Not Again.
Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation
Dave Martin for The New York Times
Kendra Williams, holding papers at front, with parents whose children were zoned away from the high-performing University Place elementary school. The moves were “all about race,” she said.
By SAM DILLON
Published: September 17, 2007
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black - and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.
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Dave Martin for The New York Times
Kendra Williams and other black parents argue that the plan violates federal law.
Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.
“We’re talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones, and that’s illegal,” said Kendra Williams, a hospital receptionist, whose two children were rezoned. “And it’s all about race. It’s as clear as daylight.”
Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama, also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and white flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white, its school system is 75 percent black.
The schools superintendent and board president, both white, said in an interview that the rezoning, which redrew boundaries of school attendance zones, was a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student district around community schools and relieve overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city’s 19 school buildings, the district saved taxpayers millions, officials said. They also acknowledged another goal: to draw more whites back into Tuscaloosa’s schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began.
“I’m sorry not everybody is on board with this,” said Joyce Levey, the superintendent. “But the issue in drawing up our plan was not race. It was how to use our buildings in the best possible way.” Dr. Levey said that all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under the No Child law to request a transfer.
When the racially polarized, eight-member Board of Education approved the rezoning plan in May, however, its two black members voted against it. “All the issues we dealt with in the ’60s, we’re having to deal with again in 2007,” said Earnestine Tucker, one of the black members. “We’re back to separate but equal - but separate isn’t equal.”
For decades school districts across the nation used rezoning to restrict black students to some schools while channeling white students to others. Such plans became rare after civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s and ’70s successfully challenged their constitutionality, said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights.
Tuscaloosa’s rezoning dispute, civil rights lawyers say, is one of the first in which the No Child Left Behind law has become central, sending the district into uncharted territory over whether a reassignment plan can trump the law’s prohibition on moving students into low-performing schools. A spokesman, Chad Colby, said the federal Education Department would not comment.
Tuscaloosa is not the only community where black parents are using the law to seek more integrated, academically successful schools for their children.
In Greensboro, N.C., students in failing black schools have transferred in considerable numbers to higher-performing, majority-white schools, school officials there said. A 2004 study by the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights documented cases in Florida, Indiana, Tennessee and Virginia where parents were moving their children into less-segregated schools.
Nationally, less than 2 percent of eligible students have taken advantage of the law’s transfer provisions. Tuscaloosa, with 83,000 residents, is an hour’s drive west of Birmingham. During court-ordered desegregation its schools roughly reflected the school system’s racial makeup, and there were no all-black schools.
But in recent years the board has carved the district into three zones, each with a new high school. One cluster of schools lies in the east of the city; its high school is 73 percent black.
Another cluster on Tuscaloosa’s gritty west side now amounts to an all-black minidistrict; its five schools have 2,330 students, and only 19 are white. Its high school is 99 percent black.
In contrast, a cluster of schools that draw white students from an affluent enclave of mansions and lake homes in the north, as well as some blacks bused into the area, now includes two majority-white elementary schools. Its high school, Northridge, is 56 percent black.
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Dave Martin for The New York Times
The rezoning plan will force an estimated 880 students in Tuscaloosa to change their schools.
At a meeting in February 2005, scores of parents from the two majority white elementary schools complained of overcrowding and discipline problems in the middle school their children were sent to outside of the northern enclave.
Ms. Tucker said she, another board member and a teacher were the only blacks present. The white parents clamored for a new middle school closer to their homes. They also urged Dr. Levey to consider sending some students being bused into northern cluster schools back to their own neighborhood, Ms. Tucker said. Dr. Levey did not dispute the broad outlines of Ms. Tucker’s account.
“That was the origin of this whole rezoning,” Ms. Tucker said.
Months later, the school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, said the plan drawn up used school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10 million to $14 million. “That’s a significant savings,” Mr. Gibson said, “and we relieved overcrowding and placed most students in a school near their home. That’s been lost in all the rhetoric.”
Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr. Rosiek, now at the University of Oregon.
In his research, he said, he found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school, and he said he believed the rezoning was in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment.
The district projected last spring that the plan would move some 880 students citywide, and Dr. Levey said that remained the best estimate available. The plan redrew school boundaries in ways that, among other changes, required students from black neighborhoods and from a low-income housing project who had been attending the more-integrated schools in the northern zone to leave them for nearly all-black schools in the west end.
Tuscaloosa’s school board approved the rezoning at a May 3 meeting, at which several white parents spoke out for the plan. One parent, Kim Ingram, said, “I’m not one who looks to resegregate the schools,” but described what she called a crisis in overcrowding, and said the rezoning would alleviate it. In an interview this month, Ms. Ingram said the middle school attended by her twin seventh-grade girls has been “bursting at the seams,” with student movement difficult in hallways, the cafeteria and locker rooms.
