Another Dry, White Season

Wendy Johnson

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 1, 3-4

President Clinton’s call for a national conversation on race comes at a pivotal time, a time when the neoconservative misuse of “color-blind” rhetoric has encouraged a willful obliviousness to enduring racial problems and a retreat from any meaningful engagement. Whether or not Clinton’s race initiative can stem this disturbing tide and make progress toward racial justice will depend on the access that minority voices can have to the public ear, the effective content of the conversation, and the willingness of white Americans to listen and act affirmatively. What should the discussion include?

One place to start would be to publicly acknowledge the dramatic racial inequalities that persist. Advocates of racial justice must find ways to publicize and reiterate the facts: that the percentage of blacks and Latinos living in poverty is about three times more than the percentage of whites; that per capita income of blacks and Latinos is

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less than 60 percent that of whites; and that blacks and Latinos are about twice as likely to be unemployed.

Other disparities are lesser known but equally alarming, such as the fact that even middle-class African Americans and Latinos with identical incomes to whites are significantly poorer and less financially secure because their net wealth is about eight times less. Why do minorities have so much less in total assets than whites? To begin with, there is the historical legacy if racial and class oppression in the very direct form of less inherited wealth. Next, continuing institutional discrimination plays a large part. For years, white firms denied life assurance to African Americans, and African Americans ire still denied home mortgages at twice the rate of similarly qualified white applicants.

As such examples attest, the ludicrous notion that we now live in a discrimination-free society must be thoroughly dismissed. Such a repudiation has proven difficult largely due to tactics of white denial. Study after study using matched white and minority applicants (with identical education, work experience, age, and size and similar personal traits) have documented the persistence of discrimination not only in the housing but also the job market. These facts of discrimination, like those of inequality, must become part of the national common sense.

As those members of Congress who amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 realized, the issue of discrimination must by taken out of the realm of personal intention and understood as a systematic process. In hiring practices, for example, minorities are systematically discriminated against because they have fewer contacts with those whites who can alert them to job openings and who make the majority of hiring decisions.

Another way discrimination can persist without conscious or malicious prejudicial intent lies in the normative considerations involved in any selection process. The notion that gatekeepers into schools, jobs, promotions, etc. can somehow impartially select the “most qualified” candidate out of hundreds, or thousands, of applicants by a pure assessment of technical ability is a myth, and must be repeatedly exposed as such. As historian Dan Carter puts it in this issue of Southern Changes, we must “challenge the worship of a handful of standardized tests as though they alone could judge what makes a person qualified for a job or for admission to college or professional school. We have to talk about the ways in which people actually succeed in college, in the workplace, and in life in general.”

In the absence of perfect information, pure impartiality, or even a clear understanding of what being technically qualified for a position really means, normative qualities (including style, mannerisms, deportment, and other personality traits) play a major role in the hiring or promoting process. For many relatively privileged positions in business firms–sales, managerial work, etc.–these personal qualities may play the predominant role.

Unfortunately these qualities are highly subject to class, race, and gender bias. Because white men have monopolized the positions of privilege and authority for centuries, these jobs have been racially and sexually stereotyped to entail the very normative characteristics they possess, while subordinate positions are often stereotyped as appropriate for minorities and women. Asian Americans, for example, are the most educated population in the nation, but they are not promoted in proportionate numbers because they are frequently stereotyped as “technicians” poorly suited for people-oriented managerial work. Introducing people of divergent racial backgrounds, languages, and cultural identities into traditionally white male occupations will help break down such occupational stereotypes and may help change the very structures of power in the process.

Because of occupational stereotyping, entrenched networks, and other forms of systematic discrimination,

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white men continue to dominate the professions and the most influential positions in our society. As noted in The Affirmative Action Debate, edited by George E. Curry, while white men are 33 percent of the population, they constitute 86 percent of the partners in major law firms, 88 percent of the holders of management-level jobs in advertising, 90 percent of those occupying the top positions in the media, 90 percent of the members of the U.S. Senate, and 95 percent of all senior managerial positions at the rank of vice president or above. In Fortune 1000 industrial and Fortune 500 service industries, white men hold 97 percent of senior management positions, while African Americans hold 0.6 percent, Asian Americans 0.3 percent, and Latinos 0.4 percent. As of 1996, there were only two female CEOs in Fortune 1000 companies.

Numbers like these should convince the public that minorities continue to face systematic discrimination in the workplace. Even before entering the job market, however, minorities have already faced substantial structural discrimination in attaining the necessary educational qualifications. As Gary Orfield documents in this issue, the racial and ethnic segregation of African-American and Latino students is spreading across the nation and producing a deepening isolation from middle class students and from successful schools. This segregation, Orfield says, is “not simply racial segregation; it is segregation by class and family and community education background as well.” While only about 5 percent of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children, more than 80 percent of segregated black and Latino schools do. High poverty schools usually have much lower levels of educational performance on virtually all outcomes, for a variety of reasons that Orfield discusses.

Increasing segregation in schools is enabled by persisting residential segregation. This American Apartheid, as one study has deemed it, is perpetuated both by the preference of whites for predominantly white communities and by realtors who respond to this demand by steering black customers away from white neighborhoods. Housing audits conducted over the past two decades have documented the persistence of widespread discrimination against black renters and homebuyers. As with schools, these systematic patterns not only segregate by race but also concentrate poverty.

According to Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., however, it is neither the school-day nor the hours spent in one’s neighborhood which are the most segregated times. “Four o’clock every day,” says Jackson, “when editors meet with their staffs to discuss the next day’s news consumption, is perhaps the most segregated hour in this nation.”

The persistence of segregation in the newsrooms is particularly dangerous because the media plays a big role in deciding how and if issues of race are addressed and whether racial prejudices and stereotypes are challenged or exacerbated. In his article, “News and Blues: Minority Journalists in the South, Twenty-Five Years Later” in this issue, Reginald Stuart points out that while minorities have made impressive gains over the last twenty-five years, they remain under-represented in the media. To make matters worse, federal policies deregulating the media “threaten to wipe out what little minority ownership of mass media properties there is.”

The final ingredient for a successful conversation on race will perhaps be the most challenging. Due to what Dan Carter identifies as the “dogma of the marketplace” dominating the current political climate, the effort to link the issues of racial injustice with those of class exploitation has become more difficult just as it has become more crucial. Both domestically and internationally, a disproportionate number of people of color continue to engage in the world’s most exploitative work at the bottom of the wage and benefits ladder. Racial prejudice helps make the most egregious forms of economic exploitation more tolerable to the white, middle classes of America and other Western industrialized nations, just as it once helped justify the economic exploitations of slavery and colonialism. The conventional notion that it is somehow appropriate or acceptable that blacks, Latinos, or Asians occupy positions of subordination and poverty because of their supposed inferiority (whether defined biologically or, more common today, culturally) acts as a formidable barrier to the formation of broad-based political coalitions capable of demanding international labor market policies geared to minimize exploitation and social welfare policies geared to guarantee decent standards of living.

Is Bill Clinton up to asking the sort of questions raised by this issue of Southern Changes? Rather than waiting in dread through another dry, white season, we must use the space created by Clinton’s initiative to encourage innovative work on remobilizing a consensus for achieving social justice.

News and Blues: Minority Journalists in the South, Twenty-Five Years Later

Reginald Stuart

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 5-9

Editors Note: Twenty-five years ago in July-August, 1972, Reginald Stuart wrote the “Survey of Southern Black Journalists,” for SRC’s South Today. It was our first look at the emergence in large numbers of blacks as full fledged partners in the newsrooms of historically white newspapers, television, and radio stations in the South.

He also wrote about the changing face of reporting on race issues in the region, with stories about the historic WLBT-TV licensing challenge case in Jackson, Mississippi, and how the media covered school desegregation in the South.

In this story, Stuart, who started as a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean and later worked for The New York Times and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, revisits these topics. Now based in Silver Spring, Maryland, he is a contributing editor to Emerge Magazine and a newspaper consultant.

When golfing sensation Tiger Woods donned his champion’s Green jacket this spring, symbolizing his victory at the prestigious Masters Golf tournament, thousands of writers like Joe Oglesby at The Miami Herald were hailing the trailblazer in newspaper columns and commentaries across the country. As an amateur golfer Oglesby had a real appreciation for the feat of a Masters victory and, in this instance, the added historical significance of a man of color winning the contest.

Like Woods, only with far less fanfare and considerably less compensation, Oglesby was quietly making history twenty-five years ago as one of a new crop of young black reporters being turned loose in historically white newsrooms across the South. Like Woods, he is making history today as one of a growing number of black editorial writers in Southern newsrooms.

“When I started, there were very few black folks doing what I was doing,” said Oglesby, who was a general assignment reporter for the St.Petersburg Times in the early 1970s. “I was very idealistic. I was literally answering the call of the Kerner Commission.”

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, was a federal panel appointed by then President Lyndon Johnson to explore the root causes of civil disorders that swept the nation’s cities in the 1960s. In its final report, which will be thirty years old next year, the commission assigned much of the blame for the riots to the white-run news media’s insensitivity and failure to reflect the totality of black life in America.

The South’s news media began to change slowly, but in profound ways, spurred by the civil disorders, the Kerner report, the end of legal apartheid, and action by local citizens’ activists groups like the United Church of Christ and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. It has never been the same.

Oglesby and scores more young blacks like him were hired by white editors and news directors seeking to step out of the past. Today, hundreds of black reporters are real players across the spectrum of the South’s news media.

“Colored” pages began to disappear as news about blacks was integrated into the mainstream of daily journalism. Today, the old reliable black crime story is put in context with news that gives a more total picture of black life and culture.

