COLUMN ONE : Seeking a New Road to Equality : A split develops among blacks as many question whether integration can bridge the gap with white America. Is the strategy of the ‘60s outdated and ineffective in the ‘90s?

Today, even after almost 35 years, Clara Luper still burns with the faith that fired her to lead this city’s first sit-in at a downtown lunch counter that denied service to blacks.

“I hated segregation with a passion. I could not understand why we couldn’t eat downtown or go to the schools that had the largest number of books and the best equipment,” said Luper, a retired 69-year-old teacher and an activist in the black community. Today, she says “I have no objection to the militants who say we don’t need white folks. But I know that I need white folks and I know white folks need me. It’s a mutual thing.”

Sharon Jackson, who is also black, doesn’t share Luper’s conviction that integration is the answer to racial woes. Jackson, a 23-year-old teacher at a virtually all-black school here, fears that too much damage is done to the self-esteem and learning capabilities of young blacks by uprooting them from their neighborhoods and placing them in predominantly white settings where they often are culturally and socially alienated.

“I think it’s important that we teach our own at this critical stage in their lives,” said Jackson, whose third-grade classroom at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School is adorned with sayings by the iconoclastic black Chicago educator Marva Collins. “Once they get to the fifth or sixth grades, then it’s OK for the melting pot.”

From Oklahoma City to New York City, from Miami to Chicago, the violence that ripped through Los Angeles this spring has infused a new urgency into debates about how to help the urban underclass and heal the enduring racial rifts in America. As the smoke clears from Los Angeles, the national spotlight is turning back toward issues that have long divided black Americans from white Americans--opportunity, inequality and crime.

But time spent in Oklahoma City--a community where residential integration between blacks and whites has proceeded to a point that places it at roughly the national average for the nation’s largest cities--suggests that the questions of how to bridge the lasting gaps between black and white America are often just as divisive among blacks themselves. Here, as in many communities, blacks are splitting--often along generational lines--around a fundamental question: Are the means that black leaders have historically employed to advance the race still relevant to the 1990s?

At its heart, the debate centers on political priorities: Should blacks devote their energies primarily toward demanding greater representation in institutions dominated by whites, or should their principal focus be on bolstering institutions controlled by blacks?

Generational Chasm

Last year, the Supreme Court decided a school desegregation case here that crystallized this generational chasm. The court upheld an Oklahoma City School Board plan that ended mandatory busing to achieve integration in grades 1 through 4--even though that ensured that students on the predominantly black Northeast side of town would attend virtually all-black schools. The ruling paved the way for hundreds of formerly segregated school systems around the nation to free themselves from decades of federal control.

In Oklahoma City, local civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League bitterly fought the decision, seeing it as a reversion to the old pattern of separate-but-equal education. But their efforts were opposed by many black parents, who had pushed the school board to end busing in the early grades out of the conviction that it exacted too great a price from their children.

“I didn’t like school busing when I was a kid and I don’t like it now,” said Swarnnie Hill, 26, the mother of six children ranging in ages from 1 to 10. “I prefer kids being able to walk to school. If my kids had to be bused, I couldn’t be involved in PTA as much. . . .”

For Clara Luper, and many like her in the generation of blacks who grew up battling against separatism vigilantly enforced by the state, such talk is incomprehensible. For them, integration remains the summum bonum , the good from which all other good will flow. “I would want my kids helicoptered if that’s what it takes,” she said. “It’s a shame those students will grow up without knowing any whites and whites will grow up without knowing them.”

But many other African-Americans say that the key to black advancement is the concentration that nourishes community institutions. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, for example, hardly any national leaders--of any ethnicity--suggested that the solution to the problems of South Central was to promote greater integration in the city. Instead, the clear focus was on building stronger institutions in the black community--particularly by expanding access to capital for black entrepreneurs.

