Rear-View Look at Busing Ruling

Among the first schoolchildren bused to integrate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in 1970 was a 14-year-old black boy with thick glasses and no idea what awaited him in a white classroom on the other side of town.

As the bus rolled from his westside neighborhood, skirting the glass towers of uptown Charlotte and finally lurching to a stop 45 minutes later at an eastside junior high, he thought of himself as a soldier being mustered into some glorious army to wage war against segregation. Hundreds of black and white schoolchildren were being driven into the great unknown, with a mission to change the nation--one classroom at a time.

That bus ride was one of the most defining moments of my life.

Now, nearly 30 years later, a federal judge has ordered an end to race-based busing, arguing that Charlotte has done all it can to end racial discrimination in its schools. His decision, which the school board is appealing, could resegregate Charlotte into neighborhood schools.

I wanted to find out why history was reversing itself. So I went home.

What I learned contradicted my childhood memories and surprised me. I found a city in uproar, divided not between white and black but between Old South and New South, debating whether racial harmony was the key to economic prosperity. I discovered a sense of disappointment among many whites that 30 years of effort had come to naught. And, I heard black Charlotte residents express a weary feeling of deja vu, as if they had been waiting all these years for whites to back away from their experiment with integration.

Mostly, I found that the issue of busing and school desegregation was as much about economics as about race. During the last 15 years, Charlotte’s population has increased by nearly half with a wave of professional and politically empowered newcomers. The overwhelming majority of them are white and well off.

When I grew up here in the 1960s and ‘70s, Charlotte was a racially segregated city. It still is, but less so. Then, blacks were a rarity in professional occupations, standing apart in our own world, isolated from Charlotte’s elite. Now, there are a few black lawyers and bankers.

Charlotte’s white leaders credit school busing for producing these positive changes, so they continue to embrace desegregation. But they are running head-first into ardent opposition from the newcomers. The debate over busing finds the old Charlotte establishment fighting a new wave of white surburbanites over what history means, if anything.

Belief That Violence Unlikely in Charlotte

When school busing began in 1970, I was in the ninth grade. I knew that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had led protest marches that turned violent in Selma, Ala., and that James Meredith had set off riots when he tried to integrate the University of Mississippi. I also believed that such violence was unlikely in Charlotte, where officials made it clear they valued peace and calm over bloody confrontation. The newspapers and television news broadcasts stressed that racial harmony would be the key to future economic prosperity.

Parks Helms recalls those days with mixed emotions. He and other young white attorneys and mid-level executives felt chastised by the court decree, but they envisioned brighter days. Currently, he is the elected chairman of the Mecklenburg County Commission, which has oversight of the city-county schools, and is a prosperous attorney with an office on the 15th floor of one of two First Union Towers.

“We could see in 1969 and 1970 that the social order was changing,” he said. “We could have fought it or we could have gotten out front and helped to lead a way toward integration of the schools.”

From the start, civic boosters like Helms and banker Hugh McColl pointed to the newly integrated schools as one of Charlotte’s major selling points. After bowing to the inevitability of black demands for racial integration, the white community embraced its newfound spirit of multiculturalism with ostentatious displays. Admission to West Charlotte, the city’s remaining black high school, became a badge of honor in some circles of upscale and white south Charlotte.

School busing and racial harmony became a calling card that Charlotte’s boosters used to attract new high-tech businesses with good-paying jobs. “The past 30 years have been one of the healthiest social experiments we could have ever hoped for,” Helms said.

There is no question that the strategy was productive. Businesses boomed. The city became a model of New South boosterism, attracting employees, professional sports franchises and residential and commercial construction.

Along Tryon Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, three of the nation’s top 10 banks have put their corporate headquarters in gleaming skyscrapers. Trendy restaurants have replaced greasy-spoon diners, and fancy art galleries have displaced tacky adult bookstores. Charlotte--where Chamber of Commerce leaders adopted the unofficial motto, “Someplace Special”--has gone Starbucks.

When I rode a bus for the first time on Sept. 9, 1970, to attend classes at a previously all-white junior high school, I couldn’t have imagined a Charlotte so upscale that I would sit sipping an espresso at a Tryon Street sidewalk cafe.

Holding Their Own in Desegregated Classes

Attending school with white kids did not make me a better person. But it opened doors that had been closed to both blacks and whites in Charlotte. It taught all of us that white kids weren’t deserving of better facilities than those handed down to black students. Given desire and equal resources, black students like me could hold our own in desegregated classrooms and later in integrated workplaces.