Black television news reporters and anchors began to appear, even in places like Jackson, Mississippi,

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and Montgomery, Alabama, centers of resistance to the social changes of the 1950’s and 1960’s. While those changes were largely cosmetic (there were few, if any, black assignment editors and news directors deciding what would and would not be covered), they sent a powerful signal just the same about the changing face of the South’s news media. Today, black anchors are commonplace and there are more blacks behind the camera influencing decisions about what is aired.

Quite a change for a region where much of the white-run media thrived for decades on race baiting, taunting its citizens–black and white–with lightning bolt phrases like “race mixing” and “forced busing.” A lot of white people didn’t like this new black presence that began emerging twenty-five years ago and are still uncomfortable with it now. A lot of black people were amused and confused by it then and remain so today, say Oglesby and others.

“I was dealing with people who carried a lifetime perception of black folks,” recalled Oglesby. “Back in those days, I was as much a curiosity among black folks as anything. People thought I was a police officer. I traveled around in a plain green car equipped with police radio monitors. And people were suspicious of what I was doing.”

Even today, black journalists working in mainstream newsrooms find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They are suspected by whites of being harsh on whites and easy on blacks. At the same time, many blacks see black journalists as “traitors to the cause.”

Pioneers and Pay-Off

Our generation of blacks was far from the first hired by so-called general interest daily media. Such honors go to people like Robert Churchwell, hired in 1950 by the ultra-conservative Nashville Banner and forced to work from his home during his first four years so his presence would not be disruptive to the newsroom. Churchwell, believed to be the first black hired as a general assignment reporter on a white-owned daily newspaper in the South, and the few blacks like him, were restricted in what they could do and how they had to act.

“When I started, I didn’t have a desk,” said Churchwell, who spent thirty-one years as a general assignment and education reporter for the Banner. “I had to work at home until 1954,” he said, describing the Banner as simply a “racist” paper in those clays. Today, Churchwell says, “it’s completely different. The newsroom here is filled with blacks.”

Oglesby and others of his generation were the first blacks hired in large numbers and given the same chances, freedoms, and responsibility as their white counterparts. For sure there were exceptions where editors only wanted blacks to cover more black news. For the most part, we were allowed to cover and question everything–city council meetings, sports, Ku Klux Klan rallies, courts, cops, NAACP meetings, schools, housing, welfare, health, prisons, travel, entertainment, business and finance–and have some assurance that we would hit page one and could actually run one of these newspapers someday. Then, our bosses and we were taking big risks. Today, hardly anyone notices.

In later years, more sweeping changes would occur as Gannett, a Rochester, New York-based chain of small and mid-size newspapers, began expanding its reach by buying key properties across the South. Gannett leaned toward the simplistic in its philosophy about news content and presentation, but also leaned moderate in its political bent. Thus newspapers that had been mouthpieces for the Old South, like the powerful Jackson, Mississippi, papers owned by the Hederman family and the Nashville Banner owned by the late Jimmy Stahlman, dramatically moderated their tone under the new, more progressive owners.

On the passionately written editorial pages, the hot button terms of “race mixing,” “outside agitators” and “forced busing,” and the relentless defense of “states’ rights” faded from the pages of these Gannett papers. As significant, Gannett would be quick to install a black

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person or two in high level decision-making positions, making its own statement about the ability of black people to read, write and fairly inform the Southern masses. In the 1980s, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, then owned by Gannett, appointed a black managing editor, one of the first for a major daily in the South. Such a move became a Gannett trademark.

“The basic motivating philosophy was the message Al Neuharth [the head of Gannett] established in Rochester–the leadership must reflect the readership,” said John Quinn, Neuharth’s long-time colleague who retired from Gannett as senior vice president and chief news executive. “It was a culture rather than any pontification of policy,” said Quinn.

Gannett’s move would significantly expand the isolated efforts made by a handful of progressive papers that had begun to hire minorities on their staffs in the late 1960s (Atlanta Constitution, Nashville Tennessean, St. Petersburg Times, Charlotte Observer, and the Anniston Star.)

The same changes would happen later at such staunchly conservative papers as the Tallahassee Democrat (for years referred to by blacks there as the Tallahassee Dixiecrat) and the Columbia State, which were acquired by Knight Newspapers (later Knight-Ridder, Inc.). Newhouse, which purchased the Mobile Press Register and New Orleans Times Picayune from entrenched local owners in the 1960s, would also start to defuse the Old South in those papers by the late 1980s.

Today, there are literally hundreds of black journalists across the South working for the so-called general interest news media (daily papers, radio, and television news operations). Most are still in the trenches, but some hold high ranking positions. Oglesby, who shared a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1980s as a member of The Miami Herald editorial board, is now associate editor of the paper. In Tallahassee, the newsroom of the Democrat is now run by a black woman, Lorraine Branham. At the Nashville Banner, once one of the most openly racist papers in the South, a black woman, Tonnya Kennedy, was recently appointed managing editor. The editorial job once held by liberal Ralph McGill at the Atlanta Constitution and Journal is now held by a black woman, Cynthia Tucker.

There are black general managers and owners of major market television stations in the region. At the national television network level, Turner Broadcasting of Atlanta, broke the glass ceiling with the appointment of a black man, Bernard Shaw, as principal anchor for the Cable News Network, the widely acclaimed worldwide cable news program. In a phrase, says veteran Atlanta journalist Alexis Scott Reeves, the media in the South”has become less recognizably Southern.”

Adds Little Rock native Cecil Hale, now a professor of communications at the City College of San Francisco:

“Have these changes made things more equitable, without a doubt. Have they made minorities feel better? Without a doubt. Have they made black papers feel unnecessary? Absolutely not. Have they made a change in the hearts and minds of the South? I’m not sure.”

Despite all the changes, the South’s media remains essentially conservative to moderate.

Hale, Oglesby, and others say the gains of the past quarter century are fragile and at risk of being lost.

Losing Ground Again

Just as the civil rights movement appears to have lost much of its momentum and muscle, the same is being said about efforts to continue changing the media in the

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South and elsewhere. The people and tools for change are disappearing.

The campaign to bring more minorities into daily paper newsrooms was never fully embraced by all editors and publishers. Tokenism is still a widespread problem, particularly at small and mid-sized papers. Indeed, the plateauing of affirmative action in newsrooms across the country has guaranteed that the ASNE (the American Society of Newspaper Editors), the leading trade group of editors of major daily papers, will not meet its year 2000 goal of having all member newsrooms reflect the nation’s racial mix.

They’ll get nowhere close to that ambitious goal, in part because of resistance among some member papers to aggressively recruiting and retaining racial minorities. Indeed, more than 40 percent of the nation’s daily newspapers have no people of color on their news staffs. Many of these papers are in the South. Meanwhile, that collective of progressive white editors who knew first hand the downsides of the Old South media has not seen its ranks replenished as it fades into the sunset.

The situation is more frightening in the television and radio fields. In the 1970s, citizens had some leverage with local stations by calling upon the Federal Communications Commission at license renewal time. Now, in the name of promoting competition and freeing business from overregulation by the government, the Commission, pushed by Congress and Republican and Democratic presidents, has all but abandoned most of the regulations used to expand and improve programming, job, and ownership opportunities for minorities.

Community ascertainment requirements that required stations to solicit public views about community needs and to offer programming to reflect those needs, has been abandoned. Nearly all requirements for news and public service programming about content rules have been abandoned. Station license renewal times have been stretched to as rarely as eight years from the historical three years, making it tougher to build a case for challenging a license at renewal time. Employment reporting requirements have been all but abandoned. The lid on station ownership has been lifted, making it harder for blacks and other minorities to purchase stations. Meanwhile, the federal government has dropped nearly all the programs it had–special tax treatments, spectrum set asides, etc.–to help blacks and other minorities purchase stations as prices are bid beyond their reach.

“There are very few local shows that address blacks at all,” said David Honig, executive director of the Washington-based Minority Media Telecommunications Council, a non-profit, non-partisan group that focuses on issues of minorities in the media. Even cable, which held out the promise of expanding ownership and programming opportunities for minorities has been very disappointing, Honig and others say. Honig’s group has taken the baton once carried by local activists in trying to preserve and enhance the gains of the past quarter century. But he and others say the landscape is discouraging.

Robert Johnson, chairman and chief executive officer of Black Entertainment Television, one of the few minority owned ventures to truly benefit from the introduction of cable television, and civil rights advocate, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., have been warning in a series of recent speeches across the country that federal policies aimed at fostering competition threaten to wipe out what little minority ownership of mass media properties there is.

“While there have been steps forward, there have been steps back,” said Dwight Ellis, director of minority affairs for the powerful National Association of Broadcasters, the trade association of local television stations. “We still have only two or three black publishers. The ownership picture in print hasn’t changed much and in broadcast it’s declining. Black and minority broadcasting is going through the same changes as the industry as a whole–consolidation. We’ve lost a lot of owners and I’m not optimistic that the traditional minority broadcast ownership is going to get any better.

Going Full Circle

If changes in the South’s “white” media have been profound, they have been earth-shaking for the ‘black’ media. After all, it was the void of fairness and voice in historically white-controlled papers that gave birth to the black press across the nation and particularly the South. For decades, black papers and their publishers and editors were the lone voice in communities for an end to Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and all forms of race discrimination.

The decision by the white press in the South to change robbed many black papers of some of their best reporters and editors (for example, former New York Times reporter and editor Paul Delaney got his start at the Atlanta Daily World, and Jack White, a top editor at Time magazine, got his start at the now defunct Richmond Afro-American) and gave blacks readers less of a reason to buy a black paper. Circulation of black newspapers nosedived.