Voting against the rezoning were the board’s two black members and a white ally.
Dan Meissner, the board president, said in an interview this month that any rezoning would make people unhappy. “This has involved minimal disruption for a school system that has 10,000 students,” he said.
But black students and parents say the plan has proven disruptive for them.
Telissa Graham, 17, was a sophomore last year at Northridge High. She learned of the plan last May by reading a notice on her school’s bulletin board listing her name along with about 70 other students required to move. “They said Northridge was too crowded,” Telissa said. “But I think they just wanted to separate some of the blacks and Hispanics from the whites.”
Parents looking for recourse turned to the No Child Left Behind law. Its testing requirements have enabled parents to distinguish good schools from bad. And other provisions give students stuck in troubled schools the right to transfer. In a protest at an elementary school after school opened last month, about 60 black relatives and supporters of rezoned children repeatedly cited the law. Much of the raucous meeting was broadcast live by a black-run radio station.
Some black parents wrote to the Alabama superintendent of education, Joseph Morton, arguing that the rezoning violated the federal law. Mr. Morton disagreed, noting that Tuscaloosa was offering students who were moved to low-performing schools the right to transfer into better schools. That, he said, had kept it within the law.
Dr. Levey said about 180 students requested a transfer.
Telissa was one of them. She expects to return this week to Northridge, but says moving from one high school to another and back again has disrupted her fall.
One of Telissa’s brothers has also been rezoned to a virtually all-black, low-performing school. Her mother, Etta Nolan, has been trying to get him a transfer, too.
“I’m fed up,” Ms. Nolan said. “They’re just shuffling us and shuffling us.”
The March on Jena
Mark Sorkin Mon Sep 17, 5:27 PM ET
The Nation -- An estimated 20,000 people will head to Jena, Louisiana, this week to protest... what, exactly? The rally is planned for September 20, the date on which Mychal Bell had been scheduled to be sentenced for attempted second-degree battery. The 17-year-old high school football star, who a year ago was being eyed as a top prospect for Division I scholarships, has been in jail since December for answering a classmate's racial taunts with a punch in the face. But on Friday, pre-empting a public outcry against the impending sentence of up to fifteen years, the Louisiana Third Circuit Court of Appeals responded to an emergency writ filed by Bell's counsel and vacated his conviction.
The rally is going ahead as planned, but it's not immediately clear how its message has changed to reflect the court's ruling. Although the occasion will now be a sort of victory rally, the case is far from resolved. Bell remains in jail, and the prosecutor, District Attorney Reed Walters, has stated his intention to press on with an endgame of appeals. Plus, the other five black students who were involved in the fight--Robert Bailey Jr., Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Jesse Beard--are still awaiting trial on similar charges. None of their cases will be directly affected by Friday's ruling, which addressed the jurisdictional problem of trying Bell, a juvenile at the time of the fight, as an adult. (Beard is being prosecuted as a juvenile; the other four of the so-called Jena Six were 17, the age of majority in Louisiana.)
"This is a moment to show that people are in it for the long haul," says James Rucker, executive director of Color of Change. One of the first activists to enter the fray, Rucker is coordinating bus trips to Jena--a rural town of 3,000 mostly white residents--and encouraging members who can't make it to organize locally. His web-savvy organization has collected more than $130,000 for the Jena Six Defense Fund and more than 212,000 signatures for a petition demanding that Walters drop all charges and asking Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco to intervene. "If this kind of pressure weren't there," he says, "the process would be going much slower, and it would be more of a crapshoot as far as the results are concerned."
Louisiana NAACP president Ernest Johnson, who is helping to organize Thursday's march in conjunction with a coalition of civil rights groups--including Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH, Al Sharpton's National Action Network and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--says he has received more calls since Friday's ruling than in the days leading up to it. As news about the case spreads, he explains, the scope of the campaign is broadening. "I think people are coming to show strength and unity against these types of injustices," he says. "They're coming to send a message to other Jenas throughout the country. To the Jena in New York, the Jena in Washington, in California--there are a lot of Jenas out there."
Rich with symbolism and iconic images, the case of the Jena Six certainly makes for a compelling parable of racial injustice in America. And as more and more people identify with the story, its meaning becomes more and more personal. Given the number of Americans who feel they have a stake in this case, it's no wonder that presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have issued statements expressing their concern.
The story, rehearsed by now in newspapers around the globe, begins at an assembly last fall, when a black freshman asked if he was allowed to sit under a large tree on school grounds that he had heard was "whites-only." He was given permission, but the next day three nooses were found swinging from its branches. The principal tracked down the offenders, three boys from the rodeo team, and recommended expulsion. But superintendent Roy Breithaupt opted for a three-day in-school suspension. "Adolescents play pranks," he told the Chicago Tribune. "I don't think it was a threat against anybody."
