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Chapter 1 Introduction Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated school system . . . [that] has blossomed into one of the nation’s finest, recognized through the United States for quality, innovation, and, most of all, for overcoming the most difficult challenge American public education has ever faced. —1984 editorial in the Charlotte Observer entitled “You Were Wrong, Mr. President,” commenting on President Reagan’s claim during a visit to Charlotte that busing was a failed social experiment.1 I believe public school desegregation was the single most important step we’ve taken in this century to help our children. Almost immediately after we integrated our schools, the Southern economy took off like a wildfire in the wind. I believe integration made the difference. Integration—and the diversity it began to nourish—became a source of economic, cultural and community strength. —2000 statement by Hugh L. McColl Jr., CEO and chairman of the Charlotte-based Bank of America, the country’s largest consumer bank.2 It seemed a telling moment in Charlotte history, and in many ways it was. There was President Reagan on a 1984 campaign stop denouncing busing because “it takes innocent children out of the neighborhood school and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants. And we’ve found that it failed.”3 But whatever reaction the president may have expected to this comment about busing, the white, otherwise cheering and 1 2 Boom for Whom? enthusiastic Charlotte audience responded with a silence that was “uncomfortable , embarrassed, almost stony.”4 What more dramatic indication than this silence among Reagan partisans in Charlotte that its residents, like observers nationwide, saw its busing plan as a success and something special, worthy of great civic pride? However, almost twenty years later, the Observer’s rebuke of the president —excerpted in the chapter’s first epigraph—commands as much attention as the crowd’s silence because even a cursory familiarity with Charlotte indicates how things have changed in the subsequent eighteen years. To be sure, the city’s skyline has become more impressive, featuring the tallest building between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, the headquarters of Bank of America, the country’s largest consumer bank. Several other corporate towers have also been added, including one that houses the headquarters of Wachovia, the country’s fifth largest bank.5 As the presence of these two banking powerhouses suggests, the local economy has continued to boom, with Charlotte becoming the country’s second largest banking center, trailing only New York. Accompanying this economic growth has been Charlotte’s expanding reputation as a quintessentially prosperous and congenial Sunbelt city, a reputation exemplified by the U.S. Conference of Mayors naming Charlotte as the nation’s “most livable” city of its size in 1995.6 Moreover, Charlotte is typically viewed as a good place for blacks, was named in 1998 by Essence magazine as the best city for African Americans, and ranks very high on many similar lists.7 Yet time has been much less kind to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools (CMS), especially the system’s efforts to pursue desegregation. Within a year or two of Reagan’s Charlotte visit, CMS began witnessing an increase in resegregation that would continue through the turn of the century. Moreover, CMS’ desegregation policies became increasingly enmeshed in political and legal controversy. By the start of the twenty-first century, the same federal judiciary whose decisions had given rise to Charlotte’s vaunted busing plan was now issuing rulings prohibiting CMS from pursuing the desegregation policies that a majority of school board members favored. The contrasting trends between Charlotte’s skyline and the racial balance of its schools—the first climbing upward since Reagan’s campaign stop, the second dropping downward—might initially seem to belie any claim, such as that of Bank of America’s CEO Hugh McColl in the second epigraph, linking economic growth to school desegregation. That claim, however, does have considerable merit, and one of this book’s main goals is to specify the links between desegregation and economic growth, emphasizing that they involved the cold realities of urban politics at least as much as the warm glow of racial diversity. Those linkages can be summarized in a series of observations laced much too fully with the irony of history: school desegregation was the prod- [3.149.251...

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