Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present

XI. Mountaintops and Green Valleys: Beyond Race in the Modern South

XI / Mountaintops and Green Valleys: Beyond Race in the Modern South Harry Briggs remembers the long, weary, dangerous battle. It began with a simple request for a school bus and culminated with a historic ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Looking back nearly forty years later, Briggs, in his early seventies and still living in Clarendon County, South Carolina, contrasted the hope and striving ofhis generation with the careless attitude of the current groupofblack students. "They don't seem to value an education," he said. But take a walk down to Scott's Branch High School in Summerton, Clarendon County, and see the run-down shacks and dilapidated trailers surrounding the school that is periodically inundated by the runoff from Scott's Branch,and maybe the indifference is more understandable . Take a look at the 590 students—they are all black, and so poor that almost everyone qualifies for free lunches. On a national standardized reading and math exam, the school's tenth-grade class averaged a score of six on a scale ofninety-nine; the national averageis fifty. The county built the school hurriedlyafter the 1954 Browndecision, hoping that a new facility would satisfy blacks and deter them from seeking entrance into all-white Summerton High School. They persisted , however, and under a court order, a few blacks were allowed to attend Summerton High by the mid-1960s. The all-white school board (in a county where blacks outnumbered whites by a ten-to; one margin) refused to go beyond this token gesture, so in 1970 the NAACPfiled yet another suit, and a federal district court ordered the county to desegregate its school system totally. The board closed Summerton High, and when the school term began only a half-dozenwhite children attended the other public schools in the county. Aprivate school, Clarendon Hall, opened to accommodate the white students, leaving the public school system entirely black. The town of Summerton declined along with the public schools, reflectingin part the demiseof King Cotton, and in part the reluctanceofnew industries to come into the county because of the school situation. Harry Briggs's modest and 256 Mountaintops and Green Valleys 257 moral proposal forty years ago has ended in bitterness, division, and decay. The Resegregation of Public Education: A Microcosm of Southern Race Relations Public education in the modern South exemplifies both the promise and problems of contemporary race relations in the region. As late as 1968, fourteen years after the Brown decision, approximately 18 percent of the region's black schoolchildren attended integrated schools. In Atlanta, roughly 90percent ofschool-aged blacks remained in segregated schools. Atlanta journalist Ralph McGill complained to a Birmingham audience in 1968, "I am weary of the old hanging on of the dual school systems and the excuses and the evasion. Must we forever keep on? Must a nation which has put a man in space still argue about where and whether a colored child shall go to school?" Not only McGill but blackparents and the federal courts were losing their patience over the dilatory pace of school desegregation. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Virginia case, Green v. New Kent County School Board, that so-called "freedom-of-choice" plansallowing limited numbers of blacks to attend white schools were no longer appropriate means of complying with the Brown decision. School boards were now obligated to "come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work. . .until it is clear that state imposed segregation has been completely removed." The Green case established a more specific standard than "all deliberate speed" and foreshadowed even stricter guidelines in future decisions. The followingyear, the High Court heard a school desegregation suit originating in Mississippi. The Nixon administration, as part of its "southern strategy," had promised a cautious, if not obstructive approach to the issue of school desegregation; accordingly, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had granted thirty-three school districts in Mississippi a one-year delay in implementing desegregation plans. The NAACPchallenged the delay, and in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, the Supreme Court ordered these school districts "to terminate dual school systems at once." The Court specifically abandoned the "all deliberate speed" standard as "no longer constitutionally permissible." School boards could not create plans that guaranteed tokenism while delaying complete integration for an indefiniteperiod. 258 Black, White, and Southern The Court remained silent, however, on the means school...