Larry Alston, my best friend since first grade, had a similar sense of awe about the paths we have traveled since high school. “We had no idea what lay ahead of us,” he said recently, recalling the excitement and fear of being on those first integrationist buses.

Alston and I plunged into our “integrated” school, joining white clubs and participating in student government. It was all very new and heady because we felt like trailblazers. At times it was difficult. Every spring of my high school years, when the weather got warm, street fighting broke out between blacks and whites. The newspapers called them riots. These brief outbursts of campus tension were always followed by a school assembly where the combatants were made to embrace.

But there was slow, steady progress as I made friends with people I might never otherwise have known.

“Even if we didn’t think so at the time, it was a good experience,” said Alston, an advertising account executive in suburban Washington, D.C. “We had an opportunity to have exposure outside our neighborhood, to see how white people lived and for them to see how we lived.”

Some of my white classmates caught the integrationist fever too. Ed Nanney, who was in my first integrated homeroom back in the ninth grade, said that attending classes with black students for the first time helped prepare him for his adult life in a multicultural world at college and in his career. After the initial stress and drama of forcing black and white students into the same schools, Nanney assumed that few would give it much thought by 2000.

“The purpose of it was, I thought, to create a nurturing environment for those kinds of friendships,” said Nanney, now an insurance executive in Chattanooga, Tenn. “With time, I thought socializing with blacks and mixing socially and culturally would be more commonplace than it has been. It’s still fairly rare. From my point of view, when it happens, it’s very special.”

I left Charlotte in 1983, before the good times really got rolling. From afar, I kept track of relatives and friends who stayed home, found careers and prospered enough to buy homes in the suburbs just like white folks. I heard about how Harvey Gantt made local political history a couple months after I left as the first black mayor and how his best friend, Mel Watt, convinced large numbers of white voters to send a black man to Washington repeatedly as their congressman.

While Charlotte remains someplace special to me, it is someplace different too.

Demographic Shift Splinters Whites

Underneath the facade of racial harmony and economic progress, a demographic shift has been splintering the white community. During the last 15 years, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s population has swelled from an estimated 458,000 in 1985 to nearly 644,000 in 1999.

Lured by the climate and abundant jobs, new citizens came from the North and Midwest, where school desegregation carried less cultural baggage than in the South. They have no psychic investment in Charlotte’s history and tire of hearing people talk about the past. They don’t know or remember racially segregated schools and want nothing to do with the old busing plans in place before they arrived.

Over the last decade, the children of Charlotte’s new suburbs have flooded the city-county schools at an estimated average rate of 2,000 new students each year. In the last five years, the pace has quickened even more, as the system had to absorb 3,250 new students a year.

“They are--as a group--freshly scrubbed, upper-middle-class, professional nomads who came to Charlotte over the past 10 to 15 years in search of economic bounty,” said Frye Gaillard, a local freelance writer who reports on the schools. “Once they arrived, they saw what was happening with the schools and asked themselves: ‘What’s this busing thing all about?’ ”

Six of those parents did more than ask questions. They filed a suit in 1997, demanding that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district drop all attempts to assign children to schools based on the color of their skin.

“My estimate of them isn’t that they’re racist or feel strongly negatively toward integration,” said Gaillard. “They just didn’t have the same history as many of us.”

Judge Robert D. Potter, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the federal bench, agreed with their arguments. Potter had fought against the original 1969 desegregation suit as a private citizen. As a federal judge he was able to rule in September that Charlotte should return to neighborhood schools. In his order, he reasoned that the school system had “eliminated, to the extent practicable, the vestiges of past discrimination in the traditional areas of school operations.”

Just as black parents had celebrated a generation earlier when Judge James B. McMillian ordered Charlotte to use busing to desegregate the schools, supporters of neighborhood schools cheered Potter’s call to stop the buses. To them, machinations to preserve racially diverse schools are ridiculous relics of a long-gone era. Worse, they see them as unfair to parents who want their children at schools close to home.

“The obsession with race, above all other issues, continues to drive a majority of the board of education,” said Thomas Ashcraft, one of the attorneys for the parents. “It’s a sad sight to see, for them and for the community.”

