The Choice We Face Read online

  23. Byrnes quoted in White, “Managed Compliance,” 44; Address of James F. Byrnes, Governor of South Carolina, to the South Carolina Education Association (Columbia, SC: 1951).

  24. “South Carolina,” Southern School News, April 7, 1955, May 4, 1955; White, “Managed Compliance,” 54–58; “Byrnes Plans Study Before Commenting on Court Ruling” and “SC Leaders Adopt ‘Wait-See’ Attitude on Court Decision,” The State (Columbia, SC), May 18, 1954; “SC Candidates Accent Separate School Issue,” The State, May 19, 1954; “Virginia Lawmakers Overwhelmingly Approve Interposition,” Southern School News, March 1956; “Georgia,” Southern School News, September 3, 1954, November 4, 1954; Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 105; Suitts, Overturning Brown, 12–17.

  25. Suitts, Overturning Brown, 12–47; Jim Leeson, “Private Schools Continue to Increase in the South,” Southern Education Report (November 1966): 22–25; McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 297–304; Michael W. Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971,” History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 159–80; White, “Managed Compliance,” 389–91.

  26. Suitts, Overturning Brown, 12–17; Leeson, “Private Schools Continue to Increase in the South,” 22–25; McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 297–304; Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi,” 159–80; White, “Managed Compliance,” 389–91; Kitty Terjen, “White Flight: The Segregation Academy Movement,” in The South and Her Children: School Desegregation 1970–1971, ed. Robert E. Anderson (Atlanta: Southern Regional Council, 1971), 69.

  27. Joseph P. Blank, “The Lost Years: What Happened to the Children When Prince Edward County, Virginia Closed Its Public Schools,” William Odum Collection, Box 1, “Odum Collection, Washington Post Article,” Library, Special Collections, and Archives at Longwood University, Farmville, Virginia.

  28. Leeson, “Private Schools Continue to Increase in the South,” 25.

  29. Timmerman quoted in “South Carolina,” Southern School News, April 7, 1955.

  30. “Byrnes Plans Study Before Commenting on Court Ruling” and “SC Leaders Adopt ‘Wait-See’ Attitude on Court Decision,” The State, May 18, 1954, “SC Candidates Accent Separate School Issue,” The State, May 19, 1954.

  31. “Virginia,” Southern School News, November 4, 1954.

  32. Johnston quoted in Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern School Choice Movement,” Southern Spaces, June 4, 2019, https://southernspaces.org/2019/segregationists-libertarians-and-modern-school-choice-movement; Joseph F. Johnston, “Schools, the Supreme Court, and the States’ Power to Direct the Removal of Gunpowder,” Alabama Lawyer 17, no. 3 (1956): 3–10.

  33. Suitts, Overturning Brown, 12–15; Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern ‘School Choice’ Movement”; Southern School News, September 3, 1954, February 3, 1955, February 1961; “Alabama Expecting No Desegregation; ‘Free Choice’ Amendment Is Adopted,” Southern School News, undated.

  34. Almond quoted in “Massive Resistance Meets Its Match,” in Lassiter and Lewis, The Moderates’ Dilemma, 125–30; Leon Dure, “Virginia’s New Freedoms,” Georgia Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 3–16; Southern Spaces, 41.

  35. “Virginia Launches Court Action Under New Laws,” Southern School News, November 1956.

  36. “Bill for Tuition Grants Introduced,” Southern School News, February 1963.

  37. H. Harrison Jenkins, “The Obituaries for Freedom of Choice Are Premature,” Southern Education Report (January–February 1968).

  38. Fritz Hollings, “Freedom of Choice School Desegregation,” speech, February 1, 1970, US Senate, Ernest F. Hollings Collection, University of South Carolina, http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/how/id/33.

  39. Hollings, “Freedom of Choice School Desegregation.”

  40. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 136–46; Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 118–28.

  41. “At Least 68 Per Cent of Systems in South Indicate Compliance,” Southern School News, March 1965; Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 124–28; Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 118–28; Patrick J. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 1–50.

  42. “School Districts Hasten to Meet Act’s Requirements,” Southern School News, March 1965; “Few Boards Have Received Approval of Compliance Plans,” Southern School News, April 1965; “Desegregation,” Southern Education Report (July–August 1965): 31.

  43. “Courts Order Seven Systems to Alter Plans,” Southern School News, July 1964; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 331; Griffin v. School Board, 377 U.S. 218 (1964).

  44. Alexander v. Holmes County Bd. of Ed., 396 U.S. 1218 (1969).

  45. White, “Managed Compliance,” 385–86; Benjamin Muse, “The South’s Troubled Year,” Southern Education Report (June 1969): 14–17; Southern Education Report (January–February 1968): 19–21; Michael B. Wise, “School Desegregation: The Court, the Congress, and the President,” School Review 82, no. 2 (February 1974): 159–60.

