The Choice We Face Read online

  As Friedman emerged as the economist of the New Right, he largely ignored the racism of the supposedly liberal or progressive northern city of Chicago. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated of a rally in Chicago in 1966: “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I had never seen—even in Mississippi—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago.”69 Friedman registered a very different reality. He would recall of the tumultuous period, “Despite [my] having [held] views that were not ‘politically correct’ . . . I do not recall any significant unpleasantness in those years.”70 Friedman remained aloof, distant, and privileged, adamant that all would work out for the best if the government just left things alone. He fiddled as Chicago burned. Friedman’s theory gave northerners an alibi for their racism, a phenomenon he noted in his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, observing that northerners supported the act only because they thought segregation was a “regional problem” limited to the South.71 Whites could claim they wanted their children to live in the suburbs and attend suburban schools because they were superior in quality, not because they were lily-white. School choice and the dismantling of public education could now proceed on a national scale.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Racism by Yet Another Name

  Busing, White Resistance, and the Foundations for a National School Choice Model

  JOSEPH RAKES was a seventeen-year-old White high school student in South Boston in 1976. Long-haired and decked out in denim, Rakes looked like a typical teenager of the era. On the morning of April 5, he linked up with a group of his friends from South Boston and Charlestown High Schools at City Hall Plaza. They gathered to protest mandated busing—a transportation plan in Boston that bused White students and students of color across the city to achieve “racial balance.” Their schools had been all White until busing, though that is not how Rakes or others saw it. “When the busing started, it was, ‘You can’t have half your friends’—that’s the way it was put towards us,” Rakes recalled thirty years after this tense moment in history. “They took half the guys and girls I grew up with and said, ‘You’re going to school on the other side of town.’ Nobody understood it.”1 At the time Rakes and his crew descended upon the plaza, the city had been torn asunder by racial violence over the busing issue. The demonstration at city hall that morning was the most recent of hundreds of busing protests upending the city. Ted Landsmark, a Black lawyer unaware of the rally, was rushing to a meeting when he ran into the mob in the plaza. Rakes and his friends turned on Landsmark and assaulted him.2

  Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald American, was there, camera in hand, to capture the moment. In a now-famous photograph, The Soiling of Old Glory, Rakes wields a US flag like a polearm, appearing to be about to spear the lawyer, who is frozen in time, leaping back, contorted, to evade the flag. In fact, the flag missed Landsmark, but other blows landed, breaking his glasses and his nose. Forman would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize that year for his photograph.3

  Published locally in the Boston Herald American but eventually circulated around the globe, the photograph shocked the sensibilities of White northerners vested in the idea that the North was a haven of freedom and equality. The image and the reality it communicated were especially haunting to those who had toiled in the southern movement against Jim Crow. Millicent Brown, one of the first eleven African American students to desegregate schools in Charleston, South Carolina, was one of these. After a harrowing experience as a full-time civil rights movement activist in the South, a battle-scarred Brown had moved north to Boston to pursue studies at Emerson College. As someone who had grown up “indoctrinated with the North-South divide,” she later said, “I first went to Boston because . . . I needed to get out of the South. I had decided that these problems were of the South. I said, ‘I’m getting the heck out of Dodge. So I’m going to go North where things were different.’ And where do I go? Boston. When? Right at the height of the Boston busing controversy.” Brown added, “I ran away from southern racism but ran into something else.”4 The something else was a system of racism that transcended the Mason-Dixon Line. The lived reality of the North presented the same problems as Dixie, just under a different name. And, as in the South, it was public education that comprised a battleground. The rhetoric of the southern school choice movement was going nationwide.

  The unrest in Boston—like much of the racial tension of the 1960s and earlier—involved buses. This mode of transportation held enormous significance in educational history. School buses were regularly used to transport children across vast tracts of rural America. For those who had formerly walked miles to school, buses could be a godsend. For John Lewis in Alabama the “rattling, rusty jalopy [and] old hand-me-down” bus was a constant reminder of inequality.5 But for Rev. Joseph DeLaine in South Carolina, a bus was a symbol of simple justice. In 1947, wishing to ensure the safe transport of the kids in his community to school, Rev. DeLaine led his congregation in rural Clarendon County in petitioning the school board to provide a bus for Black students. When the board denied their request, they sued. As lead counsel, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall argued the case in Charleston and leveraged the bus complaint to argue that de jure segregation was unconstitutional. Though the NAACP lost this particular case, it later became one of the five cases that comprised the monumental Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision.6 Less than one year after Brown, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a White section of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. In the boycott that followed, which precipitated the meteoric rise of the young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the bus emerged on the national scene as a quintessential symbol of freedom. In 1961, young activists boarded buses for freedom. The Freedom Riders associated with the Congress for Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) intended to desegregate interstate buses and bus terminals from Washington, DC, to New Orleans. Despite being firebombed and physically assaulted and having to resort to flying the last leg of their route via airplane, the Freedom Riders bestowed new symbolic meaning on buses.

