Integration Equation Seeks a Solution

More than 100 white pupils were supposed to stroll into the sagging brick buildings of predominantly black Glen Oaks Middle School this term. The school board had carefully picked a student body for the rickety junior high school to comply with a court-ordered desegregation plan. But on the first day of school, few of the white kids showed up.

Most of them had switched to home or private school--or moved away--rather than attend Glen Oaks. Only 20 white students made their way to homeroom Aug. 13. After the first week of school, during which some of the whites complained of racial epithets and harassment, their ranks had dwindled to 12.

“Most of the parents were very cordial. They just indicated they’d exercise other options,” Principal Jannette Davis said. “You can’t legislate people. You can’t force culture on them.”

It’s back to school in East Baton Rouge Parish, where an epic battle over desegregation continues to disrupt school board meetings, inject friction between black and white communities and sap millions of dollars in legal fees from school coffers.

A lot has happened since 1956, when a little boy named Clifford Davis Jr. sued East Baton Rouge Parish for depriving black children of equal access to better schools and teachers: The civil rights era rose and settled. The judges and lawyers shepherding the as-yet unresolved desegregation case quit, died or drifted away. The lawsuit was slowed by decades of procrastination, a series of failed plans--and the changing face of Baton Rouge. The school population shifted from majority white to mostly black.

But with all the things that did happen, there was one thing that didn’t: desegregation.

Despite decades of soul-searching, busing and lawyering, white and black children still aren’t commingled in classrooms, gymnasiums or cafeterias. Most Baton Rouge schools are still split--not legally, but practically--into white and black.

The Davis case is one of the oldest, angriest and most active among the hundreds of school desegregation lawsuits festering in courts across the nation. And from the looks of things, it’s far from over.

This summer, the judge who inherited the lawsuit back in 1981 penned an abrupt, scathing notice--and abandoned the case. Two Baton Rouge neighborhoods tried to break away from the school district. And 13 parents sued the school board to stop their children from being bused across town.

On Friday, lawyers for the school district appeared before an appeals court in New Orleans to argue the finer points of a consent decree. Signed in 1996, the contentious, 100-page zoning plan tried to create a network of magnet schools and bus routes that would mix black and white students. Instead, it spawned a series of debates, budget crunches and lawsuits from angry parents.

“It didn’t make sociological sense,” said Christine Rossell, a Boston University political scientist who helped draft the attendance plan. “We were trying to bring together neighborhoods that were too far-flung.”

Among parents, patience is long gone. The district is hemorrhaging about 1,000 students every year. Each of those pupils represents thousands in tax dollars--and this isn’t a district that can afford to throw away money. Just keeping the litigation rolling costs $1.5 million every year.

Meanwhile, nary a single new school building has gone up in 30 years.

“Every day I go home and ask myself, ‘Can you get this community not to be a victim of its past?’ ” interim school Supt. Clayton Wilcox said.

In the 1980s, the Baton Rouge school population neared 70,000. This year, the district claims about 50,000 students. That’s mainly white flight in action: Since the 1960s, the schools have swung from majority white to 70% black, as white families headed for the suburbs. Fewer than half of the white students still living in Baton Rouge attend public schools.

The district points to those numbers as proof that it can do no more.

Wilcox wants the federal court to declare Baton Rouge schools “unitary”--in other words, sufficiently desegregated to be cleared of the court order. Segregation becomes more elusive every time a white student abandons the public schools, the district argues.

“This whole situation has changed, and yet people continue to apply the rules of yesterday,” Wilcox said. “It’s time to sit back and look at whether the continued bickering is serving the children it seeks to protect.”

Black community leaders have little patience for complaints and excuses. The school district has procrastinated for decades, plaintiffs’ lawyer Gideon Carter said. Meanwhile, majority black schools continue to suffer from shoddy buildings, fewer certified teachers and limited access to advanced courses such as calculus, he said.

“Those persons who are affected least continue to make the most noise,” Carter said. “This case should have been over 25 years ago.”

He isn’t alone in bemoaning the schools’ historic reluctance to integrate. In a wearily worded notice filed in late July, U.S. District Judge John V. Parker called the school board’s efforts “spotty at best,” and accused the district of shirking its constitutional duties.

“The school board and its lawyers would rather litigate than desegregate,” Parker wrote. “Unlike Sisyphus, who was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back every time, this senior judge is not required to continue pushing the stone.”

If there is a lesson in Baton Rouge’s travails, it has yet to emerge. Decades after schools across the nation were ordered to abandon the division of races, the notion of desegregation remains muddy: While some social theorists call for a renewed wave of desegregation, others would rather see the whole idea left by the wayside.

“The paradoxical thing is, not only is the school system still segregated, but the efforts actually undermined their own goal,” said Carl Bankston III, a Tulane University sociologist and desegregation expert. “It’s created a system that cannot effectively be desegregated.”

Other scholars are even more critical. They say desegregation is an outmoded policy tool. It’s time, they say, to worry less about race and more about improving the schools--no matter what shade of skin color fills the classrooms.

“In many respects, [desegregation] was a very naive policy with good intentions,” Rossell said. “The lawyers got hold of it and it became a bean-counting issue.”

It wasn’t always so. Not for the Wilfords, one of the black families that joined the Davis suit in 1956. To Roena Wilford, it was a question of “sticking our necks out” for a better education.

Wilford was 6 years old on the afternoon her father called all nine children into the living room. Back then, she took for granted the daily walk past a nearby white school en route to a distant school for blacks. “Do you want to go to the school with the other kids?” her father asked.

In Wilford’s house, nobody had to ask what that meant: “Other kids” was code for “white kids.” The Wilford siblings were suspicious. “Why?” they demanded. Their father was nonchalant. Newer books, nicer schools, a better education, he explained.

“I said, ‘Hey, yeah, if that’s what it’s all about, sign me up,’ ” Wilford said. And that was that: The names of the five youngest children appeared in bold typeface among the lawsuit plaintiffs.

Today, Wilford is a 51-year-old physics professor at Southern University-Baton Rouge, a historically black college in the northern part of the capital. Her father has been dead for 20 years. Today her nieces and nephews are working their way through the public schools. Every once in a while, her older brother calls from New York: “Did anything ever happen with that lawsuit?” Not yet, she tells him.

“The circumstances aren’t changing; they haven’t changed in 50 years,” she said. “My father wanted to provide better opportunities for our family. But we’re just repeating patterns.

“We can battle and battle forever, but we’ve got to start somewhere, sometime.”

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/ Stack recently was on assignment in Baton Rouge.