“How can you have a viable black community without viable black institutions like schools?” said Russell Perry, editor and publisher of the weekly Black Chronicle in Oklahoma City. “The civil rights movement wanted integration. Now we live everywhere, but we fragmented our community. . . . Power is concentration.”

This debate recalls the divide between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and more militant blacks in the late 1960s, but with one significant difference: Blacks today are debating against a backdrop of experience that has demonstrated both the power, and the limits, of King’s vision of an integrated society that would equalize opportunity.

In many respects, African-Americans are clearly better off today than they were a quarter-century ago. The number of black elected officials has increased five-fold since 1970; more than four of every five young African-Americans graduate from high school, more than double the percentage in 1960. Measured in constant dollars, the share of black families earning at least $25,000 more than doubled from 1960 through 1982; as of 1989, almost 44% of black families earned $25,000 or more.

But, for all those gains, the median income among African-Americans remains only 59.4% that of whites, a slightly lower percentage than in 1970. And the share of blacks living in poverty, after dropping from more than half in 1959 to about one-third in 1969, has budged little since.

Another symptom of the gap between whites and blacks is the deterioration of black families, which first became visible in the 1960s and has dramatically accelerated. The share of black households headed by women has doubled since the dawn of the civil rights era, rising from 21.7% in 1960 to 43.8% in 1989. By comparison, less than 13% of white families are headed by single women. Fully half of black female-headed households live in poverty today.

Meanwhile, true integration has proven elusive even for the black middle class. Though the number of blacks living in the suburbs has increased substantially over the last 15 years, the dominant trend since World War II has been white flight that leaves blacks increasingly segregated in central cities.

These segregated residential patterns have made integrated schooling virtually impossible. Nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court struck down school systems that separated pupils by race, almost two-thirds of black children attend schools where minorities constitute a majority of the pupils. In Illinois, New York, Mississippi, Michigan and California, three-fourths of black youngsters attend such racially concentrated schools.

If these are hard and disconsolate facts for African-Americans, so is the intractable opposition of white Americans to the traditional agenda black leaders have advanced to confront these problems. A survey by the Gallup Organization last fall found that by almost 2 to 1, whites oppose busing to achieve integration; by a margin of more than 5 to 1 they reject programs that grant blacks special preferences in education and employment--even when such programs are presented as an attempt to offset earlier discrimination.

Within Democratic circles, it has become virtually an article of faith that one key to the GOP dominance of presidential politics over the last generation has been its subtle, and sometimes overt, kindling of white resentments on these issues and other racially tinged matters such as capital punishment. That conclusion has inspired a search for new approaches on racial issues among Democrats--one that fulfills the party’s historic commitment to blacks without alienating whites on Election Day.

That process has been symbolized by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s call for domestic policies built on the principle of reciprocal obligation--with government increasing its commitment to provide opportunity but also demanding more “personal responsibility” from those it aids.

When Clinton came to Los Angeles in early May after the riots, he insisted that the rebuilding of the inner city depended as much on strengthening cultural values as on christening new government programs--and said that any new programs should focus on rebuilding neighborhood institutions, such as schools and small businesses, rather than dispensing large amounts of new federal largess.

This search for new directions at the apex of national politics finds its echoes on the streets of Oklahoma City, a sprawling, table-flat community of 445,000 residents. Here, blacks are increasingly taking stock and calling for a reformulation of priorities and strategies in their quest for economic and social equality.

“We have a job to do ourselves in providing for our young people, improving our schools and working closer together in law enforcement,” said Goree James, the only African-American on Oklahoma City’s eight-member City Council. “We don’t have to ‘melt’ to be successful. There’s nothing holding us back but ourselves.”

Residents of one neighborhood in the traditionally black Northeast Side are part of this new spirit. Carved out of an urban renewal district nearly a decade ago, the neighborhood became an attractive location for families of modest means. With the help of government-subsidized mortgages, they were able to buy property and finance construction of comfortable, ranch-style homes with spacious lawns.

