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103 18 a Different Kind of Education Davison M. Douglas The world of my childhood—Charlotte, North Carolina, during the 1960s— was almost exclusively white. All my early childhood friends, whom I met in the neighborhood, school, church, the yMCA, and Boy Scouts, were pretty much like me—white and from a middle-class background. During my gradeschool years, I encountered few black people except those who cleaned homes or performed yard work in my neighborhood. I never had a black schoolmate until eighth grade. I was vaguely aware of the civil rights movement, but it didn’t mean much to me as a child. My family possessed a deep commitment to education. My mother had been a schoolteacher and later taught at a local community college. My father had grown up on a college campus where his father and uncle were professors . My parents encouraged my brothers and me from an early age to excel in school. But until school desegregation began in Charlotte in earnest in 1969 (when I entered eighth grade), I did not understand that education involved much more than successfully completing one’s assignments. The city of Charlotte had confronted the desegregation mandate of Brown earlier than most Southern cities. In 1957, Charlotte had been one of the first cities in the South to desegregate its schools (though this desegregation involved only three students and remained token for several years thereafter). The city’s leaders shrewdly used this early desegregation to promote Charlotte as a city with a good racial climate and hence an attractive place to do business , in contrast to cities such as Little Rock and New Orleans that had bitterly fought school desegregation efforts. Mindful of the detrimental effect of racial conflict on economic development, Charlotte was also one of the first Southern cities to desegregate its public accommodations in 1963, one year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made such desegregation mandatory. Over the course of the 1960s, the newly consolidated Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, one of the largest in the nation, converted to a pupil assignment plan based on residence. Though residential segregation preserved the racial identity of most of the city’s schools, by the late 1960s, a higher percentage of black students in Charlotte attended a racially mixed school than in almost any other city in the United States. 104 De Jure States and the District of Columbia In 1968, in response to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Green v. New Kent County that required Southern school districts to “convert promptly to a system without a ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools,” NAACP lawyers filed suit to further desegregate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. The federal district court judge, James McMillan, who presided over Charlotte’s school desegregation litigation, was initially skeptical, noting that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board had “achieved a degree and volume of desegregation of schools apparently unsurpassed in these parts, and . . . exceeded the performance of any school board whose actions have been reviewed in appellate court decisions.” McMillan later observed: “The Charlotte schools for many decades had been models of excellence. Many black children were going to ‘white schools.’ In the rural areas, . . . a few schools were genuinely desegregated. . . . I could not understand how anybody should complain about the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools or insist that stronger measures were necessary to afford equal opportunity to the black children.”1 But over the course of the litigation, McMillan took a dramatically different view. Because of the large number of all-white and all-black schools in Charlotte (due to residential segregation), McMillan concluded that the school board had not satisfied the Supreme Court’s desegregation standards articulated in the 1968 Green decision and hence ordered the board to develop a desegregation plan that would thoroughly integrate every school in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. In the fall of 1969, a partial desegregation plan was implemented while the school board continued work on a more complete plan. I arrived for eighth grade in September 1969 to a wholly new environment . School buses brought scores of black children from poor inner-city neighborhoods to attend “our” white middle-class school. Most of the students at my middle school had never gone to school with a person of a different race or from a vastly different economic background. The response of the white students was at best indifference and at worst hostility. By the same token, many of the black students expressed frustration at...

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