Racial tensions continued to escalate throughout the fall. A group of black students organized a sit-in under the tree to protest the white students' light punishment. Fights broke out in school and at parties; a white man waved his gun in a confrontation with black students at a convenience store; and on November 30 one of the school buildings was suspiciously set ablaze. Then, on December 4, Bell slugged Justin Barker, a white student who had been taunting him with racial slurs and defending the noose-hangers, and the other members of the Jena Six joined in. During the skirmish, Barker smacked his head on the pavement and suffered a concussion. He was treated at the local hospital and released a few hours later, and was in good enough shape to head out and socialize that evening.
District Attorney Walters, who had earlier that fall threatened black students at school that he could "take away your lives with a stroke of my pen," pushed for maximum charges. The Jena Six were expelled, arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy--their shoes were described as potentially lethal weapons. Bell, the first to face trial, saw his murder charges reduced to aggravated second-degree battery. No attempt was made by his public defender to contest the racial makeup of the jury pool, nor did he call any witnesses during the trial. Bell was convicted by an all-white jury in June.
"There are several issues in this case," says Bob Noel, one of five attorneys who signed on as Bell's new counsel after the trial. "One of the biggest is disproportionate treatment. People may think of a similarly situated kid, maybe middle-class, maybe white, and they think, Oh, let's give him another chance. When he's poor and black, it's not necessarily the case. Another is funding for indigent defense: If there's no money to adequately pay lawyers, to have support staff for them and resources they can use, they're always at a major disadvantage. And the other is the issue of race in America."
Throughout the summer, as the media glare intensified and a muscular team of attorneys assembled on the side of the defendants, Judge J.P. Mauffray and Walters dug in their heels. James Rucker, who sat in on some of Bell's motion hearings during the appeal, was shocked to see the LaSalle Parish brand of justice at work. "You'd watch this judge grill the defense attorney. It felt like he was trying to trick him," Rucker says. "And then he would set up the DA, so that all he had to do was say yes to a question. It was like they were a team."
In the first two weeks of September, however, Mauffray began to show some signs of concession; he threw out the conspiracy charge against Bell and reduced the charges against Shaw, Jones and Bailey to attempted second-degree battery. But he held firm on Bell's conviction until last Friday, when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him. How Mauffray and Walters will adjudicate the remaining cases in light of last week's decision, and the intense scrutiny that this week's protests will bring, remains to be seen. Many voices, most prominently Al Sharpton, are calling for an investigation of prosecutorial misconduct.
Friends of Justice executive director Alan Bean, a civil rights activist who has been supporting the Jena Six since January, believes that Friday's decision signaled the beginning of the end for the prosecution. "I look at a lot of things through the lens of Tulia," he says, referring to his involvement as a whistleblower in the racially charged drug sting in Texas. "In that situation, as soon as the court of appeals signaled its displeasure by remanding cases back to court for evidentiary hearing, from that point on everything fell apart." This week's rally, Bean believes, will send a loud message that in order to regain its credibility, the court of law must realign with the court of public opinion. "People really see the Jena Six as representing them," he says. At a recent planning meeting with a group of Dallas-area activists, he adds, "it was very cool, understated, but the room was electric. People were finding an opportunity to vent private pain that had been simmering for a long time."
Louis Scott, Bell's lead counsel, agrees that the protests will place a spotlight on racial disparities in the criminal justice system, but he doesn't think it will necessarily affect the way the case is litigated. For the purposes of his defense, he's focusing less on the broad social issues that the Jena Six have come to represent than the specific arguments that stand the best chance of bringing his client home.
For the purposes of reflection, however, Scott grants that the case has national--and even international--resonance. "Immediately after the facts were explained, I can remember thinking, Wow, this is a 1957 case that jumped into 2007," he says. "This is my second reaction, that the tree symbolized America. And the question was, Can all Americans share the shade of the system that we operate under? But the next thing that happened was the most frightening thing of all: They cut the tree down. I was hoping that didn't symbolize the attitude of America, that before we allow some Americans to share the same rights, the same privileges and the same responsibilities, we'll just get rid of the whole thing. It seemed to me that that was the message to be conveyed." If Americans allowed this to occur, Scott believes, "that would be the first step toward unraveling the civil rights gains of the last fifty years."
Seriously. So much of this week is just BS. And now I'm sick. I need all of my energy and wits about me just to deal with this nonsense! None can be spared on a cold. Okay, let me stop being such a baby. Things will be fine, I'm sure. But news like that does nothing to improve my mood.