  46. Jon Hale, The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 106–7.

  47. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 171–72; Jerry DeLaughter, “In Crowded Coliseum, Quiet Hotel School Protest Calls Resound,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, February 9, 1970.

  48. Colin Dwyer, “Colson Whitehead, Rep. John Lewis Among National Book Award Winners,” National Public Radio, November 16, 2016; Lewis and D’Orso, Walking with the Wind, 23–26, 52 (quote), 54–56; Williams, Self-Taught.

  CHAPTER TWO: MILTON FRIEDMAN AND THE PROBLEMS WITH CHOICE IN CHICAGO

  1. Lanny Ebenstein, Milton Friedman: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5–14.

  2. Ebenstein, Milton Friedman, 105–10.

  3. Ebenstein, Milton Friedman, 105–10; Milton and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 40–41.

  4. Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 341.

  5. Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, x–xi; Ebenstein, Milton Friedman, 11.

  6. Angela Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion For Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 6 (2007): 1087–1101; Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016); Mohamed Younis, “Most Americans See American Dream as Achievable,” Gallup, July 17, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/260741/americans-american-dream-achievable.aspx.

  7. “This Year’s Economics Prize to an American,” Nobel Prize, press release, October 14, 1976, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1976/press-release.

  8. “This Year’s Economics Prize to an American.”

  9. Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt, 1980); Free to Choose, PBS television series, 1980.

  10. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert Solo and Eugene Ewald (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 123–44.

  11. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education”; Suitts, Overturning Brown, 38–39.

  12. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” 131.

  13. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” 131.

  14. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” 131.

  15. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education”; Southern Spaces, 38–39.

  16. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 40th anniv. ed. (1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 118.

  17. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 118.

  18. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education.”

  19. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 117.

  20. Steve Suitts, Overturning Brown: The Segregationis
t Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2020), 54–60; Steve Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern ‘School Choice’ Movement,” Southern Spaces (June 4, 2019), https://southernspaces.org/2019/segregationists-libertarians-and-modern-school-choice-movement; Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 111–15.

  21. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 115–17.

  22. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Penguin Books, 2017); Andrew Hartman, “The Master Class on the Make: How the White Backlash Found Its Academic Bona Fides,” The Baffler 37 (December 2017), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/master-class-on-the-make-hartman.

  23. Friedman quoted in “Friedman Cautions Against Rights Bill,” Harvard Crimson, May 5, 1964, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1964/5/5/friedman-cautions-against-rights-bill-pmilton; Suitts, Overturning Brown, 54–60; Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern ‘School Choice’ Movement.”

  24. Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 368.

  25. Milton Friedman, “The Goldwater View of Economics,” New York Times, October 11, 1964; Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 370; MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 88–92.

  26. Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 370–71; MacLean, Democracy in Chains, 88–92.

  27. Ansley Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 4, 25–27.

  28. See Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis, 4–15.

  29. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 118.

  30. Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation (New York: Picador, 2016), 40–41; Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3; Urban Renewal and the Negro in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Urban League, 1958), 10, Table 1; Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 6.

  31. Urban Renewal and the Negro in Chicago, 11.

  32. On the history of racial covenants, see Jeffrey D. Gonda, Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

  33. Moore, The South Side, 41–43.

  34. Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto, 40–42.

  35. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 372–75; Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto, 40–42.

  36. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 396–98.

  37. Moore, The South Side, 44–48.

  38. Urban Renewal and the Negro in Chicago, Table 1 and Table 2; Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto, 27–29; Worth Kamili Hayes, Schools of Our Own: Chicago’s Golden Age of Black Private Education (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 49–50.

  39. Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto, 31–34.

  40. “How Chicago Is Redeveloping Slum Areas,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 28, 1952; “Preventing Tomorrow’s Slums: A Citizens Action Program,” Hyde Park Historical Society Collection, Box 78, Folder 17, University of Chicago Library; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 100–107, 122–27; Paul V. Betters, “The United States Housing Act 1949,” Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 20, no. 3 (September 1949): 375–78.

  41. Urban Renewal and the Negro in Chicago, 4; Hayes, Schools of Our Own, 27–31.

  42. Kimpton quoted in Austin C. Wehrwein, “Chicago U. Spurs Renewal Project,” New York Times, November 1, 1959; LaDale C. Winling, Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 95; Eddie R. Cole, “‘We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums’: The University and Housing Discrimination,” chap. 2 in The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 51.

  43. Cole, “‘We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums,’“ 41.

  44. Cole, “‘We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums,’“ 50; “The Hyde Park–Kenwood Urban Renewal Survey,” Spring-Summer 1956, 171, Hyde Park Historical Society Collection, Box 11, Folder 13 (“Urban Renewal Survey”), University of Chicago Library.

