NAACP Policy on Integration May Face Test

Swimming against the tide of black opinion, John Lee Johnson never supported the 1971 school busing plan that sent black children from their poor and working-class neighborhoods in this city’s center to affluent suburbs just so they could attend classes with white kids.

“Black people didn’t have the sophistication to understand that white folks were going to structure the plan for their comfort and not for fairness,” said Johnson, 55, a popular and outspoken community activist here for nearly 40 years. “As a result, 99% of the burden of integration has fallen on the shoulders of African American children.”

Twenty-five years ago, Johnson was ridiculed as an anti-integration extremist and, often as not, shouted down by black parents eager for the benefits they expected when their children went to school with white kids. Now, angered by white opposition to sharing the burdens of school desegregation and disillusioned by the effects on their own children, many blacks are swinging toward Johnson’s side.

And, nationwide, so many black parents find Johnson’s sentiments so appealing that no less an organization than the NAACP, whose lawsuits were responsible for many of the nation’s forced-busing programs, is finding its position under challenge from within. That is visible for all to see as delegates gather in Pittsburgh, this weekend for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual conference.

“I would like to see it come up,” said Randa Trapp, president of the NAACP’s San Diego branch. “I think it should be reevaluated.”

Trapp, who will not attend the conference, says delegates to the meeting will have strong opinions on the subject and could push “to have this issue revisited.” If so, she said, black schoolchildren may benefit.

*

“If [school] integration is not working, then we might want to focus on not being so concerned with having our children sitting in a class with white children,” she said. “We need to look at how best to educate children as a whole.”

Convention planners, however, say no formal board resolutions are proposed that could lead to a reversal of NAACP policy at this meeting.

“There has been no discussion [among board members] of repudiating our push for integrated schools or an integrated society,” said Julian Bond, a member of the NAACP’s board. “I cannot imagine that happening.”

The closest thing to a high-profile public debate will probably be a workshop titled, “Why the NAACP Is for Integration.” At that session, a panel of lawyers is expected to address the question: “How can [NAACP] branches equalize educational opportunities while fostering desegregation alternatives to busing?”

But many of the more than 12,000 attendees likely will be talking among themselves about what they view as the high costs and low benefits of school desegregation programs--and expressing outrage over desegregation programs that are not producing improved performance among black children.

Others are expected to decry the fact that schools in predominantly black and inner-city communities are allowed to deteriorate without capital improvements, while predominantly white and affluent communities build state-of-the-art public schools.

*

These private conversations are part of a grass-roots revolution that is forcing the nation’s oldest civil rights organization to reevaluate its 88-year-old commitment to racial integration as its raison d’etre.

Over the years, the NAACP has waged and won a series of legal and legislative battles--starting with the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954--that have established the group’s integrationist bona fides.

NAACP leaders, say those familiar with the organization, are wary of a freewheeling debate on school desegregation because it could call into question its long-held mission: fighting for black inclusion in the nation’s white mainstream.

Worse yet, some fear that efforts to crack the NAACP’s rock-hard support for school desegregation might open the door for a membership-led retreat from the group’s fight against “separate but equal” laws affecting schools, public accommodations and workplaces.

“Kids with integrated experiences in schools are more likely to live integrated lives,” said William L. Taylor, a school litigation lawyer who has represented the NAACP in numerous desegregation cases. “The schools are not the only factor [in fostering racial integration], but if we go backward instead of forward, that is a precursor to making our society more segregated.”

That trend already may have begun in the classroom, says Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University.

In a report issued in May, Orfield and a team of researchers at Harvard and Indiana University found that since 1980, white flight from cities to suburbs and lax federal enforcement of school desegregation plans had produced increasing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools.

“We are moving backward toward greater separation rather than pressing gradually forward as we were between the 1950s and the mid-1980s for black students,” the report stated.

Orfield said in a recent interview that public opinion surveys and tracking polls suggested that racial prejudice and antagonism had declined over the decades, leading him to conclude that “the country is very integrationist.”

But, he lamented, the federal government has backed away from aggressive enforcement of school desegregation programs just as they were beginning to show signs of improvement in Southern and border states. In a few key cases, the Supreme Court stopped the drive for integrated schools by allowing some communities to block busing programs across city-county lines and allowing other communities to terminate their voluntary desegregation efforts over the objections of school officials.

*

“Everyone wants an integrated society, but no one wants to do anything to bring it about,” Orfield said. “It’s crushed a lot of people’s hope.”

Middle-class and middle-aged black Americans, who make up much of the leadership of the NAACP and other civil rights groups, are among the most disappointed by the national retreat from school desegregation and other federal programs designed to increase integration.

Fortified by a mounting stack of evidence--some scholarly accounts, like Orfield’s study, others anecdotal, like the painful testimonies of recent books written by black professionals--many black Americans are demanding that the NAACP address whether the organization should devote so much effort to achieve racial integration at the expense of alternative self-help initiatives.

“I found plenty of middle-class African Americans willing to express disenchantment with the promise of integration,” said Ellis Cose, author of the 1993 best-seller “The Rage of a Privileged Class.”

Cose said his conversations with NAACP Chairwoman Myrlie Evers-Williams and President Kweisi Mfume have convinced him that they are still committed to integration as the organization’s guiding light.

But, he said, the group’s top officials also want to make the organization more relevant to young and professional blacks, who have been less willing to support integration without challenging its relevance to their lives.

“It is very clear that Myrlie and Mfume feel very seriously about rejuvenating the NAACP by reaching out to younger people, who harbor a lot of disenchantment with integration,” Cose said.