“The changing face of the media in the South probably has been most detrimental to the black press,” said Alexis Scott Reeves, granddaughter of the founder of the Atlanta Daily World. “Readership demanded integrated coverage, so readership left the black press.”

Reeves, one of that new generation of young black journalists,launched her career in 1974, not with the Scott

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family papers, but with the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. She worked her way through the ranks to become director of diversity at Cox Enterprises, which owns the Constitution, Palm Beach Post, Austin American-Statesman, and a host of television and radio stations.

Many black papers folded as the white media changed, Reeves said. Others were able to hang on for a while by having a more direct message and staying local, she said. In the 1970s and early 1980s they benefitted from the minority vendor purchasing programs of major companies that set aside funds for advertising in the black media. In the past decade, “the smart ones in the black press, all of them, are reinventing themselves as affirmative action has waned. Now, they’re cashing in on the second Reconstruction.”

Reeves is part of the rebuilding of the black press. This spring she quit Cox to help her family revive the Daily World, a twice-a-week publication with a circulation of about 16,000.

“To many of us, we can’t all be editors and publishers for the white folks,” said Reeves. “But we can go home with what we have learned and run the black press.”

Indeed, there is plenty the whole Southern press can do to better itself, despite the phenomenal changes of the past quarter century.

Historically white papers still fall far short of covering black and other minority communities in all their dimensions, Reeves, Hale and others say. Seasoned public thinkers who are black, like Andrew Young and Johnetta Coles, “have all this perspective but no where to share it because white folks still don’t get it, except for a quote here and there,” said Reeves.

Meanwhile, there is still a widespread perception, that covering news of blacks and other minorities is a necessary evil, rather than a necessary part of doing business. As a result, the agenda setting that news organizations provide for a community does not often enough reflect the best interest of the total community.

“This business has changed immensely and in profound ways,” said Oglesby. “At the same time it hasn’t changed at all. There are a hell of a lot more black folks doing a lot more things from top to bottom. Still, they are not in control of much and the black perspective we thought we were going to be able to bring has not been brought forth in a way we thought would make a difference.

“It’s like being in a ship traveling at twenty miles per hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” said Oglesby. “You know after several weeks you’ve traveled quite a distance, but it still looks and feels the same.”

Get Back! The Resegregation of America’s Schools

By Linda Blackford

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 9-11

The city of Charleston, West Virginia, took an unusual approach to school integration in the fall of 1956: It moved black children into white schools long before the rest of the South, and did it without a peep.

No one showed up to protest. No state official swore to block the schoolhouse door. It seemed that the daring experiment of integrated schools could succeed.

But over the years, and again, without a peep, Charleston’s schools have moved back to the separate and unequal facilities the Brown decision tried to correct.

Most of Charleston’s black residents–about 12 percent of the population–live in the Flats, the river bottom land north of the Kanawha River. Their children go to crumbling, un-airconditioned schools. Children and teachers move in and out at an alarming rate. The shiny, new schools up in Charleston’s hills have PTAs that raise up to $40,000 a year to hire art teachers and install new computer labs. The Flats schools still hold fundraisers for field trips. In the seven Flats elementary schools, there are less than five black children in the gifted programs.

“People are having a lot of problems.” said Anne Gilmer, a parent and teacher. “We’ve noticed a lot of our kids have been passed over and we feel the school system for our kids is a lot worse now than it ever was then.”

When the school board created a re-districting program, they refused to consider creating more racially and economically diverse schools, opting

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instead for “neighborhood schools.”

But Charleston is far from being alone. In fact, according to Harvard researcher Gary Orfield, it’s just one more fallen domino in what is becoming a pre-Brown pattern of segregation in America’s schools.

As places like Charleston show, the historic promise of integrated schools has somehow gone awry. Small gains that were made since the 1970s have reversed and widened the gap between black and white schools, and rich and poor ones.

Meanwhile, the entire principle of desegregation has become so controversial that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has discussed abandoning its historic and vigorous support of integrated schools. Even the U.S. government has changed its course.

“It is wrong to conclude that schools that teach poor, black children cannot teach,” said Raymond Pierce, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. “We need to look at the deliverables like test scores and graduation rates.”

Reversals

Orfield, who started the Harvard Project on School Desegregation and frequently testifies in desegregation court cases, has sounded this particular alarm since the late 1980s. His latest report, which came out in April, 1997, and is excerpted in this issue of Southern Changes, shows that re-segregation is occurring at the fastest rate in schools in the South. The other increase is for Latino students, who find themselves more and more isolated in schools in the West and Southwest.

The Southern states have the most to lose ‘they moved from total segregation in 1960 to placing 14 percent of blacks into majority white schools in 1967. By 1988 the percentage jumped to 41 percent. By 1994, however, that number has dropped to 36.6 percent. Maryland, Mississippi, and Louisiana are now among the ten most segregated states in the country.

Latino segregation has become even more severe, according to Orfield’s data. In the North, South, and West, three-fourths of all Latino students attend predominantly non-white schools.

Orfield’s report blames most of the reversals on lower court and Supreme Court rulings that reversed desegregation orders, many of which are Reagan and Bush administration legacies just being felt today.

The trend started in Detroit in 1974 when Milliken v. Bradley drastically limited the flow of students between suburbia and the inner cities. Michigan now ranks second in the country for segregated black students. Cities like Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, are similar: inside city limits, the schools approach 95 percent black, the result of nearly irreversible white flight.

Since then, major desegregation and busing orders were overturned or dismantled in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Kansas City; a landmark case in Norfolk, Virginia, supported by the Reagan Justice Department allowed the school board to return to segregated community or neighborhood schools.

Orfield’s numbers also illustrate the consequence of this segregation by showing the close link between racial isolation and economic deprival. The way most school systems are funded today, local economic deprivation too often means educational deprivation as well.

For example, he points out that only 5 percent of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children but more than 80 percent of segregated black and Latino schools do.

“Desegregation is not only sitting next to someone of the other race,” he writes. “A child moving from a segregated African-American or Latino school to a white school will very likely exchange conditions of concentrated poverty for a middle class school. Exactly the opposite is true when a child is sent back from an interracial school to a segregated neighborhood school as is happening under a number of recent court orders which end busing or desegregation choice plans.”

The Brown decision said that segregated schools were “inherently unequal,” and evidence proves this is true today, Orfield says.

Economically deprived schools must often cope with a host of problems before class even starts. Poor children are more likely to have health and developmental problems, they may not be ready to learn, and they may not speak English. Many poor schools find it hard to attract good teachers while parents cannot afford the many extra resources, like art and computers, that wealthy schools buy.

Like a Mirage

Orfield is a tireless campaigner for integration. But many others feel the long struggle has had too few results.

“I’m not saying it was the wrong thing to do,” said Gilmer, who went on to teach in the Charleston schools. “What was bad was we expected too much of it.”

Mary Sanford, president of the Perry Homes Tenant Association in Atlanta, Georgia, thinks integration failed because it wasn’t done fairly.

“They took all the best black teachers into the white schools and bused all the black children,” she said. “Black schools stayed black, they never bussed any whites.”

Gilmer and Sanford agree that too much time and

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money have been spent trying to persuade white families to integrate. They think that the country needs to strive for integration, but not at the expense of children’s education.

“I think we lost a whole generation of children,” Gilmer said.

Integration was also resented because it held that a black child got a better education because he or she sat next to a white child. In fact, many black children in white schools were ignored or tracked into low level classes, regardless of their intellect.

Pierce of the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, thinks too many people assume a majority black school must be a bad one.

Black residents of Greensboro, North Carolina, including a group of black ministers called the Pulpit Forum, supported the end of large-scale busing in Guilford County. “Separate but truly equal would not be so bad,” Greensboro resident Amos Quick told the Greensboro News and Record in May.

But the idea of “truly equal” still shimmers like a mirage in school districts around the country. Educational equity may prove to be just as elusive a concept as racial integration.

Numerous states have used lawsuits to fix funding disparities between rich and poor school districts. Those lawsuits may equalize property taxes between areas but they have not addressed the crucial difference between a PTA that raises $40,000 and one just a few streets away that raises $400. That difference often occurs between white neighborhoods and minority ones.

But Orfield is not the only one who thinks it’s too early to give up on integrated schools and the educational equity they bring. After much speculation and debate at the NAACP convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in July, the NAACP confirmed its support for school integration and pledged to continue to fight in desegregation court cases.

“Separate, segregated schools are inherently unequal,” Chairman Myrlie Evers-Williams said at the conference, “and will not provide the quality of education needed for the twenty-first century.”

Deepening Segregation in American Public Schools

By Gary Orfield, Harvard University; Mark D. Bachmeier, David R. James and Tamela Eide, Indiana University Harvard Project on School Desegregation

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 11-18

Introduction

After the Supreme Court outlawed segregated education in the South, it took fifteen years and a series of actions by the courts, Congress, the executive branch, and civil rights groups before the seventeen states with legal segregation were changed from an area of total educational segregation to the nation’s most integrated. It remained that way for a generation. Now, there are clear signs that progress is coming undone and that the nation is headed backwards toward greater segregation of black students, particularly in the states with a history of de jure segregation.

The trends reported here are the first since the Supreme Court approved a return to segregated neighborhood schools under some conditions. A number of major cities have recently received court approval for such changes and others are in court. The segregation changes are most striking in the Southern and Border states but segregation is spreading across the nation, particularly affecting our rapidly growing Latino communities in the West. The racial and ethnic segregation of African-American and Latino students has produced a deepening isolation from middle class students and from successful schools. Our report also highlights a little noticed but extremely important expansion of segregation to the suburbs, particularly in larger metropolitan areas. Expanding segregation is a mark of a polarizing society without effective policies for building multiracial institutions.

