With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education

Brown, Integration, and Nevada

former Wisconsin state politician and U.S. ambassador to Poland, in an effort to win favor with the city’s Polish-American working-class Southside . In a subsequent ruling, Reynolds also issued numerical goals: black student enrollments in one-third of Milwaukee schools needed to fall between 25 to 45 percent in 1976–77, with the remaining two-thirds of the schools meeting that goal over the next two years. Continuing their legal defense of neighborhood schools, the Milwaukee School Board appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which later vacated the decision and sent it back to lower court for further consideration in 1977. Based on the Dayton v. Brinkman decision, where the Court narrowed the scope of desegregation remedies on the grounds that systemwide solutions were appropriate only when the original violations had systemwide effects, the Milwaukee case was remanded back to Judge Reynolds’s courtroom to determine more precisely whether local school officials had deliberately intended to segregate all schools or if their actions had simply led to segregation in some areas. Barbee was forced to go back to trial and meet a higher standard, requiring more delay. Reynolds issued a second decision in Barbee’s favor in 1978, with stronger language against the defendants. The law firmly ruled that Milwaukee would desegregate—the only question remaining was how.19 The Racial Politics of Magnet Schools A year before Judge Reynolds issued his first ruling in 1976, the Milwaukee School Board hired a new superintendent, Lee McMurrin, who designed the city’s grand compromise on race and public education: the magnet school plan. In the wake of racial violence over mandatory busing in Boston and Louisville, the superintendent crafted rhetoric that would appeal to both sides of this heated issue. McMurrin vowed to anti-desegregation forces that he would not permit mandatory busing in the city, yet he promised desegregation supporters that he could integrate the schools through voluntary means. One of his trial proposals, prior to the court’s ruling, was to reorganize the city’s fifteen high schools into citywide magnet schools, each with its own specialized curricular offering , to encourage student enrollment from outside traditional neighborhood boundaries. In theory, the stronger the attraction of special offerings at each magnet school, the greater the likelihood that black and white students would voluntarily cross neighborhood boundaries and obtain a high quality education at a racially integrated school. Further226 Jack Dougherty more, McMurrin knew how to obtain federal Emergency School Assistance Act funding to make it possible.20 But magnet schools also opened a new set of questions and controversies . First, as the sociologist Mary Haywood Metz has argued, they openly contradicted the myth of equal educational opportunity in American public schooling. For magnet schools to attract students, they needed to offer something more than what students typically received in their traditional neighborhood schools. School desegregation supporters had long demanded equality for all students, but the magnet school remedy sought to resolve the issue by designating some schools as superior in resources or reputation. McMurrin’s initial plan to transform all high schools into magnets theoretically addressed these concerns about inequality, but if all high schools were equally good, why would anyone move? Second, McMurrin’s administration faced difficult pragmatic questions about magnet school location and enrollment. Would white families send their children to a magnet school in the middle of an innercity black neighborhood? Would they come if the percentage of black students was guaranteed not to rise above a certain level? And would sufficient numbers of whites participate in the voluntary integration plan? McMurrin and his assistants brushed aside these questions and pushed ahead on Milwaukee’s “speciality school” magnet plan, expressing confidence that it would eliminate “some of the negative imagery of desegregation” in the minds of many white Milwaukeeans. The old slogan of “forced busing” into black neighborhoods had been replaced by the seductive rhetoric of voluntary “choice.”21 But in reality, Milwaukee’s so-called voluntary magnet desegregation plan entailed some mandatory busing for black students. After Judge Reynolds’s initial ruling in 1976, twenty-four magnet schools opened up. But about thirty-three hundred black students were reassigned to white neighborhood schools due to overcrowding or the closure of their former black neighborhood schools. Another thirteen hundred black students (but only two hundred whites) were reassigned when their neighborhood schools were converted into magnets. At the opening of the 1976 school year, Superintendent McMurrin proudly announced that...