1,570 students are African-American. It is a scene being played out throughout metropolitan Atlanta and the South--the region that fought hardest against desegregation and then worked the hardest to make it work.
William Smelser, a physical science and chemistry teacher at Southwest DeKalb since 1965, watched his classrooms change over a 15-year period ending in the early 1980s.
"This was a rural community in the 1960s, and we didn't have the difficulties that you saw on TV," said Smelser, who is white. "But it was a shock. There were more than 1,900 white students here and only about 10 black students."
"The problems started when they began transferring teachers through a lottery," he said. "They forced programs like the cheerleaders to be 50-50 black and white. A lot of people thought that was unfair, and it caused a lot of unnecessary resentment. And as more and more black families moved in, the white families moved to counties farther north."
Hall has no regrets about her educational experience in southern DeKalb County, an area transformed from a small dairy-farming community of whites to an urban area of mostly middle-class blacks.
True to Southwest DeKalb
"I have never been on a yellow bus, except to go on a field trip," said Hall, 18, president of the senior class. "I love my community, and I love Southwest DeKalb. I would never want to go to another high school."
The resegregation of public schools in the South is particularly troubling to civil rights workers, many of whom led marches and court battles to ensure that black children received the same level of education as whites.
"In 2004, there are still vestiges of the '50s and '60s. It's pretty prevalent, but it just doesn't get expressed the same way. People are reluctant to express their true feelings about integration," said Julius Chambers, a NAACP attorney and director of the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights.
"It's not someone standing in the schoolhouse door this time. It's people saying, `We want our children assigned to schools closer to home' or `We don't want busing.' It is a bit more subtle, but it carries the same result."
The widespread integration in the South during the 1970s and 1980s has resulted in the emergence of a solid black middle class, particularly in metropolitan areas such as Atlanta. As affluent blacks purchased four- and five-bedroom homes in such areas as southern DeKalb County, whites moved out. Within two decades, almost all whites with school-age children had left, taking with them many financial and economic resources that once had made Southwest DeKalb one of the crown jewels of public education in the South. When Mary Norman came to Southwest DeKalb in 1970 to teach math, there were only two black students in her class, and she was one of only four African-American teachers. "Many black families moved into this community because they wanted the best education for their children," Norman said. "The majority of students here were college-bound. Now, about 60 percent of them still go to college. In those days, most of the students were eager to learn, and they wanted to go out in life and do well. "It is the same today. The race of the students does not matter. You had sharp students then as well as those who like to procrastinate. That hasn't changed either." The South still is the most integrated region in the country, according to researchers at The Civil Rights Project at Harvard. Minority student enrollment in public schools is at 40 percent nationwide, nearly double what it was in the 1960s. In the West, where there is a large Latino population, and the South, where black enrollment is highest, almost half of all public school students are non-white. While the most segregated schools in the nation are in the North--Illinois, New York, California and Michigan have the lowest percentages of black students in majority-white schools--the 20 most rapidly resegregating school districts are in the South, according to the Harvard researchers. "The only place desegregation ever really was tried was in the South, and it worked in the places where there was nowhere for whites to flee," said Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project. "Small towns and rural areas are still quite integrated today because people settled down and accepted integrated schools." "People say it does not matter if a black student is sitting next to a white student, but it does matter when you're in a middle-class school where almost everyone is going to college," Orfield said. "Nine out of 10 times, all-black or all-Latino schools have concentrated poverty. That relates to lower test scores, a higher dropout rate, less-qualified teachers, fewer course offerings and fewer connections with colleges." Whites are the most segregated group in the nation's public schools, research shows. They attend schools where, on average, 80 percent of the study body is white. Those in private schools are more segregated. Many white families in the South saw private schools as a haven for escaping integration. While Catholic school enrollment declined nationwide to 10 percent in 2000 from 11 percent in 1970, it increased in the South to 9.1 percent from 5.2 percent during the same period, according to Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University economist. In states such as Mississippi, where desegregation battles were hardest fought, private-school enrollment tripled from 1967 to 1972. Today, private-school enrollment in the South is about equal to what it is nationwide. "In the response to desegregation in the South, private schools were very important in some places and moderately important in others, depending on the racial composition of the public schools. The higher the non-white percentage, the more likely whites were to try to avoid the [public] schools," said Clotfelter, author of "After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation." "In many of these private schools, the cost was low," he said. "They were what you might think of as budget operations and, in some cases, had quite strikingly modest physical facilities. Some were set up in churches, and in the very early days, they were put together so quickly that they lacked things such as a cafeteria. Over time, capital campaigns enabled them to build new buildings and add football fields, making them comparable to public facilities." As a student at the all-black Murphy High School in Atlanta during the early 1970s, Sharon Hall Mincey used to travel across town to watch her basketball team play predominantly white Southwest DeKalb. By the time her daughter, Millicent, enrolled at Southwest in 2000, the school was predominantly black. "For us it was like `We're going to the white school,' and that was unusual because we did not interact with white students at