The Choice We Face Read online

  As evidenced by vocational education, discussions of academic tracking, and the presence of business owners in local school governance, schooling in America had long been susceptible to the idea that education should be run as a business, or at least that the aims of education should align with those of the job market. Friedman built on this, envisioning the entire field of education as a free market. Schools would function as places of business in the larger market. Teachers and administrators would act as service providers. Students and their families would be viewed as consumers. Schools that met consumer demand and provided good services as measured by test scores would remain open. It followed that education would be viewed as a business, but Friedman’s logic transformed the entire context of how education should be provided and the government’s role in it.

  Friedman used rational choice and free market theory to argue that the nation’s education system would become more responsive to the needs of parents if they were free to choose where their children attended school. Redistributing school funding directly to the individual, or consumer, rather than to local school districts or state agencies would provide a better education, or product. As in a free market, the best schools would stay in business as they gained the tuition dollars of customers who used vouchers. The worst schools, like bad businesses, would close due to their inability to attract customers.

  Parents, acting as consumers in their own best interest, would inspire competition among schools, which would theoretically improve the entire market. Parents, as rational consumers, would select the best educational services the market offered. Friedman argued that “competitive private enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands than either nationalized enterprises or enterprises run to serve other purposes.”11 But he seemed to offer no insights into how race and racism played a determining role in where parents would send their children to school and with whom. At first glance, Friedman’s thoughts appear to transcend race, but his essay includes a long footnote that is often overlooked in the history of school choice. Just before he published his essay, Friedman was made aware of plans to use public money to privatize education in the South, and he used this footnote to distance himself from southern opposition to integration. He opposed this southern resistance, but not on moral grounds. He thought that southern plans were “a striking case of the possible defect” of his idea of “public financing but private operation of education.”12

  Upon further reflection, evident in a later revised version of the essay, Friedman saw the South as the ultimate test of the government’s commitment to individuals’ right to select their children’s school. While Friedman made sure to say that he detested segregation and racial prejudice, he noted, “It is not an appropriate function of the state to try to force individuals to act in accordance with my—or anyone else’s—views.”13 This included racial prejudice, so long as the attitudes did not physically harm others. If the government had no business intruding upon free speech, Friedman reasoned, then the government also had no right to intervene with the individual’s freedom of choice. Based on his articulation of the proper role of government in education, Friedman concluded that the government had no right in a free market, capitalistic society to force segregation or, conversely, “nonsegregation.” People had a right to be racist in views and action, he maintained, as much as people had a right to be nonracist or antiracist.14

  For Friedman, private schools resolved the dilemma presented by the “evils” of being forced by the government to choose between segregated and nonsegregated schooling. Under his proposed system of school choice, “there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to.”15 This “third alternative” was precisely what Virginia’s freedom of choice plans advocated. Virginia legislators adopted a freedom of choice policy and, by the time Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom in 1962, Prince Edward County had closed its public schools, denying all children a public education. Tuition grants and vouchers supported by the state in practice only went to White families. It was a policy that Friedman endorsed in principle. He even predicted success: “We should see a flowering of the schools available in Virginia,” he noted, “with an increase in their diversity, a substantial if not spectacular rise in the quality of the leading schools, and a later rise in the quality of the rest.”16 The disastrous results of closing public schools for five years proved otherwise.

  In a belief that is widely shared among school choice advocates, Friedman claimed that race did not and would not matter in an ideal application of choice. He predicted marked improvement through school choice plans for “the ablest and most ambitious Negro youth.”17 If one is able, ambitious, committed, and dedicated—like he himself had been—one could succeed. These ideas resonated with southern “freedom of choice” advocates because he placed the onus to desegregate on those who supported integration. It was up to them, not the government, to persuade individuals to support desegregation. Friedman argued, in the long footnote in his 1955 essay, “The appropriate activity for those who oppose segregation and racial prejudice is to try to persuade others of their views; if and as they succeed, the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the nonmixed, and a gradual transition will take place.”18 In his revised essay seven years later, he urged his readers to “try by behavior and speech to foster the growth of attitudes and opinions that would lead mixed schools to become the rule and segregated schools the rare exception.”19

  Friedman was a principled libertarian, which complicated any “conservative” label. Friedman applied the same principles in his opposition to fair housing legislation, arguing that the government had no right to intervene in the management of negative or nonviolent harm, as he conceived it. He argued that business owners have a right to apply racially discriminatory hiring practices if desired by a majority of customers or employees, just as they have to the right to not discriminate based on race.20 He also extended his opposition to intervention in the budding discourse around “right-to-work” or anti-union legislation.21 For Friedman, government intervention to ban unions was tantamount to the same overreach he so adamantly opposed in the field of education. As historian Nancy MacLean has demonstrated, Friedman was part of a larger network led by other economists, such as James Buchanan at the University of Virginia, who established the intellectual foundations for a network of wealthy elites to restructure state and federal policy to protect their rights (and their privileged position) from being diminished by the majority of Americans, who were not in the upper echelons but potentially wielded the power to regulate the elite.22