But when the oil bust devastated Oklahoma City’s economy, the neighborhood was hit hard. Many homeowners lost their jobs and were driven into foreclosure. With a dearth of buyers for the vacant properties, the houses were boarded up and left unceremoniously to the ravages of time and crime.

Residents Pitch In

Two years ago, that began to change. A neighborhood association was formed with an aggressive, self-help agenda. Residents cleared debris, cut grass and removed graffiti at the unoccupied homes. An “eyes-on-the-street” campaign was initiated to promote security. Plans were drawn up for constructing a neighborhood playground and a minipark with a gazebo on two separate vacant parcels of land.

“We wanted to live here and have a safe, nurturing environment where neighbor knows neighbor and everyone has pride in their community,” said Dianne Ross McDaniel, a social worker and single parent who heads the neighborhood association. “But we realized that if we wanted to improve things, we would have to take full charge and full responsibility ourselves.”

To the overwhelming majority of blacks on the battered Northeast Side, retaining neighborhood schools is essential to any community-rebuilding effort.

“Most of my parents are very supportive of the neighborhood-school concept,” said Linda Toure, principal of Creston Hills Elementary School, a handsome, Spanish-style building set in a struggling neighborhood of modest, single-family homes. “They like having the school as a focal point for the neighborhood.”

Creston Hills is one of nine elementary schools on the Northeast Side that returned to virtually all-black enrollment after the school board discontinued mandatory busing for desegregation for youngsters in grades 1 through 4.

Leola and Don Pittman, a married couple with five children who have lived in the Creston Hills neighborhood for the last two decades, supported the board’s action.

Under desegregation, their three oldest children, who now range in ages from 19 to 25, were bused during their elementary school years to a school 10 miles away.

“I don’t feel my kids got anything from being in a racially mixed environment,” said Leola Pittman, 41, an aerospace employee at Tinker Air Force Base in southeast Oklahoma City. “They got an OK education, but . . . the only time they learned anything about their racial heritage . . . was during Black Heritage Month.”

But the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League oppose the neighborhood school plan, contending that it has shortchanged the Northeast Side and is an unconscionable throwback to the Jim Crow era.

“The most glaring shortcoming of the plan has been its failure to allocate resources--physical, financial and human--to effect educational equalization and effectiveness in the ‘Dowell’ schools,” the Urban League contended in a position paper, referring to the nine Northeast Side schools with virtually all-black enrollments.

School Supt. Arthur Steller maintains that the civil rights groups are unfairly comparing the all-black schools with predominantly white schools in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods. When they are compared with schools in predominantly white, low-income areas, he contends, their problems do not seem as pronounced.

He maintains that the district is making a concerted effort to overcome academic deficiencies at the Dowell schools, so named after the Dowell vs. Oklahoma City Board of Education desegregation case that went to the Supreme Court.

Per-pupil expenditures at the Dowell schools exceed spending at schools with the highest ratio of whites by an average of almost 25%, he said, and the gap in test scores between the all-black schools and the district as a whole has been narrowed over the last six years from 13 points to 8, nearly a 40% reduction.

But civil rights activists and even some parents who otherwise support neighborhood schools maintain that black students at the Dowell schools would perform better academically if they were in integrated classrooms.

“I liked it better when my daughter was being bused,” said Karen Bruner, 34, referring to her daughter, Kara, 16, who was bused during her grade-school years. ‘ “She had a mixture of teachers and a mixture of children. The children were being better educated.”

But Don Pittman is among those who argue otherwise. He cites his own experiences as a student when busing was first mandated by the federal courts. “My grades went totally down when they started busing,” he said. “I went from an ‘A’ student to a ‘C.’ I even failed in geometry and had to go to summer school to make it up.”

And Toure, the Creston Hills principal, thinks integration is beside the point: “I think the best thing we can do for our kids is to give them a good foundation so that they can compete anywhere. It’s not necessary for them to be in a class with white students to function successfully.”