all," said Mincey, who graduated in 1975. "I don't want to say that the experience was frightening, but it was different. We knew about discrimination and racism, so when the game was over, we got right on our bus and went back to our side of town. Nobody wanted any trouble." Like most school districts in the South, DeKalb County resisted integration for a decade after the Brown decision. In 1965, DeKalb County closed all of the six black schools and distributed those students in white schools. In 1969 a federal lawsuit, Freeman vs. Pitts, was filed alleging that segregation still had not been eliminated. In 1993 the Supreme Court found that all vestiges of discrimination had been removed and released the district from federal supervision. Educators cite the DeKalb County case, along with Board of Education vs. Dowell in Oklahoma in 1991 and Missouri vs. Jenkins in 1995, as the three major decisions in the 1990s that helped to thwart desegregation across the country. In 1969, only 6 percent of the 80,000 students in DeKalb schools were black. Today, the system of 100,000 students is 80 percent African-American. "The school system has done exactly what the court said in terms of integrating," said Spencer Ragsdale, spokesman for DeKalb County Schools. "But what the system contended all along and court agreed on was that when neighborhoods change, the schools change. We don't have the luxury of assigning houses. So when the neighborhoods feeding to a school change ethnically, there is nothing the district can do. That is community problem, not a school problem." Today there is barely any indication that Southwest DeKalb once was a white school. The trophy case is filled with trophies won by all-black sports teams. All of the athletes on the wall of fame are African-American. And the yearbooks from the 1950s and earlier are kept locked in a storage room. While Mincey said she is pleased with the education her daughter has received at Southwest DeKalb, she always has taken steps to ensure that Hall had experiences outside an all-black environment. Her daughter has traveled to Europe and was exposed to the theater and other cultural events at an early age. "It's crazy to try and live your life in the DeKalb County bubble. You can't be well-rounded if you can't battle with the best," said Hall, who plans to attend the historically black Bethune-Cookman College. "I have been exposed to a lot of things, and I have eaten at restaurants other than the Red Lobster. A lot of my peers didn't get that. I can go to the projects right now or go to the White House and feel just as comfortable." Micah Streiff, 17, one of the three white students at Southwest DeKalb, said he has adjusted better at the predominantly black school than he did at Chamblee Middle School in predominantly white north DeKalb County. Streiff said he has had no problems fitting in at Southwest DeKalb since the family moved to the community during his freshman year. "At Chamblee, I didn't like the atmosphere because all the different races were separated. When I hung out with my black friends, my white friends accused me of trying to be black," said Streiff, who is the kicker for the football team, captain of the soccer team and was elected "Mr. Sophomore" and "Mr. Junior" by his black classmates. Located in a middle-class black community, Southwest DeKalb has a well-stocked library and a computer lab. The school is the home of one of the county's two "high achievers" magnet programs. Recently students won the state championship in a competition debating the Constitution. Some have gone abroad to study French. Southwest DeKalb consistently has met or exceeded the state school system average in standardized tests, according to Principal Kenneth Bradshaw. Last year students scored an average of 909 on the SAT college-entrance exams, the highest of any black school in DeKalb County and higher than the national average for black schools. Yet it was lower than the predominantly white schools in DeKalb and the nation that routinely score above 1,000. Most educators agree that Southwest DeKalb is an exception. Many of the predominantly black schools are in impoverished neighborhoods where students do not perform as well academically. "All families, black or white, given the choice and all things equal, would want their kids in a school nearby. The question is whether schools are really equal in educational quality," said Sean Reardon, an education and sociology professor at Penn State University. "There is a feeling on some levels that we tried desegregation and it did not work, so let's not do it anymore. It's a return to the old separate-but-equal philosophy," Reardon said. "But it did not work before the Brown decision, and there is plenty of history to show us that it would not work 50 years later." Integration foe's view Valle Dutcher, general counsel for the Southeastern Legal Foundation, which has fought against a half-dozen school desegregation orders in the South, said the Brown decision has accomplished as much as possible--to enforce the 14th Amendment of the Constitution by providing equal protection under the law. "Equal protection does not mean equal results. The law removed the barriers, but it does not provide an instantaneous fix for the problem," Dutcher said. "By busing a white or black child two hours or forcing them to sit next to each other at a desk, you may end up with a racially mixed school, but there are tremendous differences in educational results. "Inner-city children operate at a disadvantage regardless of their race or ethnicity. They live with the disadvantages brought on by poverty. The inequities today are really socioeconomic and not race or ethnicity. The proper response is not to just transport the problem around on a bus, but to look it in the face and deal with it, perhaps for the first time." There are issues to be considered other than academic achievement, Reardon said. And the future of the country, which is increasingly multiethnic, depends on how future generations adapt to it. "It is important that kids, especially middle-class white kids, grow up in schools that reflect the multiracial aspect of the 21st Century," he said. "One of the first things you learn in integrated schools is tolerance and understanding, and comfort and familiarity." - - - Racial imbalance returns Like many Southern communities, DeKalb County, Ga., has seen its schools go from being almost all white to being more integrated to being mostly black. DEKALB COUNTY SCHOOLS 1968-1970 Black: 6% White: 94% 1990 Black: 69% White: 23% Hispanic: 4% Asian: 4% 2000 Black: 76% White: 13% Hispanic: 7% Asian: 4% Note: Black and white students are non-Hispanic. Source: Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research Chicago Tribune
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