Latino students, who will soon be the largest minority group in American public schools, were granted the right to desegregated education by the Supreme Court in 1973, but new data show they now are significantly more segregated than black students, with clear evidence of increasing isolation across the nation. In contrast to the varied regional trends and changes in direction over time for African Americans, Latino students are becoming

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more isolated almost everywhere. Part of this trend is caused by the very rapid growth in the number of Latino students in several major states. Regardless of the reasons, Latino students now experience more isolation form whites and more concentration in high poverty schools than any other group of students. This was long true in the centers of Puerto Rican settlement in the Northeast but it is rapidly increasing now for students in areas where the Latino communities are overwhelmingly of Mexican background.

The segregation is not simply racial separation, it is segregation by class and family and community educational background as well. Segregated black and Latino schools are fundamentally different from segregated white schools in terms of the background of the children and many things that relate to educational quality. Only a twentieth of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children, but more than 80%, of segregated black and Latino school do. Desegregation is not only sitting next to someone of the other race. A child moving from a segregated African-American or Latino school to a white school will very likely exchange conditions of concentrated poverty for a middle class school. Exactly the opposite is true when a child is sent back from an interracial school to a segregated neighborhood school as is happening under a number of recent court orders which end busing or desegregation choice plans.

This is of fundamental importance to educational opportunity. The United States is a nation with a shrinking proportion of white students and a rising share of black and Latino students, groups which experience far less success in American public education and are concentrated in schools with lower achievement levels and less demanding competition. Recent court decisions approving a return to segregated neighborhood schools in various parts of the country will intensify the isolation.

The Supreme Court’s 1954 conclusion that intentionally segregated schools are “inherently unequal,” and contemporary evidence indicating that this remains true today means that it is very important to continuously monitor the extent to which the nation is realizing the promise of equal educational opportunity in schools that are now racially segregated. Education was vital to the success of black tenth of the U.S. population when de jure segregation was declared unconstitutional in 1954. It is far more important today, in an era in which millions of the good, low-education jobs have vanished. We are now talking about a society which has one-third non-white public schools and where whites will make up only half of

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the school age population in a third of a century if well-established trends continue. The stakes are much higher. We are moving backward toward greater separation rather than pressing gradually forward as we were between the 1950s and the mid-1980s for black students.

Our report presents the latest available evidence on segregation trends from federal enrollment statistics. It shows a delayed impact of the Reagan Administration campaign to reverse desegregation orders, which made no progress while Reagan was President but now has had a substantial impact through appointments which trans-formed the federal courts. The 1991-94 period following the Supreme Court’s first decision authorizing resegregation witnessed the continuation of the largest backward movement toward segregation for blacks in the forty-three years since Brown v. Board of Education.

During the 1980s, the courts rejected efforts to terminate school desegregation and the level of desegregation increased, although the Reagan and Bush Administrations advocated reversals. Congress rejected proposals for major steps to reverse desegregation and there has been no trend toward increasing hostility to desegregation in public opinion. In fact, opinion is becoming more favorable. The policy changes have come from the courts. The Supreme Court, in decisions from 1991 to 1995, has given lower courts discretion to approve resegregation on a large scale and it is beginning to occur.

The statistics we report show only the first phase of what is likely to be an accelerating trend. These statistics for the 1994-95 school year do not reflect post-1994 decisions to end desegregation plans in a number of areas including metropolitan Wilmington, Broward County Florida, Denver, Buffalo, Mobile, Cleveland, and others. Important cases in a number of other cities are pending in court now.

Background Of Desegregation

Forty-three years ago, in 1954, the Supreme Court began the process of desegregating American public education in its landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Thirty-three years ago, Congress took its most powerful action for school desegregation with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Twenty-six years ago, in 1971, the great national battle over urban desegregation began with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Charlotte, North Carolina busing case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. With Swann, there was a comprehensive set of policies in place for massive desegregation in the South.

No similar body of law ever developed in the North and West. The Supreme Court first extended some desegregation requirements to the cities of the North and recognized the rights of Latino as well as black students from illegal segregation in 1973. In the early 1970s, Congress enacted legislation to help pay for the training and educational changes (but not the busing) needed to make desegregation more effective. The last major initiatives intended to foster desegregation took place more than two decades ago.

Since 1974, almost all of the policy changes have been negative and there has been a major increase in the nation’s non-white population, particularly among school age children.

The key decision limiting metropolitan desegregation, Milliken v. Bradley, concerned metropolitan Detroit and was a drastic limitation on the possibility of substantial and lasting city-suburban school desegregation in what was rapidly becoming a society dominated by suburbia, a society in which only a small fraction of white middle class children were growing up in central cities. That decision ended significant movement toward less segregated schools and made desegregation virtually impossible in many metropolitan areas where the non-white population was concentrated in central cities.

The Supreme Court ruled that the courts could try to make segregated schools more equal in its second Detroit decision in 1977, Milliken v. Bradley II. The Court authorized an order that the State of Michigan pay for some needed programs in Detroit which were aimed at repairing the harms inflicted by segregation in schools that would remain segregated because of the 1974 decision blocking city-suburban desegregation. Unfortunately, there was little serious follow-up on the educational remedies by the courts and the Supreme Court would radically limit their reach in the 1995 Missouri v. Jenkins decision.

By far the most important changes in policy in the 1990s came from the Supreme Court. The appointment of justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 consolidated a majority favoring cutting back civil rights remedies requiring court-ordered changes in racial patterns. In the 1991 Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a school district that had complied with its court order for several years could be allowed to return to segregated neighborhood schools. In the 1992 Freeman v. Pads decision, the Court made it easier to end student desegregation even when the other elements of a full desegregation order had never been accomplished. Finally, in its 1995 Jenkins decision, the Court’s majority ruled that the court-ordered programs designed to make segregated schools more equal educationally and to increase the attractiveness of the schools to accomplish desegregation through voluntary choices were temporary and did not have to work before they

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could be discontinued.

In other words, desegregation was redefined from the goal of ending schools defined by race to a temporary and limited process that created no lasting rights and need not overcome the inequalities growing out of a segregated history. These decisions stimulated efforts in a number of cities to end the court orders, sometimes even over the objection of the school districts involved.

As the courts were cutting back on desegregation requirements the proportion of minority students in public schools was growing rapidly and becoming far more diverse. American public schools enrolled more than 43 million students in the fall of 1994 of whom 66% were white, 17% African American, 13% Latino, 4% Asian, and 1% Indian and Alaskan. By 1994, the proportion of Latinos in the U.S. was higher than that of blacks at the time desegregation began in 1954 and the proportion of whites far lower. The two regions with the largest enrollments, the South and the West, were 58% and 57% white, foreshadowing a near future in which large regions of the U.S. will have white minorities.

Rising African-American Segregation in the Heartland of the Old Segregation

The South and the Border State region are leading the nation in the turn back toward segregation for black students, because they have been the most desegregated region and have the most progress to lose. Ever since the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, the seventeen states of these two regions (the eleven states of the Old Confederacy and the adjoining six states from Oklahoma to Delaware which also maintained state-mandated segregation) have been the center of the least segregated region for black students. The transformation of this huge region, with more than one-third of the states, from an area of complete educational apartheid to the least segregated area in the U.S. was a historic accomplishment that is being lost.

Two of the three measures used in this study, show that the South has fallen behind another region of the country. The Border State region is now reporting an extremely high level of intense segregation, exceeded only by the Northeast. These regions are clearly slipping back toward their far more segregated pasts.

In terms of the proportion of black students in desegregated majority white schools, the South increased dramatically from virtually total segregation in 1960 to 14% of blacks in majority-white schools in 1967, 36% in 1972 and a high of 44% in 1983. Since then the number dropped to 39.2% in 1991 and 36.6% in 1994, losing all the slow progress of the last two decades and heading back toward the levels of segregation before the cities were desegregated. On the other measures of segregation the pattern for the region was similar. Its level of intense segregation increased slightly and the exposure of its black students to white students fell.

The Border State region, encompassing the six states from Oklahoma to Delaware which were not part of the old Confederacy but had a system of mandated segregation at the time of the Brown decision, experienced a more rapid rise in segregation from 1991-1995. The Border State region went from having 41% of its black students in majority white schools to 36% in just three years, a very rapid rate of change. The percent in intensely segregated schools climbed from 33% to 37% and exposure of black students to whites also declined significantly.

The most segregated regions for the past generation, the Northeast and the Midwest, continued to lead the list this year, except the Border States surpassed the Midwest in terms of intense segregation. Segregation in the most segregated region, the Northeast, remained about the same. The Northeast now has about half of its African-American students in schools that are 90-100% nonwhite, far surpassing other regions in the level of intense segregation.

Trends for Latino Students

Latino segregation has become substantially more severe than African-American segregation by each of the measures used in this study. In the Northeast, the West, and the South, more than three-fourths of all Latino students are in predominantly non-white schools, a level of isolation found for African-American students only in the Northeast. We have been reporting these trends continuously for two decades. They are clearly related to inferior education for Latino students. Though survey data are limited, the surveys that have been done tend to show considerable interest in desegregated education among the Latino families and substantial support for busing if there is no other way to achieve integration.

The data shows a continuing gradual national increase in segregation for Latino students. The most significant change comes in the proportion of students in intensely segregated schools, which rose to 34.8% in 1994. In 1968, only 23% of Latino students were in these isolated and highly impoverished schools compared to 64% of black students. Now the percentage of Latino students in such schools is up by almost half and is slightly higher than the level of intense segregation for black students.

