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

Chapter 3 Swann’s Way and the Heyday of Charlotte’s Busing Plan

57 Chapter 3 Swann’s Way and the Heyday of Charlotte’s Busing Plan The neighborhood school concept never prevented statutory racial segregation; it may not now be validly used to perpetuate segregation. —Federal District Judge James B. McMillan in his 1969 Swann decision that would give rise to Charlotte’s busing plan.1 Although “separate but equal” is again a shibboleth apparently tempting to many high-placed people, it has not tempted the present School Board. —Judge McMillan, ten years later, dismissing a challenge to the busing plan.2 The pupil assignment plan . . . has rested for a decade on a fragile consensus . . . But there is a potential impatience perpetually bubbling beneath the surface of community consensus. —The Charlotte Observer, in a 1986 editorial, “Playing with Fire: The Dangers of Resegregation,” cautioning two new school board members who had raised questions about the busing plan’s fairness and operation.3 Most aspects of CMS’ recent history begin with two events in the 1950s, one national in scope, the other primarily of local interest. The first was the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown; the second was local voters’ approval of a 1959 referendum that led to a merger of the city of Charlotte’s school system with that of Mecklenburg County to create CMS. Although both decisions would eventually transform local education, their immediate consequences seemed less portentous, as the initial section of this chapter indicates. 58 Boom for Whom? After considering these immediate consequences, I discuss the Swann case, noting the events that led to the busing plan, its main characteristics, the relationship between political and legal battles, the role of the business elite, and African American political cohesion. I then turn to the superintendency of Jay Robinson that represented the heyday of Charlotte’s mandatory busing plan, discussing its main characteristics and the extent to which the desegregation glass was half full or half empty. Finally, I discuss the political constraints and shortfalls in civic capacity that affected the Robinson era. THE STRUGGLE FOR DESEGREGATION Brown and Consolidation Concerned with preserving its image of racial moderation, North Carolina engaged in “well-publicized, but decidedly token integration,” thus maintaining “an almost completely segregated school system for the first decade after Brown.”4 This was certainly true in Charlotte. Starting with the 1957– 58 school year, the Charlotte school board, trying to avoid more comprehensive court-mandated desegregation, agreed to the voluntary transfer of a few black students to white schools. Three of these students managed to attend such schools without major incidents, but a fourth, Dorothy Counts, was met with taunting mobs who spit and threw sticks and debris. The continuing hostility forced her out of the school, but photographs of the courageous, dignified young black woman surrounded by scores of jeering white yahoos made newspapers around the world, including one in India, where, tellers of the Charlotte story delight in mentioning, it deeply affected the Counts’s family friends, missionaries Darius and Vera Swann. In India, Darius would later write that their son “had never known the meaning of racial segregation ,” and that they had been “happy to watch him grow and develop with an unaffected openness to people of all races and backgrounds.”5 But when the Swanns returned to Charlotte in 1964, their son was assigned to an allblack school. Unable to persuade either the superintendent or school board to change the assignment, the Swanns contacted civil rights attorney Julius Chambers and joined other black families in the litigation that would bear their name. As Charlotte’s school desegregation history unfolded, it was greatly affected by the fact that the district was a consolidated one, if only because its large size made it difficult for whites so inclined to avoid desegregation by moving to another school district.6 At the time of consolidation, some Charlotteans, such as city schools Superintendent Elmer Garinger, realized the implications that consolidation could have upon desegregation.7 However, Swann’s Way and the Heyday of Charlotte’s Busing Plan 59 there was little public discussion of these implications, perhaps because that goal may have seemed even more remote than earlier; in the 1959–60 school year, the number of black students (one) attending white Charlotte schools was less than in 1957–58.8 The main push for consolidation came from civic leaders concerned about improving rural schools, increasing administrative and fiscal efficiency, avoiding the redundant...