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3. The Continuing Struggle over Desegregation, 1981–2007
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c h a p t e r t h r e e The Continuing Struggle over Desegregation, 1981–2007 In the spring of , as Louisvillians reacted to the possibility that the Supreme Court would invalidate their school desegregation plan, the former NAACP president Maurice Sweeney wondered why, “As we discuss and debate the state and purpose of desegregated schools in Jefferson County, there seems to be a bit of history missing. For some reason we jump from to and forget about April , .” On that date, a series of hardfought negotiations between school officials and representatives of the NAACP and other civil rights groups produced an agreement to reform the busing plan. Sweeney might have added that the community amnesia applied likewise to a second major reform in and to a series of pivotal court challenges to the desegregation plan beginning in . At each of these moments the community confronted the question of how to make the plan more equitable or—once federal courts began giving the green light for doing so—whether to scrap it in favor of neighborhood schools. Whites who opposed court-ordered desegregation from the beginning used each debate as an opportunity to push for the reduction or elimination of busing. Some African American leaders, out of disillusionment with the inequity of the desegregation plan, likewise called for its end. In the midst of each round of debate, however, a coalition of blacks and whites stood up for preserving integration and diversity in the schools. As a result, the school board over time altered but did not end the busing plan. First, it created magnet programs to encourage voluntary white enrollment in inner-city schools. Later it assigned students to facilities based on their residence instead of their name, and eventually gave parents a choice among a “cluster” of schools. Thus, during a time when the national political mood / the continuing struggle, – was becoming inhospitable to school desegregation plans, indeed when the legal tide was turning against even voluntary efforts to maintain mixed facilities, in Louisville and Jefferson County a biracial integrationist coalition and eventually the school board itself fought to protect diversity in the local schools. Nationally, the erosion of support for school desegregation began at the top, with presidents and federal judges setting the tone. Richard Nixon had never approved of court orders for desegregation and campaigned against busing. By appointing William Rehnquist, a consistent opponent of school desegregation plans, to the Supreme Court he began the process of packing much of the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Ronald Reagan favored ending mandatory desegregation plans and replacing them with parental choice, reflecting his goal of reducing the role of the federal government in local affairs. During his administration, the Justice Department acted on the assumption that school desegregation had failed and that communities should be allowed to “return” to neighborhood schools. Although neither President Bush made opposition to busing a part of his respective campaign rhetoric, both appointed justices who would prove pivotal in decisions undercutting desegregation plans, and George W. Bush’s administration filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case that would in force the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) to alter their student assignment program. These presidents and judges helped create a climate that made affirmatively pursuing desegregation increasingly difficult. The Supreme Court wrote that climate into law, circumscribing what local districts could or were required to accomplish. Almost at the dawn of the court-ordered busing era, the Milliken () decision made desegregation more difficult in northern and western cities by forbidding transportation across school system boundaries, thus separating urban and suburban districts. Because of white flight to the suburbs, this strict demarcation left city schools struggling to maintain mixed student bodies with fewer and fewer whites, a process that was almost doomed to fail. Milliken had less impact on large southern districts, such as those in Louisville and Charlotte, however, because they merged their city and suburbs into combined school systems. In the following decade, such southern school districts worked out busing plans with the support of black communities and lower court judges, making the region more desegregated than any other in the country by the mid-s. A series of Supreme Court decisions during the next ten years reversed this history of successful desegregation. The process began in when [35.171.159.141] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:09 GMT) the continuing struggle, – / black parents in Norfolk, Virginia, challenged a school board plan to end busing and...