As in previous periods of black disenchantment with social progress, activists within black communities have found some success with separatist and nationalist appeals to secure independence from white Americans. Separatist movements such as Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” campaign in the 1920s, Elijah Muhammad’s expansion of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s and Malcolm X’s leadership of that group in the 1960s have found hundreds of thousands of supporters among black Americans.

But for the most part, the NAACP, with its call for racial inclusion, has held the largest sway over the majority of black Americans--especially middle-class and working African Americans.

Chris Edley, a Harvard Law School professor and advisor to President Clinton’s task force on race relations, said there was a “tentativeness and ambivalence about integration and isolation” that “has always been within our community.” Enhancing separatist leanings for the past two decades, he said, has been a sustained assault in Congress and the Supreme Court on the civil rights gains of the 1960s.

“Our ambivalence [toward integration], while not unusual, is today quite dangerous because there really is a battle afoot,” Edley said. “Many people have not felt or do not recognize dividends from our investment in the integration ideal. There certainly are dividends, but they’re distributed unevenly” among black Americans.

In his recently published book, “Integration or Separation? A Strategy for Racial Equality,” Roy L. Brooks traces the lure and loathing of both integration and isolation among black Americans since before the end of slavery.

*

He points out, for example, that the nation’s first public schools in the Massachusetts and Virginia colonies in the 1640s “had no laws segregating African American and white pupils.” But because black schoolchildren were so badly treated, black parents in Boston founded the nation’s first African American private school in 1798. By 1820, Boston school officials were fully funding the black school, which had run out of money, as a public school exclusively for black students.

In the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine in public accommodations. The Plessy decision permitted racially segregated schools--which were in effect unequal to better-funded white schools--until NAACP lawyers successfully argued the 1954 Brown decision before the Supreme Court.

Brooks, a professor at the University of San Diego Law School, writes that the “hardening of racial attitudes should push African Americans to look to themselves rather than to whites for salvation.” In an interview, he called on some black Americans to engage in “limited separation” as a way to build self-reliance.

And the NAACP, Brooks said, should openly confront the issue at its convention.

“If they are truly concerned about the plight of African Americans, they need to have this discussion now,” he said. “If they are only interested in pleasing their white supporters, then they shouldn’t.”

In Champaign and neighboring Urbana, John Lee Johnson has given his life to community organizing on behalf of blacks. In the 1960s, sporting a huge Afro and dashiki, he was arrested for leading demonstrations. He mobilized youths to challenge gang violence. He served two terms on the Champaign City Council. He taught himself the intricacies of the Community Reinvestment Act and successfully compelled leading bankers to provide low-cost loans that led to construction of public housing in depressed downtown communities.

His latest and most prolonged fight--eight years and going strong--has been with the school board. He wants school officials to scrap plans to build a school in the booming southern suburbs in favor of a pupil assignment plan that requires more white students to attend existing schools in black neighborhoods.

“Black kids are being bused to achieve desegregation of the public schools, and white kids are not being bused for purposes of desegregation. That’s unfair,” he said.

For participating black children, Johnson says, desegregation has produced mixed results at best. “It has not been advantageous to all African American people,” he says, “and it has not provided us with an equal playing field.”

It is not that Johnson opposes integration in principle. He just believes that the time is not yet ripe.

*

“My experience in community organizing tells me that we are not going to reach a workable integrated society if African American people are not able to begin to establish the kinds of infrastructures in their community that whites have in theirs,” he said. “Only after that is done can we negotiate for an appropriate integrated school or any other system in America.”

The NAACP, Johnson said, is not a party to his lawsuit. He considers the venerable organization more of a hindrance than a help.

“The NAACP should be working to restore a vision, a sense of purpose in black America,” he said. If it is only now beginning to discuss the drawbacks as well as the benefits of school desegregation, it is “30 years late.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Pendulum Swings

For 150 years, separatist and integrationist strains have coexisted uneasily.

*

Key events in separatism

1822: American philanthropists buys land in Africa to resettle slaves in the Republic of Liberia.

1881: At 22, Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute, dedicated to black self-help.

1895: Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech was given to a white audience. He urges blacks to improve themselves before demanding equal rights.

1896: The Supreme Court’s Plessy vs. Ferguson decision enshrines the “separate but equal” doctrine.

1903: 1900 National Negro Business League is founded by Washington to present “a case for segregated black economy.”

1914: Marcus Garvey founds the Universal Negro Improvement Assn. in Jamaica.

1916: Garvey moves to the United States, where his Harlem-based movement seeks to create a separate country for blacks.

1925: Garvey is jailed for mail fraud and is deported after serving two years.

1934: DuBois published essays suggesting that black separatism could be a useful economic strategy.

1960: Malcolm Little becomes Malcolm X and transforms the National of Islam into an influential black nationalist organization.

1993: Ben Chavis is elected executive director of NAACP and seeks alliance with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam.

*

Key events in integration

1866: The 14th Amendment outlaws slavery. The Civil Rights Act gives blacks “the rights enjoyed by white citizens.”

1905: W.E.B. DuBois helps convene the Niagara Movement, a biracial coalition that aims for “the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color.”

1910: The NAACP is founded.

1954: The Supreme Court rules that public schools must be integrated.

1955: Rosa Parks refuses to move to the blacks’ section in the back of a public bus in Montgomery, Ala.

1963: Martin Luther King Jr. declares, “I have a dream” of a color-blind America.

1964: The 1964 Civil Right Act outlaws discrimination in public accommodations and employment.

1965: The Voting Rights Act rules out literacy tests, poll taxes and other techniques designed to deny blacks their right to vote.

1994: Myrlie Evers-Williams, elected chairman of the NAACP, charts a more integrationist course than Chavis and former chairman William F. Gibson pursued.

Researched by D’JAMILA SALEM FITSGERALD / Los Angeles Times