White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

The Open High School

110 The Open High School When I started high school in 1974 right after my final summer at camp, I always carried a book ready to shield the front of my face. I was all brains and skittishness. Not knowing what to do with my woman’s body, I hid it under jeans and a baggy smock. I let my hair grow long, thick, and ropy. I had reached what would be my adult height, a mere five feet two inches. My weight was what doctors would call average, but it was still higher than I wanted it to be. I had chosen to enroll in the Open High School, an educational experiment run by the Richmond public schools, the high school version of the model schools started by the Zellers. It is ironic that I ended up at the Open High while the Zeller children went to boarding school. There were 160 students in all four grades, about 60 percent black and 40 percent white. The academic mix ranged from would-be dropouts to geniuses who would go on to earn Ph.D.s. Anyone who lived in the city of Richmond was eligible to go. My mother, despite her misgivings about the model schools, was willing to let me apply to the Open High instead of continuing on to Thomas Jefferson, the traditional high school she and my sister had both attended. She knew I hated eighth grade and wanted to try something new. Because I had thrived in the English independent study class at the Richmond Humanities Center, she thought I was finally mature enough for the less structured Open High. By going to the Open High, I left Liz and whatever friends I had managed to make in middle school. Our group had been dwindling each year, anyway. Of eleven white girls from our cafeteria table at Binford, only two of us continued in the Richmond public schools through high school. By the end of eighth grade, I felt we were a ragtag bunch who stuck together just because we were white. Had we met in any other situation, most of us would never have become friends. The direction that the Richmond public schools would take was decided in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a proposal to consolidate Richmond’s city and suburban school systems. 111 The black plaintiffs envisioned one giant school district that would mix the white students from the suburbs with the black students from the city. At this time, the Richmond public schools were 70 percent black. The schools in Henrico and Chesterfield counties, Richmond’s nearest suburbs, were more than 90 percent white. A giant school district would have given each school a more even racial mix. U.S. District Court judge Merhige ruled in favor of this plan in 1972. Consolidation, as the plan became known, outraged the white, suburban families who would be affected by it. Many had moved to the suburbs to escape busing in the first place. In 1972, a motorcade of 3,261 cars drove to Washington, D.C., to protest. The Richmond Times-Dispatch called Merhige’s decision “appalling,” further editorializing : “U.S. District Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr. is more interested in manipulating human attitudes than in promoting excellent public education. This he showed by warmly endorsing . . . the pernicious gibberish of those social engineers who argue, in effect, that a school system’s primary function is to promote racial togetherness, not to give children the best possible academic education.” In the spring of 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Merhige’s ruling . Justice Lewis Powell, former chairman of the Richmond School Board, recused himself from this decision. The Court’s decision, which meant that the Richmond schools would not see a fresh influx of white students, set the stage for what was already happening during my school years: overall enrollment was declining and the ratio of black students was increasing. In fall of 1970, the year desegregation started, there were 47,988 students in the Richmond public schools, of which 64 percent were black. When I graduated from high school in 1978, there were only 35,412 students, and 82 percent were black. While the courts were wrangling over the school consolidation plan, the Open High quietly opened as a Richmond public school in 1972. Instead of operating in a traditional school building, it rented headquarters on the second floor of a downtown Richmond office building. The principal styled...