  Clearly, Friedman stood in direct conflict with the civil rights movement. Beyond providing intellectual rationale for the “freedom of choice” plans that emerged across the South, Friedman, in principle, opposed the milestone legislation of the movement: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Speaking to the Young Conservative Club at Harvard just three months before the passage of the act, Friedman criticized the bill on principle, upholding his assertion that freedom must be applied equally by asking: “If we pass a law saying that race shall not be a factor in employment, then what grounds do we have for opposing a law that race shall be a factor?” He again reinforced “the general principle that the state [should] not interfere in these [civil rights] matters.”23 To put it simply, according to Friedman, the government should not be used to protect the rights of the routinely and historically disenfranchised.

  Friedman’s opposition to federal spending and advocacy for free markets would soon be leveraged by the New Right, a movement to oppose federally mandated desegregation and interventionist economic regulation. Part of this rising tide of conservative policymakers, Arizona outsider Barry Goldwater hired Friedman to serve as economic advisor during his 1964 presidential campaign, and Friedman’s economic theory turned even more conservative while he continued to ardently oppose government intervention. Friedman later noted that he �
�was impressed with Goldwater’s firm adherence to basic principles, his courage in taking unpopular positions, his willingness to sacrifice what seemed like political expediency to stand up for what he thought was right, and, not least, his quick wit.”24 Friedman helped shape Goldwater’s economic platform and provided numerous engagements in New York as he taught as a visiting professor at Columbia. In the New York Times, he outlined Goldwater’s basic philosophy, which dovetailed neatly with his own. Goldwater believed in the “freedom of the individual to pursue his own interests so long as he does not interfere with the freedom of others to do likewise; opportunity for the ordinary man to use his resources as effectively as possible to advance the well being of himself and his family.”25 The ideology did not win the converts he sought in the New York intellectual community—a lot he chastised as homogenous and provincial. To Friedman, the liberals of New York accepted “a standard set of views complete with cliché answers to every objection, of smug self-satisfaction at belonging to an in-group.”26

  Though Goldwater was defeated by Lyndon Johnson in the landslide election of 1964, a major change further upset America’s troubled political waters. Friedman and Goldwater’s philosophy captured the heart of Dixie, and their proposals shaped the reorganization of the Republican Party’s economic platform. Through his connections during the Goldwater campaign, Friedman met Ronald Reagan, not yet governor of California, who would also be key in the conservative economic realignment of the Republican Party. Their movement similarly embraced race-neutral rhetoric and a defense of individual rights. This attracted southern segregationists with whom Friedman personally disagreed but whose right to school choice he supported.

  But race could not be dismissed in a footnote. It was an absolute factor that shaped individual decision-making. Many Americans were not permitted to enroll their children in the school of their choice. The nation watched as White segregationists harassed, threatened, and terrorized Black students who enrolled in White schools. And White school “consumers” often conformed to a racist logic, making this a truth of their economic “rationality.”

  While Friedman’s ideas would flourish, the “educational marketplace” remained harmfully unfair. In the years after the Brown decision, public schools, especially in the South, grew stagnant, and those who relied on them suffered. Hopes were dashed. Opportunity was denied. As historian Ansley Erickson noted of the period after World War II and before the onset of desegregation in the mid-1960s, “Schooling interacted with a broad range of municipal policy areas, from city planning practice, housing development and urban renewal plans to local and state economic efforts.”27 In Chicago, where Friedman lived and wrote, this dynamic led to White flight to the suburbs, with the weight of concomitant problems, such as failing schools, squarely on the backs of Black people.28 Contrary to Friedman’s assertions, school choice perpetuated inequality.

  The University of Chicago was Friedman’s incubator. While serving on the faculty, Friedman published his most important work, served as economic advisor to a burgeoning conservative movement, and accepted the Nobel Prize in economics. The school’s location, the city of Chicago, was a potential laboratory to study how his ideas could reform education. Friedman asserted in 1962: “There is also no doubt at all that if the Virginia [school choice] system were introduced in Chicago the result would be an appreciable decrease in segregation, and a great widening in the opportunities.”29 As with Virginia, this outlook proved tragically false.

  The foundation of the grand experiment in choice was inherently flawed from the start. Friedman never factored into his analysis the endemic racism and segregationist history of Chicago, and the violence racism fomented there during the 1950s and 1960s. His position in the ivory tower colored—or, rather, whitewashed—his way of seeing it.