Hopes of rebuilding neighborhoods from within are complicated, ironically, by the very success of the civil rights movement in allowing middle-class blacks to move into the suburbs--stripping businesses of their best customers, and neighborhoods of role models.

Cornelia Roach, whose father was one of Oklahoma City’s pioneering black entrepreneurs, recalls the black business strip, “Deep Deuce.” It was here that her father owned a string of once-thriving businesses--a hotel, a furniture store and a hardware and variety store.

But, after integration laws permitted blacks to shop anywhere, all that remains are the signs that once graced the facades.

“My opinion is that we as a people are swinging backwards,” she said. “Now we don’t have the black hotels, the black grocery stores, the black restaurants like we used to do.”

Perry, the newspaper publisher and editor, says that with 16 full-time employees his business is probably the largest black-owned enterprise on the traditionally black Northeast Side of town.

“I’m not saying that to be boastful,” he said, “but only to give you an indication of the state of black enterprise in this community. Our overall economic base within the city is virtually nil; it’s zero.”

To Perry, this economic disenfranchisement is the ironic, but inevitable, result of a civil rights agenda aimed at encouraging blacks to disperse into white areas, and pin their hopes on advancement in white businesses.

But many successful blacks refuse to reject the dream of integration--or at least escaping the ghetto for predominantly black neighborhoods in suburbia. The choice Perry frames is an extension of the underlying issue in the school-desegregation case: Are blacks better off pursuing integration or concentrating together? And do blacks entering the middle class have a special responsibility to neighbors they left behind?

Otis Funches, a 56-year-old electronics engineer, typifies the conflicting pressures and emotions pulling at the black middle class.

He grew up poor in a segregated neighborhood in southwest Oklahoma City.

“We went to all-black schools, we couldn’t eat in any of the restaurants downtown and, as I recall, there were even some exclusive stores, like men’s or women’s shops, that we couldn’t even shop in,” he said. “. . . We had no contact with whites.”

When he left as a teen-ager in the mid-1950s to go into the Air Force, he never wanted to come back. After he got out of the military, he moved to Los Angeles, where he went to college, got his first job in electronics, married and began rearing a family.

In 1981, however, an irresistible job brought him back to Oklahoma City. When he and his wife, Nancy, started looking for homes, the one unyielding criterion was that it not be on the Northeast Side--not even in the fashionable black neighborhoods of Wildewood or Park Estates.

“I didn’t want to live in a segregated neighborhood,” he said.

He and his wife, a teacher at an Oklahoma City public school, found the home of their dreams in an affluent, predominantly white area on the Northwest Side.

Their neighbors have been friendly and, because so few blacks live in the area, have not exhibited any of the usual fears of whites. “The neighbors right next door are a retired couple, and they’re like family,” Nancy Funches said. “When they’re out of town, they give us the key to their house and I go in and water their plants.”

They seldom set foot in any predominantly black part of town.

“Integration is essentially working for us,” Otis Funches said. “There may be some limits on the job, like the ‘glass ceiling’ African-Americans often bump into, but all in all, I guess I don’t have too much to complain about.”

The Funches’ experience remains atypical; that residential integration remains extremely limited in almost all major cities. Even in many suburban communities, integration has tended to be the period between the time the first black family moves in and the last white family moves out.

“When you look at the overall patterns you find the level of black-white segregation in the large metropolitan areas have not changed very much since the 1960s,” said Douglas S. Massey, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

Orville Bradford, 67, is the personification of historical perspective. In the early 1970s, he and his late wife were among the first blacks to move into the then lily-white Wildewood neighborhood on the far Northeast Side.

Initially, their neighbors could not have been friendlier. But as more and more blacks moved in, the dreams of integration took an all too familiar twist.

“All those friendly white people moved out,” Bradford said. “There were just too many blacks for them too soon. Now Wildewood is mostly black.”