Race and Poverty

The relationship between segregation by race and segregation by poverty in public schools across the nation is exceptionally strong. The correlation between the percent of black and Latino enrollments and the percent of students receiving free lunches is an extremely high 72. This means that when we talk about racially segregated schools, they are very likely to be segregated by poverty as well.

There is strong and consistent evidence from national and state data from across the U.S. as well as from other nations that high poverty schools usually have much lower levels of educational performance on nearly all outcomes. This is not all caused by the school: family background is a more powerful influence. Schools with concentrations of low income isolated children have less prepared children. Even better prepared children can be harmed academically if they are placed in a school with few other prepared students and, in some cases, in a setting where academic achievement is not supported.

School level educational achievement scores in many states and in the nation show a very strong relation between poverty concentrations and low achievement. This is because high poverty schools are unequal in many ways that effect educational outcomes. The students’ parents are far less educated–a very powerful influence–and the child is much more likely to be living in a single parent home which is struggling with multiple problems. Children are much more likely to have serious developmental and untreated health problems. Children move much more then, often moving involuntarily in the midst of a school year, meaning that schools often do not have the students for sufficient time to make an impact. High poverty schools have to devote tar more time and resources to family and health crises, security, children who came to school not speaking standard English, seriously disturbed children, children with no educational materials in their homes, and many children with very weak educational preparation. These schools tend to draw less qualified teachers and to hold them for shorter periods of time. They tend to have to invest much more heavily in remediation and much less adequately in advanced and gifted classes and demanding materials. The level of competition and peer group support for educational achievement are much lower in high poverty schools. Such schools are viewed much more negatively in the community and by the schools and colleges at the next level of education as well as by potential employers. In states that implemented high stakes testing that denies graduation or flunks students, the high poverty schools tend to have the highest rates of sanctions by far.

None of this means that inc relationship between poverty and educational achievement is inexorable and that there are not exceptions. Many districts have one Or a handful of high poverty schools that performs well above the normal pattern. Students of the same family background may perform at ninny different levels of achievement, and there are some talented students and teachers in virtually every school the overall relationship, however, are very powerful. Students attending high poverty schools face a much lower level of competition regardless of their own interests and abilities.

This problem is intimately related to racial segregation. The data show that 60.7% of the schools in the U.S. have less than one-fifth black and Latino students while 9.2% have 80-100% black and Latino students. At the extreme, only 5.4% of the schools with 0-10% Black and Latino students have more than half low income students; 70% of them have less than one-fourth poor students. Among schools that are 90-100% African American and/or Latino on the other hand, almost nine-tenths (87.8%) are predominantly poor and only 3% have less than one-fourth poor children. A student in a segregated minority school is 16.3 times more likely to be in a concentrated poverty school than a student in a segregated white schools.

Segregation in the Suburbs

Blacks living in rural areas and in small and medium sized towns or the suburbs of small metropolitan areas are far more likely to experience substantial school de-segregation than those living in the nation’s large cities. Students living in towns and rural areas and in suburbs of small metropolitan complexes attend school with an aver-age of about half white students. In contrast, those in the big central cities attend. schools those that have an aver-age of 83% nonwhite students. Suburbs of big and small central cities occupy an intermediate position, with black students in schools with about 40% whites and 60% non-white students. Considering the small proportion of minority students in many suburban rings this level of segregation is a poor omen for the future of suburbs which will become more diverse.

The nation’s nonwhite population is extremely concentrated in metropolitan areas. Outside the South, this concentration tends to be in the largest metropolitan areas with the largest ghettos and barrios. Since the minority communities are constantly expanding along their boundaries, and virtually all-white developments are continuously being constructed on the outer periphery of suburbia, the central cities have a continual increase in their proportion of black and Latino students.

The suburbs are now the dominant element of our society and our politics. As the nation’s population changes dramatically in the coming decades, they are destined to become much more diverse. What kind of access black and Latino children will have to mainstream suburban society will be affected by the racial characteristics of suburban schools. It raises serious concerns to realize that by 1994, blacks were in schools that averaged 59% nonwhite and Latino students were in schools what were 64% nonwhite in the suburbs of the largest cities although the whites in those suburban rings were in schools with little hope of stabilizing lists enrollment once a major racial change begins without drawing on students from a broader geographic area. This means that in areas with many fragmented school districts, not only the central city but also substantial portions of suburban rings may face high levels of segregation.

Since nonwhite suburbanization began in earnest in the 1970s, the cities have also been losing many of their minority middle class families, leaving the central cities with a higher and higher concentration of poverty. These districts contain 18% of the black students, 23% of the nation’s Latino students, 13% of Asians, but only 2% of the whites. About a fifth of black and Latino students depend an average of only 14% combined black and Latino enrollments. Latino students, but not blacks, were almost as segregated in the suburbs of smaller metropolitan areas. If these patterns intensify as the suburban African-American and Latino population grows, we may be facing problems that are as serious as those that led to desegregation conflicts in many central cities.

Table 1: Most Segregated States for Black Students, 1994-1995 on Three Measures of Segregation

%of Blacks in Majority White Schools	%of Blacks in 90-100% Minority Schools	Average % of White in Schools of Typical Black Student
New York	15.1	Illinois	61.9	Illinois	20.0
California	17.5	Michigan	59.6	New York	20.1
Michigan	18.8	New York	57.1	Michigan	20.8
Illinois	20.2	New Jersey	53.7	New Jersey	25.7
Mississippi	23.3	Pennsylvania	47.0	California	26.0
Maryland	25.9	Maryland	46.0	Maryland	27.3
New Jersey	26.6	Alabama	38.2	Mississippi	28.5
Louisiana	28.8	Tennessee	38.0	Louisiana	30.4
Wisconsin	29.2	Louisiana	37.6	Pennsylvania	30.4
Pennsylvania	30.4	Mississippi	36.9	Alabama	32.9

It would be profoundly ironic if the Supreme Court decision that meant to protect suburban boundary lines, Milliken v. Bradley, ended up making it impossible for suburban communities in the path of racial change to avoid rapid resegregation. Individual suburban school districts are often so small that they can go though racial change much more rapidly and irreversibly than a huge central city. A suburb will often have only the enrollment of a single high school attendance area in a city and has little hope of stablizing lists enrollment once a major racial change begins without drawing on students from a broader geographic area. This means that in areas with many fragmented school districts, not only the central city but also substantial proportions of suburban rings may face high levels of segregation.

Since nonwhite suburbanization began in earnest in the 1970’s, the cities have also been losing many of their minority middle class families, leaving the central cities with a higher and higher concentration of poverty. These districts contain 18% of the black students, 23% of the nation’s Latino student, 13% of Asians, but only 2% of the whites. About a fifth of black and Latino students depend on districts that do not matter to 98% of white families. Most of these systems have faced recurrent fiscal and political crises for years and have low levels of educational achievement. Desegregation has become virtually impossible in some of these systems since the 1974 Supreme Court decision in the Detroit case. The trends of metropolitan racial change that have been operating since World War II suggest that segregation will become worse in the future.

Segregation of Whites

In a nation where whites are destined to become one of several minorities in the schools if the existing trends continue, it is important not only to consider isolation of nonwhite students from whites but also the isolation of whites from the growing parts of the population.

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Except in the historic de jure states for blacks and the states taken from Mexico in the war in the 1840s, most white students have not yet experienced substantial desegregation. Although they are growing up in a society where the Census Bureau predicts that more than half of school age children will be non-white in a third of a century, many are being educated in overwhelming white schools with little contract with black or Latino students. As the American workforce changes skills in race relations will become increasingly valuable in many jobs.

Southern and Border states tend to have substantially larger proportions of black students than other states and higher levels of desegregation. Not only did they have to overcome a very rigid segregation but they also had to bring much larger shares of black students into interracial schools. As a result of desegregation orders their white students tend to be in schools with much larger proportions of black students than whites in other parts of the country. In no state in the Northeast, the Midwest, nor the West do whites, on average, go to schools with 10% of more black classmates. Thirteen Southern and border states have higher shares of black students than any state in the North or West. White students attend school with the largest proportions of black students in the states indicated in Table 2.

The most segregated states of the North had little interracial experience for white students. In Illinois, New York, and California the typical white student attended a school with less than 7% blacks; in New Jersey, less than 8%; and in Michigan less than 5%. Some states with developing patterns of serious segregation, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota, have proportions that are even lower.

There were twenty-three states where the number of black students per classroom in the schools attended by white students was less than 1 percent. Northern whites who may be inclined to assume their superiority to Southerners in terms of racial attitudes and policies should reflect on the fact that Southern white students have experienced far more actual desegregation for a quarter century and some northern states with very small black enrollments have been more resistant and made less progress than Southern states with far larger black communities.

The exposure of whites to schools which average more than 10% Latino enrollment is limited to six South-western states–New Mexico (36%), California (23%), Texas (19%), Arizona (19%), Colorado (13%), and Nevada (13%). In eight other states, the typical white is in a school with more than one-twentieth Latinos. The number is lower in the other thirty-six states and that is a major reason that national attention on this extremely important population is limited. In the long run, secondary immigration may distribute Latinos much more broadly across the nation.

