Boom for Whom?: Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments As I complete this book in June 2003, preparations are well under way to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A month ago, the attorney general and secretary of education announced the creation of a high-profile commission to, as their press release said, “encourage and coordinate activities that will commemorate the 1954 ruling, one of the most important decisions ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court.” Here in Charlotte, plans are being made for a series of events including a retrospective, a symposium, a play, a museum exhibit, and an ongoing community dialogue about the city’s desegregation experience. That experience has national relevance because Charlotte is the city whose segregated school system gave rise to the Supreme Court’s Swann decision. While not as epochal as Brown, Swann was a turning point in school desegregation history because it allowed mandatory busing for racial balance. In the aftermath of the decision, Charlotte eventually implemented what is generally considered one of the nation’s most successful mandatory busing plans. This book is about Swann’s consequences for Charlotte. Here, however, I want to talk about some of Swann’s consequences for my family in the hope of conveying the disappointment, anger, and sense of the irony of history that helped prompt the writing of this book. In the 1980s, when my family moved to Charlotte, both of my children —who are white, as am I and my wife—were bused in grades 4-6 from our predominantly white, suburban neighborhood to First Ward, an innercity elementary school where they received a fine education. Located just a few blocks from downtown, First Ward bordered Earle Village, a run-down public housing project virtually all of whose residents were African American. Prior to desegregation, almost all of First Ward’s students were black, and the school was a dilapidated and neglected one. However, with mandatory busing came middle-class white families with the kind of political clout and resources to help transform the school, so much so that it was generally considered one of Charlotte’s school desegregation showcases and in 1988 received a National School of Excellence Award. ix x Preface and Acknowledgments In 1988—when my daughter had just graduated from First Ward and my son had just entered—approximately 32 percent of the school’s students were black. At that time blacks constituted 40 percent of the school system’s total enrollment, and First Ward’s enrollment was well within desegregation guidelines . In the subsequent fifteen years, local developments led to a decline in mandatory busing for desegregation in Charlotte, and the reopening of the Swann case led to its end. The Charlotte schools have seen considerable resegregation and, in that respect, generally exemplify the national and regional trends documented by many scholars, most notably Gary Orfield and the Harvard Civil Rights Project. In First Ward, this resegregation is especially stark: blacks now comprise 90 percent of the school’s students, more than double the system-wide figure of 43 percent. My son, recently a counseling intern at First Ward, has run into some of the extraordinarily effective and dedicated people who played a large role in his education fifteen years ago. Their continued presence at the school augurs well for the current cohort of students, as, I am sure, does the presence of a new generation of caring and effective educators. Nonetheless, it is difficult to reflect on the almost total resegregation of this one-time desegregation showcase as well as the national trends without asking, Would not the upcoming fifty-year commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education more appropriately be called the last rites for much of that ruling’s landmark promise of school desegregation and racial equality in public education? The question is a polemical one that exaggerates the situation. The Charlotte schools are not likely to return anytime soon to the extreme racial segregation of the Jim Crow era, nor are many other school systems. Moreover , some school districts—such as the one in Rock Hill, the South Carolina city that is home to Winthrop, the university where I teach—are trying to swim against the national tide by pursuing greater socioeconomic and/or racial balance in pupil assignment. But the intentionally polemical nature of the question serves to raise a less polemical one, “To the extent school desegregation has been dying, why has it...