  By 1976, as Boston erupted in violence over integration, the classic American school bus—the yellow bus with retractable stop sign—had come to stand for desegregation. Many White Americans despised it, seeing it as an unwanted jalopy.

  From the Brown decision in 1954 through the late 1960s, the American public largely viewed desegregation as a southern issue. According to the prevailing logic of the North, what happened in Boston was an anomaly. The conflict in Boston was not really based in racism like it was in the South. For centuries, the North had beckoned those who toiled and suffered under the chains of slavery and the oppressive laws of Jim Crow. Yet the lived realities of African Americans who escaped or moved to the North were at odds with the region’s reputation as a haven. Dr. King’s observations in 1966, for instance—that Chicago was no different from Birmingham, Alabama—did not conform to the mythology of northern freedom. His biting remark merely affirmed the realities of millions like Millicent Brown.

  Whites in Chicago, New York, Boston, and Detroit responded with violence to the mere notion of integration. Northern Whites pleaded that court-ordered desegregation infringed upon their rights. Rather than integrate schools, they sought different options, all of which weakened the traditional public school system. Whites fled to the suburbs, leaving behind cities depleted of investment and a tax base. Building on a long national history of racial redlining and discriminatory loan practices since the early 1900s, legal and extralegal barriers ensured that suburban enclaves remained White. Whites also claimed to be paying more taxes than Black families and families of color and therefore entitled to better schooling, even if unequal. When busing remedies were proposed to rectify ongoing segregation, Whites across the North actively demonstrated against it. In the most “liberal” of American spaces, like Chicago and Boston, Whites practiced the same modes of resistance as they did in Dixie to avoid integration.

  White parents in
the North made it clear that they were not opposed to sending their kids to schools with Black or Brown children, per se. Northerners had witnessed a decade of civil rights struggle in the South, where children were harassed, protesters and activists killed, and the US military called in to escort Black students to White schools. Northerners were not like that.

  Northern Whites instead directed their angst against the process of desegregation. To them, the process was unfair, especially busing. Many northern cities had developed plans to transport students across neighborhoods to mitigate the effects of segregation. This was a way of responding to increasing pressure from civil rights coalitions whose members held no illusions—segregation was upheld north of the Mason-Dixon Line as fiercely as it was below it. Infuriated Whites across the North raised such a clamor against busing that it effectively shaped the platforms of presidential candidates and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though busing by court order or by school districts voluntarily actually affected a miniscule portion of the northern school population, the issue captured the attention of the nation.

  The impact of White northern reaction to desegregation was widespread and ultimately devastating to public education. Parents and policymakers in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston inspired widespread divestment from education. Many northern Whites perpetuated the belief that public education was broken beyond repair. It was now a broken system not worth investing in. Former Harvard president James Conant’s influential book Slums and Suburbs portrayed a dismal scene of urban education while using the rhetoric of “slums” that framed Black neighborhoods as inherently inferior places. Best-selling author, education reformer, and homeschooling advocate John Holt even referred to students in urban public schools as “slum children.” Americans widely saw public schools in “blighted” cities as a “blackboard jungle,” believing that such schools—and consequently their children—were in peril. Jonathan Kozol, a teacher in the Boston public schools who published the award-winning Death at an Early Age, provided a view from the trenches in the 1960s. For Kozol, public education was not only failing; it was slowly killing kids, existentially and physically. He claimed that students in American schools were part of “a losing battle to survive.” The same message was reinforced by popular historian Nat Hentoff in These Children Are Dying.7

  Calls increased for America to heed the warning signs and scrap the public school system altogether. This toxic mindset made choice palatable to the majority of Americans nationwide, not just as a way to avoid the prospect of widescale desegregation in the South.

  Much like the civil rights movement in the South, an impressive coterie of activists was coordinating strategies to desegregate northern cities. In New York City, coalitions such as the Intergroup Committee on New York’s Public Schools, Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York City Schools, and the New York Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools challenged the city to live up to the ideals of integration. Working alongside the NAACP, grassroots coalitions flourished under the leadership of civil rights luminaries such as Ella Baker. They coordinated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC. Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose famed “doll tests” that illustrated the adverse effects of segregation among children and were cited as critical evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, were active in New York as well. Rev. Milton Galamison, a Princeton Theological Seminary graduate and president of the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP, facilitated the rise of a grassroots cohort committed to exposing and addressing segregation in their city.8 The experience of northern activists who had fought in the southern civil rights movement proved useful in the North as they successfully pressured school districts to adopt desegregation policies.

