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

Chapter 8 School Desegregation and the Uphill Flow of Civic Capacity

209 Chapter 8 School Desegregation and the Uphill Flow of Civic Capacity The success of Charlotte, N.C. and Mecklenburg County, all this economic success . . . has been based on what I would call racial harmony. . . Had we taken a different course in 1972 (when schools were desegregated), then we would not be enjoying the prosperity that we now have. —Statement several months before the 1999 reopening of the Swann litigation by C. D. Spangler Jr., prominent Charlotte businessman, former member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board, and former president of the University of North Carolina.1 We have got absolutely the best school system in the United States. I will say to you that any school system that isn’t doing what ought to be done ought to get about it because they can make progress. We elected a Black mayor, and we are proud of him . . . I would say to you that prior to school integration, we couldn’t have done that, regardless of how good he was. We have grown tremendously. —Statement at a 1984 National Education Association commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education by W. T. Harris, supermarket magnate and former chair of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners.2 What’s wrong with Mecklenburg’s county commissioners and their county manager, Jerry Fox? . . . County finances are in the best shape in years. By continuing to treat the schools as burdensome stepchildren needing stringent financial discipline, the commissioners and Mr. Fox are unnecessarily handicapping the school board and administration, insulting the good teachers of this county and neglecting the children in their classrooms. —Editorial in the Charlotte Observer, three days after reporting W. T. Harris’s comments to the NEA.3 210 Boom for Whom? The themes that emerge from the previous chapters can be grouped under two main headings: school desegregation and civic capacity. Since desegregation catapulted CMS onto the national stage, it is appropriate to begin there. In discussing the consequences of desegregation, I distinguish between educational and political ones. Without gainsaying the educational benefits of desegregation, I will argue that the political spillovers from desegregation did more to build civic capacity in the area of economic development than in the area of education. As a result of this asymmetric transfer of civic capacity, the spillovers from desegregation, I also claim, did more to help the business elite than black Charlotteans. I then consider how these asymmetries can be decreased by drawing on the Introduction’s discussion of the necessity of regulation and coercion in the operation of opportunity expansion regimes. After indicating why the regulation and coercion of institutional elites are indeed necessary to improve education for African Americans in Charlotte, I explore the relationship between the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Compromise and civic capacity. The chapter concludes by using the Charlotte experience to comment on the debate, discussed in the Introduction, about whether the situation of the urban poor can improve absent major changes in the corporate domination of most urban regimes. WHO BENEFITTED FROM SCHOOL DESEGREGATION IN CHARLOTTE? As the twentieth century wound down, the country witnessed a largescale retreat from school desegregation.4 Almost fifty years after Brown, there also was widespread agreement that school desegregation had fulfilled only a small portion of the promises that its proponents had anticipated in 1954. Understanding the complex causal relations among the retreat from desegregation , its unfulfilled promises, and many other factors is no easy matter. Causal inferences are made difficult by, among other things, the tendency of desegregation’s detractors—President Reagan being perhaps the most prominent national example—to pursue policies that exacerbate the very problems they decry. As a result, these detractors’ jaundiced view of desegregation has a distinctly self-fulfilling aspect.5 To such individuals and organizations, desegregation proponents can legitimately reply, “Don’t spit in our face, then say it’s raining.” Scholars have frequently attempted to illuminate the political controversy over desegregation with research, but the academic literature is a very contested one. Probably the closest that academics have come to achieving a consensus on the educational aspects of desegregation is School Desegregation: A Social Science Statement, an amicus curie brief signed by over fifty social School Desegregation and the Uphill Flow of Civic Capacity 211 scientists and submitted to the Supreme Court in June 1991 in Freeman v. Pitts, a major school desegregation case that arose in an Atlanta suburb. The...