Federal and State Policy

The Clinton administration has no stated policy on the movement back toward segregation and has given no priority to supporting successful desegregation. Although it is presiding over the period of the most rapid resegregation of the South since the Brown decision, it has not proposed any initiative, though the hostility of the previous twelve years has ended and positions have been changed on some important cases. There has been no proposal to restore the federal desegregation aid program that reached its peak under President Carter and whose funding was eliminated under President Reagan. Although the administration is asking for large increases in compensatory education, to a total of $7 billion for children in high-poverty, low performance schools, it has no initiative to move children out of such failing schools or even to slow the termination of desegregation plans in communities where equal education for minority students has never been achieved.

The only two desegregation-related items left in the education budget are for the small desegregation assistance centers set up under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Magnet school program, which is often used to help pay for some of the voluntary elements in desegregation plans. The White House has requested zero increase for each program.

School desegregation has not been chosen as a priority issue by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights or the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and no major new research on the consequences of segregation or the best methods for improving the successful operation of multiracial schools and classrooms have been commissioned. The leader of both the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights recently stated that neither department has issued any statement of its policy on school desegregation during the Clinton Administration and that each is responding on a case-by-case basis.

Very few states have active state government efforts to enforce school desegregation in the middle 1990s. Some that once had rules or state legal requirements have suspended them or have terminated the offices that administered them. In California, for example, where segregation was increasing rapidly for both blacks and Latinos, and for some groups of Asian students, the State Department of Education’s Intergroup Relations Office was abolished, though the state provides funds for court ordered remedies. In Illinois, the state supreme court took away the state board of education’s right to enforce

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desegregation requirements. In New Jersey, the state desegregation office has been abolished under Governor Christie Whitman.

Table 2: States with Lowest Levels of Segregation of Whites

State	Average % black in School of Typical white
Mississippi	30.3%
South Carolina	29.9%
Delaware	27.2%
Louisiana	26.8%
North Carolina	22.9%
Georgia	21.6%
Alabama	18.9%
Virginia	17.7%
Florida	16.9%
Maryland	15.9%

Many states have adopted policies to publicize achievement results by district and school and they repeatedly publish lists that show urban minority schools with very high levels of concentrated poverty at the bottom in academic achievement without ever discussing the very frequent relationship between segregated education and low achievement. If standards are to be raised with high stakes for students, states must be concerned about the structural fairness of their system to minority students.

The Bridge Backward

In American race relations, the bridge from the twentieth century may be leading back into the nineteenth century. We may be deciding to bet the future of the country once more on separate but equal. There is no evidence that separate but equal today works any more than it did a century ago.

The debate that has been stimulated by recent Supreme Court decisions is a debate about how and when to end desegregation plans. The most basic need now is for a serious national examination of the cost of resegregation and the alternative solutions to problems with existing desegregation plans. Very few Americans prefer segregation and most believe that desegregation has had considerable value, but most whites are still opposed to plans which involve mandatory transportation of students. During the last fifteen years plans have been evolving to include more educational reforms and choice mechanisms to try to achieve desegregation and educational gains simultaneously. A stronger fair housing law, a number of settlements of housing segregation cases, and federal initiatives to change the operation of subsidized housing–as well as the very rapid creation of brand new communities in the sunbelt–all offer opportunities to try to change the pattern of segregated housing that underlies school segregation.

Policies that would help move the country back toward a less polarized society include:

1) resumption of serious enforcement of desegregation by the Justice Department and serious investigation of the degree to which districts have complied with all Supreme Court requirement by the Department of Education. Such requirements could be appropriately specified in a federal regulation.

2) creation of a new federal education program to train students, teachers, and administrators in human relations, conflict resolution, and multi-ethnic education techniques and to help districts devise appropriate plans and curricula for successful multi-racial schools.

3) serious federal research on multiracial schools and the comparative success of segregated and desegregated schools.

4) a major campaign to increase nonwhite teachers and administrators through a combination of employment discrimination enforcement and resources for recruitment and education of potential teachers.

5) incorporation of successful desegregation into the national educational goals.

6) federal and state efforts to expand the use of integrated two-way bilingual programs from the demonstration stage to become a major technique for improving both second language acquisition for both English speakers and other language speakers and successful ethnic relationships.

7) additional Title W resources to expand state education department staffs working on desegregation and racial equity in the schools.

8) federal, state, and local plans to coordinate housing policy with school desegregation policy.

9) examination of choice and charter school plans to assure that they are not increasing segregation and to reinforce their potential contribution to desegregation.

10) examination of high stakes state testing programs to assure that they are not punishing the minority students who must attend inferior segregated schools under existing state and local policies.

Both Race and Class: A Time for Anger

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 19-22

As we look at the economic changes in the United States over the last quarter century, we can see that a revolution has taken place. Since the late 1970s, there has been a 40 percent increase in real income in the U.S., but over half of this increase has gone to the top one-half percent of America’s taxpayers. At the same time, people who make up the bottom 20 percent of income earners have seen a substantial decline in their standard of living. As a result, we have a gap between rich and poor which is greater than at any time since the 1920s.

That gap is growing every year; we are well on our way to the creation of a nation in which a small elite accumulates unimaginable wealth while an increasingly insecure majority struggles to maintain middle-class status, only a step away from a growing underclass of the desperately poor.

What role can a democratic government play in reversing these forces? It seems to me that this is a question of central importance as we think of our future, but it’s essentially a non-issue in terms of political debate. Clearly we have lost any sense of the possibility of collective action to reverse these trends.

Why?

I believe it is because we have lost faith in the power of a democratic government to promote equity and justice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Alabama Governor George Wallace set up half the equation: the federal government–the “central government,” as he described it–was always evil. The “government” consists of bureaucratic elitists who live off the hard-earned wages of working people and delight in social engineering. Now we know that the mainspring of Wallace’s anger toward the federal government lay in its efforts, however timid, to end racial discrimination. But Wallace clearly touched a resonant chord across the nation which went beyond race.

The federal government had fought the depression, won the second world war, and laid the foundations for a stable middle class with policies which essentially benefitted that emerging middle class: subsidized housing loans, the GI Bill, Social Security, and a host of other programs. By the 1960s, however, that middle class was restive under the “burden” of taxes and uneasy over the social upheavals of the decade: civil rights, feminism, court protected free speech, a rising crime rate, the inconclusive war in Vietnam etc. Thus, when Wallace harped on the evils of busing or the rise of a parasitic welfare class–both issues with racial resonance–Americans across the nation proved receptive to his argument that government was part of the problem, not the solution.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan carried through where Wallace left off. He continued Wallace’s argument that government is inherently “bad,” but he made the circle complete by offering a solution: unleashing the beneficent forces of the marketplace. Everything is the best of all possible worlds as long as the government doesn’t interfere. The marketplace alone can adjudicate every economic conflict equitably and render rewards and punishments on the basis of individual achievement.

I’m normally not one for believing that intellectuals have much of an impact upon our society. But Godfrey Hodgson’s recent book on the triumph of conservatism documents the skillful way in which wealthy right-wing individuals and corporate interests have created a broad network of subsidized think-tanks, grants, fellowships, and research sinecures which skillfully promoted their ideological agenda. Nothing is more ludicrous today than conservatives’ complaints of a “liberal media.” The fact is, the assumptions underlying laissez-faire economics and a “free-market” economy dominate public political discussion. And that is true whether we are talking about the print media, Sunday television news programs, the major networks, or public television and radio.

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It will not be easy to break out of this ideological cul-de-sac. While the economic expansion of the last twenty years has primarily benefitted the wealthy, enough crumbs have trickled clown to the middle class to make possible the diversionary focus upon the poor, immigrants, and racial minorities. At the same time, conservatives’ success in subverting the role of positive government for working Americans and minorities has led to their increasing cynicism and withdrawal from the political process. In part, they’re correct, of course. Government is not working in their interest. The end result of that withdrawal, however, has been the creation of an electorate which is disproportionately white and affluent.

But we have to continue to struggle for racial and economic justice and to change the terms of the debate and to focus on the issues which will arouse the electorate.

It won’t be easy to confront racial issues. Despite the progress of the last forty years, this nation remains deeply divided along the color line. The climate of opinion is particularly hostile to affirmative action. In part this is because of the success of conservatives in misrepresenting its purposes and scope and convincing whites–it didn’t take much convincing–that discrimination is a thing of the past and that we truly have an open society. We also have to face up to the reality that opposition to compensatory action is deeply rooted in American’s notions of “fairness” and equal justice.

Still, I think we can take heart from the fact that there has been a deep shift in the thinking of most white Americans. A quarter-century ago, there would not have been the assumption that there ought to be minority group representation at every level of political and economic life. We have to build upon that shift by challenging the glib arguments used to misrepresent affirmative action.

We should challenge the worship of a handful of standardized tests as though they alone could judge what makes a person qualified for a job or for admission to college or professional school. We have to talk about the ways in which people actually succeed in college, in the workplace, and in life in general.

I’m most familiar with college admission procedures, and I know that my university constantly makes decisions on the basis of a variety of factors other than Standard Achievement Test (SAT) scores. We seek geographical representation. We look for different life experiences from our applicants. We seek students with a range of talents. And, yes, we seek to create a racially and ethnically diverse student body in the belief that there is strength in diversity.

We have to defend the freedom to make those choices in our public life as well.

That, I confess, is still a hard sell.

I think we can be more successful in refuting conservatives’ argument that the legacy of centuries of discrimination has miraculously disappeared over the last few years, and the reason minorities continue to lag is simply because they have been paralyzed by the “culture of dependency” fostered by welfare programs. We have to ask those who would throw the poor overboard to sink or swim: “Do you really believe that someone who has grown up in a culture of poverty, who has very limited education, lacks the kind of skills that the marketplace wants, with no financial reserves, no health care, and few resources–do you believe the solution to their situation is simply to throw them to the forces of the market?”