  45. Urban Renewal and the Negro in Chicago, 13, Table 1.

  46. Facts on the Conditions of Hyde Park, February 1957, Hyde Park Historical Society Collection, Box 72, Folder 27, University of Chicago Library; Robert Stevens, “Community Leads Way to Rehabilitation of Cities,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1960.

  47. “Director’s Report, 1957 Annual Meeting,” 3–4, Hyde Park Historical Society Collection, Box 72, Folder 6, “Hyde-Park Kenwood Community Conference, Directors Report, 1957,” University of Chicago Library.

  48. Robert Stevens, “Community Leads Way to Rehabilitation of Cities,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1960, in Hyde Park Historical Society Collection, Box 78, Folder 13, “Chicago Tribune, ‘The Hyde Park Story,’“ Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago.

  49. Stevens, “Community Leads Way to Rehabilitation of Cities,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1960.

  50. Quoted in Austin C. Wehrwein, “Chicago U. Spurs Renewal Project,” New York Times, November 1, 1959; Winling, Building the Ivory Tower, 95; Margaret Weir, “Urban Poverty and Defensive Localism,” Dissent 41 (Summer 1994): 337–42; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

  51. Wehrwein, “Chicago U. Spurs Renewal Project”; Cole, “‘We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums,’“ 51; Davarian L. Baldwin, “The ‘800-Pound Gargoyle’: The Long History of Higher Education and Urban Development on Chicago’s South Side,” American Quarterly 67, no. 1 (March 2015): 84–87; Delmont, “Making Philadelphia Safe for ‘WFIL-adelphia’: Television, Housing, and Defensive Localism in Postwar Philadelphia,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 1: 89–113.

  52. Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto, 42–45, 135–39 (“stable” on 137).

  53. Cole, “‘We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums,’“ 68–73.

  54. Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto, 42–45, 135–39, quote on 137.

  55. Cole, “‘We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums,’“ 49; Wehrwein, “Chicago U. Spurs Renewal Project.”

  56. Cole, “‘We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums,’“ 49; Wehrwein, “Chicago U. Spurs Renewal Project”; “Citizens Mass Meeting,” in Hyde Park Historical Society Collection, Box 78, Folder 19, University of Chicago Library.

  57. Daley quoted in “The Hyde Park Story,” 3, in Hyde Park Historical Society Collection, Box 78, Folder “Chicago Tribune, “The Hyde Park Story,” University of Chicago Library.

  58. Elizabeth Todd-Breeland, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 26.

  59. See Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis, 4–15.

  60. Dionne Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965–1985 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 11–15.

  61. Webb v. Board of Education of City of Chicago, 223 F. Supp. 466 (N.D. Ill. 1963).

  62. Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 13–14.

  63. Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 4; Nicholas Kryczka, “Building a Constituency for Racial Integration: Chicago’s Magnet Schools and the Prehistory of School Choice,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 1 (February 2019): 1–34; Moore, The South Side, 113–17.

  64. Todd-Breland, A Political Education, 27–31; Moore, The South Side, 117–18; Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 19–20.

  65. Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 1–3.

  66. Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 1–3.

  67. Todd-Breeland, A
Political Education, 29–31; Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 15, 19–21; Moore, The South Side, 118–20; on the implications of this history, see Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

  68. Friedman, Freedom and Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 118.

  69. Martin Luther King Jr., “Chicago Campaign,” chap. 28 in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Time Warner, 1998), in Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/publications/autobiography-martin-luther-king-jr-contents/chapter-28-chicago-campaign.

  70. Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 341.

  71. Friedman quoted in “Friedman Cautions Against Rights Bill”; Suitts, Overturning Brown, 54–60; Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern ‘School Choice’ Movement.”

  CHAPTER THREE: RACISM BY YET ANOTHER NAME

  1. Rakes quoted in Celia Wren, “Stars and Strife: A Clash of Cultures at Boston’s City Hall in 1976 Symbolized the City’s Years-Long Confrontation with the Busing of Schoolchildren,” Smithsonian, April 2006, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/stars-and-strife-113668570.

  2. Jack Tager, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 220–21; “Life After Iconic 1976 Photo: The American Flag’s Role in Racial Protest,” National Public Radio, September 18, 2016.

  3. Wren, “Stars and Strife”; Tager, Boston Riots, 221.

  4. Millicent Brown, interview by Vanessa Jackson, Atlanta, 2005, Avery Research Center, Charleston, South Carolina, transcript in possession of the author; Millicent Brown, interview with the author, February 23, 2020.

  5. Lewis and Orso, Walking with the Wind, 51–52.

  6. Orville Vernon Burton, Beatrice Burton, and Simon Appleford, “‘Seeds in Unlikely Soil’: The Briggs v. Elliot School Segregation Case,” in Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina During the Twentieth Century, ed. Winfred E. Moore and Orville Vernon Burton (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 191.