  The coalition prompted school officials in New York to respond by the 1960s, but the city’s solution was limited to “free choice transfer,” “open enrollment,” or “permissive zoning” plans. Much like the freedom of choice plans in the South, only a select number of families of color were permitted to transfer to schools outside their allotted attendance zones. The plans, limited to select neighborhoods, impacted less than 5 percent of all students of color who were eligible, resulting in token desegregation that left a segregated system intact.9

  Though limited in scope, the plans were enough to incite violence and protest among Whites. In March 1964—just one month after civil rights activists led over 450,000 students in a New York City boycott of public schools to protest segregation—over 10,000 White parents marched on city hall, directing vitriol against plans to bus students across district lines.10 White parents, led by mothers, used the same protest methods that civil rights activists had used to capture national attention in the South. They marched, carried signs, and chanted. Placards across the Brooklyn Bridge read, “We will not be moved.” Another said, “I will not put my children on a bus.”11 In September 1964, the same mothers staged a larger boycott that kept over 275,000 students out of school. “I would rather go to jail,” one mother noted, “than see my kids bused out of the neighborhood.”12 In response to the White protests, the board of education called for the transfer of about 13,000 students, only 383 of whom would have to travel by bus.13 White fears of compulsory busing were out of sync with the actual numbers proposed by the city’s very modest desegregation plans.

  Many parents drew rhetorical distinctions that distanced themselves from those they saw as virulent racists in the South, in part by making claims as taxpayers. As historian Camille Walsh noted, White segregationists across the nation put forth arguments that they were taxpayers who paid more into the system than Black parents did and that therefore their children were entitled to a better education or to attend the school their parents chose for them. Parents in New York named their coalition “Parents and Taxpayers” to articulate that it was not desegregation that they opposed. It was the affront to their rights as parents and taxpayers that they so bitterly protested.14 The false claim that their rights as taxpayers had been violated was connected to a larger ideology of libertarianism including fiduciary liberty and individualism that resonated with the more nuanced or “moderate” calls for segregation in the South. Whereas White southerners under the banner of “freedom of choice” claimed that the federal government trampled on their right to choose a school, Parents and Taxpayers in New York claimed that the local and state governments treaded on their rights as taxpayers. New Yorkers could oppose busing (and other ostensible desegregation plans such as freedom of choice) because such plans were not based on their consent as taxed citizens.

  Such claims as taxpayers were also an affirmation of White rights. As one sign read in a “White boycott” in New York City in September 1964: “Give us back our neighborhood school, our children also have civil rights.”15 Whites reacted vehemently in Queens, where a “pairing plan” aimed to pair—or merge—a predominantly White school in Jackson Heights (P.S. 149) with a school in a predominantly Black district (P.S. 92). White parents contended that the plans “denied their children the right to attend their neighborhood school because they are white,” charging racial discrimination against Whites that violated the principles of the Brown decision.16 In this vein, parents angrily and publicly opposed busing, not desegregation, at least on the surface. Elected officials tended to follow suit. Joseph Krasowski, an Illinois state senator, captured the sentiment, noting, “I don’t oppose school integration, but the school board shouldn’t stress integration more than education . . . you can’t foist this upon the people.”17

  The New York Times polled New Yorkers in the midst of growing unrest. The results are instructive. A majority of respondents in one poll from 1964 believed that the civil rights movement had “gone too far,” and 54 percent thought that the movement and its demands for equality and integration were going too fast.18 Over 80 percent said they opposed the school transfer plans. Nearly 50 percent claimed they would send their children to a private school rather than permit them to be part of desegregation plans, whether or
not that meant busing.19 Under the guise of individual rights, New York Whites opposed desegregation with a fervor that matched that of Whites in the South, embracing the same strategies to preserve a system that worked to their advantage.

  As a collective rejection of desegregation gained traction in New York, Whites in Chicago used very similar forms of resistance to busing. Mayor Richard Daley managed to elude federal enforcement of desegregation mandates in Chicago, rendering the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare impotent in pressuring northern cities to integrate meaningfully. Still, in response to the US Office of Education’s complaint against school segregation in Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools announced a desegregation plan, albeit limited in relation to the depth of segregation in the city. Known as the “Redmond Plan” after the city’s superintendent James Redmond, it proposed the two-way busing of 3,500 students that would have created an “integrated” school population technically desegregating schools but maintaining a student body in the participating schools that was 70 percent White. To assuage White concerns, the plan was reduced to one-way busing, transporting just over 500 Black students from Black elementary schools on the south and west sides of the city to White schools in the area. On the first day, a mere 249 students showed up to get on their buses. The modest measure sparked dramatic racial transition and White flight. In less than five years, elementary schools affected by busing transitioned from being 80 percent White to over 80 percent Black.20