  Chicago was a deeply segregated city. It still is today. The city’s segregation barriers grew in direct relation to the arrival of over half a million African Americans between 1910 and 1970, when six and a half million Blacks left the South as part of the Great Migration. The Black population in Chicago rose to over one million by the end of the massive migration to the North. In 1920, Black residents constituted only 4 percent of the city’s population, but by 1956, two years after the Brown decision, African Americans and other communities of color made up 19 percent of the city’s population, and, by the height of the civil rights movement, African Americans made up 30 percent.30 The Urban League in Chicago, the historic African American association for empowerment founded in 1910, extrapolated in 1958 that 80 percent of the Black population in the Chicago area would be concentrated in the city by 1965 while only one-half of the White population would reside within city limits.31

  Once African Americans arrived to the promised land of Chicago, they encountered the same codified racial segregation that existed in the South. Whites implemented racially discriminatory housing policies and practices to confront what they largely saw as a Black “invasion.” Real estate boards and agents across the city coordinated a code of racially restrictive covenants, which dictated where to sell and to whom. These covenants became embedded in property deeds, home loans, and business ethics. After the Supreme Court found racial ordinances to be unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley (1917), racially restrictive covenants rested on private agreements, unspoken understandings, and contracts among real estate brokers, homeowner associations, and business owners.32 The exclusionary process was also determined by federal programs including the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration that refused or grossly limited access to home loans and other financing to families of color. Those steered to areas that were demarcated on maps by literal red lines—”redlining”—found it exceedingly difficult to gain financial assistance at all or loans to buy homes anywhere.33 Denying the capital needed to buy homes and build wealth, lending policies were frighteningly efficient tools to corral people of color into racialized ghettos. In Chicago, covenants ultimately relegated Black tenants and property owners to the South Side, where they had traditionally lived in mixed neighborhoods. As in other northern cities employing the same practices, African Americans were boxed in, shut out, and denied access to other affordable neighborhoods in the city.

  Whites militantly enforced the strict racial boundaries they drew. Violence was not uncommon. Historian Arnold Hirsh asserted that the late 1940s was “an era analogous to that of 1917–21, when one racially motivated mobbing or arson occurred every twenty days.”34 Instances of violence across the city defined the lived experiences of people of color. Harvey Clark, a veteran of the Second World War, and his wife and two children were relegated to a one-room tenement unit on the segregated South Side. By 1951, they’d found a place in Cicero, the virtually all-White working-class neighborhood on the city’s West Side. As the moving truck pulled up to their new, larger apartment, a small White mob greeted them with jeers and taunts. The Clark family ultimately left that day, once the police ordered them to do so. When, later that summer, the Clarks managed to go back and move their belongings into their new abode, the White Circle League, a segregationist vigilante association, inspired another mob to invade the apartment. Ransacking The Clarks’ home, the mob threw their furniture out the window, piled it next to other family belongings, and then torched it. This was only the start. The mob then firebombed the entire building and threw bricks at arriving firefighters. They owned the streets. The violence subsided only when the governor called in the National Guard to quell the riot, which lasted for four days. Over one hundred Whites were arrested, yet none were indicted.35

  A Black recording artist who had earned the respect of White America at large fared no better. As Mahalia Jackson searched for a home in a White section of the South Side, Whites protested, organized meetings, and rallied their neighbors to resist. Once she moved in, Whites fired shots into her home. They harassed her and her family with late night phone calls. They threatened their lives. Police were sta
tioned outside her home.36

  This violent reality belies the claim that residential segregation was “natural” and that those who lived in segregated neighborhoods voluntarily chose to do so. Self-segregation is nothing more than a myth, and Chicago provided the tangible evidence. The area surrounding Milton Friedman’s neighborhood and the University of Chicago was the site of fierce and highly visible lawsuits over housing segregation. In 1938, Carl Hansberry, the father of playwright Lorraine Hansberry who was eight years old at the time, purchased a home in Woodlawn, an all-White neighborhood just southwest of the university. Whites harassed the Hansberry family and threw bricks through the windows at night. Mrs. Hansberry kept watch throughout the night, pacing through their new home or sitting in a rocking chair with a loaded gun in hand. Anna Lee, a White woman, filed suit on behalf of the Hyde Park–Woodlawn Improvement Society, charging that the Hansberry family had violated a restrictive agreement that prohibited home sales to African Americans. Whites seeking to drive the family out won in the local and state courts. Though the Supreme Court eventually overturned the case in Hansberry v. Lee (1940), the family was forced to leave the neighborhood. The ordeal inspired young Hansberry, who would pen the acclaimed A Raisin in the Sun.37

  As courts struck down racial covenants after Hansberry and established legal precedent, Black families moved where and when they could to escape the overcrowded and overpriced conditions of racialized ghettos. In response, Whites moved out. The suburban population of Chicago exploded after the collapse of overt racial covenants and during the years of the civil rights movement, growing by more than 400,000 or 15 percent. More than 270,000 Whites left in the early part of the 1950s alone, a massive White flight out of the city. Outside the city limits, people of color—denied the loans and capital to build and buy homes—composed only 5 percent of the suburban population, a percentage that remained steady throughout the 1950s. As Whites moved out of the city, African Americans moved into previously all-White urban neighborhoods. These parts of the city were “in transition” to becoming all-Black, triggering serious alarm among Whites who stayed.38