But I want to return to the original point that I made at the outset of our conversation. Discrimination in our society is rooted in both race and class; neither problem can be addressed separately and if we’re going to build any kind of effective political coalition, we have to make that linkage clear. Of course right-wing conservatives will cry “class warfare,” but that seems a hollow charge corning from a group that has waged relentless war against the weakest and most helpless members of our society.

Just as we must counter the shibboleths of the new racism, we have to challenge the ideological foundations of the new conservatism, driving home the argument that an unrestrained free-market economy does NOT protect the interests of working and middle-class Americans. At the same time, we have to stop passively accepting the big lie that all social investment is wasteful and makes no difference in the lives of the disadvantaged.

I recently spoke to an Atlanta service club about the enormous problems that primary and secondary educators face in impoverished communities. The disadvantages these children face are so great, I argued, that they cannot be overcome by teachers in the classroom, however dedicated. What is needed, I said, was a broad program of support including income assistance, child care, health care, and comprehensive job training for parents trapped in the cycle of poverty. It won’t be cheap, I argued, but it is the right thing to do and, in the long run, it will benefit all Americans.

As you can imagine, that didn’t go over very well. Afterwards, I was greeted with a chorus of dismay which faithfully echoed what has become the conservative mantra: there is no connection between spending money and improving education or solving social problems.

I like to think that I am a tactful person, but I’m afraid my answer was not very conciliatory. “If that were really true,” I replied, “why do we have parents clamoring to get their students into my university at a cost of $25,000 a

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year when they could send them to community college at $600 a semester?” What you’re really saying, I told them, is that money doesn’t count when it involves poor kids, but it certainly does when it involves your own.

At the same time, we cannot create the kind of political climate in which needed social investments are made in our society unless we face head-on the “no new taxes” chant that has become dogma to both political parties. And the best way we can do that is by creating a simple, straightforward, progressive tax system stripped of the kinds of convoluted provisions which seem to have rewarded the most rapacious and parasitic individuals and groups within American capitalism.

Having to make this argument does make me realize I’m getting older. No one in the 1960s would have questioned the ethical basis of a progressive tax system, but one of the horrendous accomplishments of the conservative revolution has been to justify various schemes whereby the rich contribute less and less to society, but justify their greed on the basis of some kind of moral superiority, defined of course, by their success in manipulating capital and corrupting the political process.

It is true that middle class Americans have not seen their taxes go down over the last twenty years. But, what Americans need to be reminded is that–despite all the talk of “tax cuts” in the Reagan years–the changes in the tax code in the 1980s brought benefits to a very small portion of the population. The bottom 50 per cent of the population actually saw its taxes increase as rising social security, medicare and excise levies more than offset marginal declines in their income tax rates. There was relatively little change in the tax rate of the population between the fiftieth and ninetieth percentile. In contrast, the closer to the top of the pyramid, the greater the reductions in the effective federal tax rates. For the top 10 percent there was a 5 percent reduction in taxes; for the top 1 percent a 15 percent cut. Cumulatively the effect has been to save the wealthiest tax payers billions of dollars over the last fifteen years and to play a significant role in transferring wealth from the working and middle classes to the very wealthy.

Never satisfied, the new rich in this country remind me of the grasping landowner who claimed that he wasn’t greedy: he just wanted all the land abutting his farm. And so this summer we are greeted by the sordid spectacle of a Republican congressional majority intent on reducing capital gains taxes to a maximum of 20 percent, even though studies by the Internal Revenue Service show that

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three quarters of capital gains go to the top one per cent of American taxpayers. (In 1989, ninety-three per cent of all families received NO capital gains.)

Now is when we really need a little class warfare.

What happened to the notion of the dignity of labor? Where is the morality in a system which decrees that Bill Gates–among the richest men in the world–should pay 20 per cent capital gains tax on the hundreds of millions of dollars he has made from his stocks while the nurse who cares for the sick and the elderly pays 28 per cent income tax on every dollar she makes over $23,000.?

I’m certainly not suggesting that we emulate the conservatives by substituting capitalist scapegoats for immigrants, gays, blacks and other minorities. I am saying that people have a right to be angry about a political and economic system which is rigged in favor of the privileged few.

For the last thirty years, conservative demagogues have successfully deflected the anger of middle and working class on the victims of the system rather than the real perpetrators of economic and racial injustice. But there is an opportunity to shift the ideological ground and to begin to build coalitions at the intersection of race and class.

Let me suggest two of the many battlefields where I think advocates of social justice can begin their counter-attack.

The first revolves around the issue of childhood poverty. For thirty years, conservative ideologues have revived the nineteenth century notion of the “undeserving poor” by blaming the victims of poverty for their own plight. But it is difficult to speak about “lazy, shiftless children,” or “undeserving toddlers.” It seems to me that this is one of the issues around which political coalitions can be built. Certainly in advocating universal children’s health care we can bring up the interrelationship between race and economics because we know that Hispanic and African-American children are disproportionately excluded from adequate health care.

Secondly, we can support a revived labor movement. Given the kinds of pressures that working people in the white collar job-force are facing, I believe there is also a potential for that revival. For all the past failures of America’s unions, they are the greatest hope we have for building a political base to protect the economic self-interest of working people.

Although blacks, whites, and Hispanics remain segregated in housing, schools, and (to a slightly lesser extent) in higher education, the workforce at the working-class level is going to be integrated simply because of the growing percentage of the Hispanic and African-American population. There is obviously an opportunity here to create an inter-racial coalition. I don’t mean to underestimate the difficulties of revitalizing the labor movement in this country; certainly it will be unlike the the industrial, blue-collar movement of the 1930s. And, while racial suspicions still divide workers, I don’t think there is any question that flagrant racial prejudice is less in the 1990s than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. So there is at least the potential in the twenty-first century for an interracial political coalition based upon common class interests.

I’ve talked a great deal about the role of the federal government on issues of taxation and social investment on a national basis. But the last point I would like to make is that a revival of the politics of social justice has to begin at the grassroots level.

As a black candidate in a newly configured majority-white congressional district in Georgia, Cynthia McKinney would, I feared, lose her bid for re-election in 1996. But she won by a substantial majority and I think she did so by focusing on political issues which cut across racial lines. In local communities as in the McKinney campaign, there are opportunities to build coalitions around issues of child welfare, health care, housing, the inequities of the criminal justice system, and the degradation of our environment.

Above all, we have to remember that authentic political movements always begin at the grass roots level and have their greater impact when we least expect it. It is always hard to predict where, when, or how the next movement for social justice will coalesce and emerge, but we have to learn from our mistakes, build upon our defeats, and move forward with the kind of arguments and proposals that–right now–don’t seem to have much prospect of success. Perhaps we can take heart from the words of St. Paul who urged the early Roman Christians to take heart from their troubled past, knowing that “tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope….”

Dan T. Carter is Kenan Professor of History at Emory University. He is author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace. The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Simon Schuster, 1995). His most recent book is From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (LSU Press, 1996). This essay was developed from an interview with Southern Changes editor Allen Tullos.

Canton, Then and Now

By Tom Dent

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 23-24

In his most recent book, Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement, author Tom Dent revisits some cities and towns in the South to explore what impact the Civil Rights Movement has had on the people who live there. In the excerpt below, Dent visits Canton, Mississippi, and looks at the career of civil rights activist Annie Devine.

The first person I interviewed in 1976 was Annie Devine of Canton, one of the most extraordinary women of the Mississippi campaign. I can thank veteran SNCC leader Ed Brown for sending me to Mrs. Devine, for I had only previously known of her through Annie Moody’s classic autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, much of which tells the story of the painful effort to register blacks to vote in Canton.

Annie Devine was an insurance saleswoman and the mother of four children when the first Congress of Racial Equality organizers arrived in 1963. Canton was and is the seat of Madison County, which has a 75 percent black-majority population, the same conditions that made Albany and Selma ripe for organizing. Except that in Albany, because of its professional class of blacks, and in Selma, because of the efforts of the Voters League, a handful of blacks had voted in each town. Madison County had no Voters League and a virtually nonexistent black professional class–people of color had not voted since Reconstruction. To make sure they didn’t, the county courthouse was protected by a mean sheriff, Billy Noble, who apparently had a free hand in dealing with blacks who got “out of line.” His antagonist, and leader of the CORE project in Canton, was a youth from New Orleans, George Raymond. Annie Moody, who was then a student at Tougaloo, just down the road a bit from Canton, was the organizer who recruited Mrs. Devine.

In 1963, Mrs. Devine was well into her middle age, divorced, caring for her children, and living in a housing project. A former schoolteacher, she knew the value of voting and full citizenship, though she never voted. It didn’t take her long to decide to join in with young folk; she could help them a lot through her church contacts,and through her encyclopedic knowledge of the black community acquired from insurance canvassing. When she declared in church, “You don’t have to whisper about me, I’m in it. I’m in the Movement,” it opened the door for other adult black Cantonians to commit themselves. And commitment was necessary. George Raymond was jailed endlessly, and beaten numerous times. The names and addresses of blacks who attempted to register were printed in the local newspaper just as in Selma. Nevertheless, they persisted.

Extremely dark skinned (her skin practically glows), deliberate, and meditative rather than exhortative, Mrs. Devine put me through the third degree back in 1976 before she would be interviewed. When she decided to trust me, I was amazed at her power of reflection and quality of analysis. When I asked about choices of actions, she replied, “If we had done something else, it might have been better, but we didn’t know that then.” In her view, the 1960s was an effort by struggling human beings to come to grips with their situation and at least attempt to do something about it, provided they could define their situation. Mrs. Devine was not capable of the salable lie or the romanticization of the Movement. I never forgot her statement as she joked while making me coffee: “I don’t know. All we may have done through the civil rights movement is open Pandora’s box.”