School officials are appealing the judge’s ruling. In the meantime, they have pledged to comply with the order to stop using race as a criterion in pupil assignments--but only when all of the schools have equal resources and facilities. To do otherwise would permit a return to separate and unequal schools, divided along race and class lines, which the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.

Indeed, if the school board follows Potter’s order to stop using race in pupil assignments for the 2000-2001 school year, nearly every one of Charlotte’s 151 schools could be easily identified by race and class.

Busing Schemes Changed Annually

The school district, which now teaches about 100,000 students in Charlotte and the surrounding Mecklenburg County, is roughly 60% white and 40% minority--mostly blacks but including some Latinos and Asians. Since the busing program began, school officials have sought to maintain in every school the ratio of whites to minorities in the school population. For the most part, they have succeeded. But doing so required busing schemes that changed annually, sending an estimated 28,000 children past neighborhood schools to attend classes elsewhere.

All this busing still is necessary because housing patterns remain separated along racial lines. Black and poor white children, who are more likely to live in central city neighborhoods, will be sent to schools that are older and more rundown than the newer schools built in overwhelmingly white and wealthy suburbs. The rare exception will be in minimally integrated communities where affluent whites and a smattering of middle-class blacks have bought their way into isolated neighborhoods with better schools.

And to bring schools in black neighborhoods up to the standards of those in white neighborhoods will take money, a lot of money, some $1.3 billion by one school board estimate.

But so far, the wealth in the new suburbs has not been spent on schools in the inner city. Arthur Griffin, chairman of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board, is still mad about it. “Spending on schools became a shell game,” he said. “We built where whites moved but not where blacks lived.”

Griffin, who is black, voiced the frustration of a man who had fought a losing battle for more school funding, victim of what he views as misplaced priorities. “We spent more and more money to build a brand-new jail, which was already full before the last brick was laid,” he added, repeating a commonly heard refrain among blacks in Charlotte. “But we wouldn’t spend money to put a school in black communities.”

Given the disparity of wealth in Charlotte, affluent taxpayers will be asked to shoulder the lion’s share of costs associated with upgrading and equalizing the schools.

Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, said that the current trend among U.S. cities is to move away from integrated public schools. No one compiles statistics on how many school districts have abandoned busing. But Orfield said that Los Angeles, Kansas City, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta and Norfolk, Va., all have moved away from desegregation plans that heavily relied on busing children across school districts. In nearly every case, he said, the schools resegregated, with poor black and Latino kids more likely clustered in inferior schools.

“This is the problem of urban education in America,” Charlotte Supt. Steve Smith said. “What we’re really talking about here is asking some people to do something that doesn’t come easily in human nature. We’re asking them to pay for more benefits to other people’s children than their own.

“But if this community, any community, is going to survive in the next century, then it’s going to have to happen.”

Tradition-bound and graying, Charlotte’s old-line leaders, both white and black, say it is imperative to Charlotte’s economy to preserve racially integrated schools. They are aghast at the arrogant and selfish attitudes of the newcomers who refuse to go along. It is clear and palpable that the old Charlotte leaders are turning on the very newcomers whom they have recruited, seeing in them the seeds of destruction to the city’s prosperity.

Even the veneer of Southern genteel politeness fails to mask the resentment they feel for the interlopers’ lack of understanding of Charlotte’s proud history of working--hard--for integration.

“If it hadn’t been for [busing to desegregate the schools], Charlotte wouldn’t be the city it is today,” said Ron Thompson, principal of East Mecklenburg High. “The people who brought the [recent] lawsuit don’t see that. They weren’t a part of our past. They don’t understand our history of struggle. We have allowed them to come into this community and be the prevailing voice. They have nothing to do with who we are and what we’ve come from.”

At age 50, Thompson’s a beefy white man with short hair and a pained expression. He testified on behalf of the school system, favoring the continuation of a busing plan to preserve desegregated schools. He has spent his entire teaching and school administrative career in the Charlotte system and views the judge’s decision as he would news of a death in his family.

“First you’re in denial that it’s happening,” he said. “Then, you get angry before you can accept it’s true. I’m about halfway between the two right now.”

As I listened to him, I imagined how a similar conversation might have sounded 30 years ago. Someone like him would have complained to a reporter about how black parents and “forced busing” would ruin Charlotte. The reporter then would have been white. Now it was me.

A lot has changed since then.

“In 1971, Charlotte was a black community and a white community,” Thompson told me. “Today, Charlotte is a multicultural community and we’re better for it.”