Annie Devine quickly became well known within Movement circles; by 1964 she served as a statewide spokesperson, traveling to other towns to make speeches, often in concert with Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County in the Delta, and Victoria Gray of Hattiesburg, two other great local leaders who emerged literally from the fertile earth of the Mississippi Movement. Mrs. Devine, Mrs. Gray, and Mrs. Hamer were chosen in statewide elections to represent the Freedom Democratic party in the challenge to unseat the all-white Mississippi Democratic party delegation during the presidential election in 1964. This historic effort, much analyzed by civil rights historians, ended in predictable political defeat but set a precedent that foreshadowed the opening of the Democratic party to black participation in the state in the following three decades.

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I returned to Canton to talk with Mrs. Devine several more times during the 1970s and ’80s, and to learn from her wisdom. My interviews with her led to others and others, so that the totality of the interviews and my experiences in Mississippi gave me a special feeling for the place; not only the people, but the starkly diversified terrain, the physical beauty of the state, which stood in contrast to its history of racial grief. Because of its reputation, I came to believe that the conflict in Mississippi was more fundamental, the issues were clearer, the need greater, and the people more grateful for whatever help they received. Through its warriors for justice, male and female, white and black, I came to like the people of Mississippi and to appreciate them for their genuine belief in hope for a better future.

In 1991, twenty-seven years after Freedom Summer, blacks have clearly won the ballot, though that was more the result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which appointed federal registrars to monitor recalcitrant areas of the South, than a capitulation by Madison County officials. Now black voters pretty much control Canton, though not Madison County, as was explained to me by Community Action Program director Walter Jones; Board of Supervisors member Karl Banks; and attorney George Nichols, a former Canton Board of Aldermen member. A deep cleavage has developed between two new black political organizations in Canton, over the few elective offices in town. There’s so little private-sector work for people in Madison County, the struggle for control of political patronage and the jobs that might flow from political office has created a nasty battleground. As a result, the potential impact of a unified black vote has been substantially diluted. Meanwhile, the expansion of young white upper-middle-class housing and businesses in North Jackson has, in the seventies and eighties, flowed well across the Hinds-Madison county line into southern Madison, increasing the population and property values in Ridgeland and Madison (the town). Canton, the largest town in the county, while embroiled in its own intrablack political squabbles, has suddenly become the poor northern and primarily black relative of south Madison County. Even so, Canton is growing, Calvin Garner, a Tougaloo graduate in his thirties and an administrator for the Community Action Program, assured me, during a tour he graciously gave me of the town. It didn’t look like it was growing, though it did appear to be making an effort to renovate itself. There is an effort to spruce up the town square. I was happy to see a couple of black-run clothing stores a block from the square for those customers who don’t shop in Jackson, and a small restaurant that sells wonderful fried catfish. The problem is, with a large shopping mall and several smaller malls, full of every sort of retail business imaginable in North Jackson, most Cantonians do their heavy shopping there. The old square, which was lined by thriving all-white businesses in 1963 and 1964, was then the main Canton shopping area for blacks, said Garner. Square business became the target of intense retaliatory boycotts when blacks were turned away from the county registration office at the still-dreary courthouse. At least those days are gone, and maybe black political officials, if they can get themselves together, will modernize the town center. “It’s just that,” confessed attorney George Nichols, “we’re a generation behind every other place in Mississippi.”

Canton doesn’t seem to be a generation behind when it comes to the destructive presence of hard drugs, a fact everyone attested to. This was a completely post-1960s phenomenon in small Mississippi towns. I didn’t expect to see evidence of hard drugs in places like Canton. In the sixties, the small towns still had an innocence about them; you could concentrate on worrying about the police. Movement volunteers, who were virtual strangers, could enter a town and organize in pool halls and cafes, places frequented by black youth, without encountering suspicion. That couldn’t happen now. Suspicions involving drugs, along with the violence associated with drugs, not to mention undercover police work, would discourage conversations with strangers.

Tom Dent is the former executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. In addition to Southern Journey (William Morrow and Company, 1997), he is author of two volumes of poetry, Magnolia Street and Blue lights and River Songs, and the co-editor of The Free Southern Theater. He lives in New Orleans.

Cora Tucker (1938-1997)

Staff

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 30-31

On June 21, 1997, Cora Lee Mosley Tucker, a long-time community activist and educator from Halifax, Virginia, died.

Tucker led a life of tireless activism, most of which was devoted to challenging the long-established relationships of power in her home county in rural South Central Virginia.

“Cora was a major force in the conscience of Virginia politics,” remembers University of Virginia professor Paul Gaston, who served with Ms. Tucker for many years on SRC’s Executive Committee.

“Every community needs a Cora Tucker,” noted Parren J. Mitchell, the former U.S. Representative from Maryland who helped launch Tucker’s career as an activist in the 1970s by enrolling her in a course on community research at Harvard. “Cora Tucker has been an indefatigable worker on behalf of minorities, the poor, and the working poor.”

Tucker lived in Halifax County all her life. She was born there in 1938. Her father, a Pullman conductor, died when she was three, leaving her mother with nine small children. To keep the family together, they all farmed–sharecropped–tobacco and corn. When she was seven-teen, Cora married Clarence Tucker, a farmer, and together they raised seven children.

Although she devoted much of her time in the 1960s and early 70s to raising her children, she became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, attending rallies and marches in Virginia and in Washington, DC.

Tucker said it was the treatment she received as a young child that made her “want to make some changes.” Growing up black in Halifax County in the 1940s and ’50s was “pure hell,” she said.

“We caught heck growing up in Southside Virginia as sharecroppers,” she remembered in a 1992 interview. “I vowed then that I was going to learn about help for poor people and was going to tell everyone how to apply for help, where to apply, and would help them take on the racist class system that keeps poor and black people on their knees.”

Tucker began making good on that vow in the 1970s. Encouraged by Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan–whom she heard speak in Washington–and aided by Rep. Mitchell, Tucker joined with friends and scores of black students in Halifax County to form a grassroots organization called Citizens for a Better America. The group immediately began surprising and angering the entrenched white officials.

The group’s first action–a campaign to build an integrated recreational center for youth–was followed by voter registration drives and surveys of the county’s public and private minority employment practices CPA filed successful formal complaints against the local governing bodies’ spending of revenue sharing monies and against the school system’s discriminatory hiring practices.

The group also criticized Halifax Democrats for being controlled by the same tight group of white men; that was borne out in 1979 when it was learned they had inadvertently re-elected a dead man to the local Democratic Committee. By 1981, when she was running as a write-in protest candidate for governor, a Tidewater Virginia reporter wrote that Tucker had “created waves like no black leader before her in rural Halifax County and the small city of South Boston.” (For a portrait of Tucker’s activist work, see the October/December 1985 issue of Southern Changes.)

By the mid-1980s, Cora Tucker and CBA had in-

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volved themselves with a range of black community needs including paving roads, integrating the Agricultural Extension Agency’s Home Demonstration Clubs, and boycotting white-owned businesses to force them to hire more blacks. In 1983, Tucker led SRC’s Co-op Democracy Project in Halifax. The project challenged the all-white board of the Mecklenberg Electric Co-op, which had simply been re-electing themselves for years (see Southern Changes, Fall/Winter 1996). Tucker also got involved in environmental issues when she formed a coalition to stop an uranium mine nuclear waste dump from opening. In 1986, Mother Jones magazine named Tucker one of the “10 Heroes of Hard Times.”

Tucker remained a vital grassroots leader in the 1990s while accepting regional and national leadership positions including the chair of Grassroots Leadership, membership in the Black Leadership Roundtable, appointment to the Rules Committee of the Democratic Party, membership on SRC’s Executive Committee, and membership on the board of directors for the Virginia NAACP and Civic Responsibility Southside Virginia. She also worked with the National Toxics Campaign and the National Black Women’s Caucus. In these and many other organizations, Cora Tucker became a national speaker who gave lectures, classes, and workshops on grassroots leadership and community organizing.

Frank Parker (1940-1997)

Staff

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 p. 31

Civil rights lawyer and voting rights advocate Frank R. Parker passed away on July 10, 1997, after suffering heart complications at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, Virginia. He was fifty-seven.

Parker worked for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for twenty-four years, in Mississippi and in Washington, serving for more than a decade as director of its Voting Rights Project. He brought redistricting lawsuits against multi-member state legislative districts which diluted black voting strength and fought successfully to deny federal tax exemption to segregated white academies across the South.

After leaving the Lawyers’ Committee in 1993, he joined the faculty of the District of Columbia School of Law and then became visiting professor at Washington and Lee School of Law in Lexington, Virginia.

Parker leaves a lasting impact on Southern politics. Veteran Mississippi journalist Bill Minor once wrote that “Frank Parker had more influence on the flow of the state’s governmental history in the 1970s than any single public official or group of officials elected by the people of Mississippi.”

His book about the transformation of Mississippi politics, Black Votes Count. Political Empowerment in Mississippi After 1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 1990) won numerous awards.

“Through decades of toil, hardship, and brilliant legal advocacy, Frank secured the opportunity for black Mississippians to elect the first African Americans since Reconstruction to serve in the state legislature and in Mississippi’s congressional delegation,” said Lawyers’ Committee Executive Director Barbara Arnwine. “The legal strategies he pioneered and the many redistricting battles he fought made minority political participation a reality at all levels of government across the nation.” The Lawyers’ Committee plans a memorial service honoring him in mid-September in Washington, D.C.