Chris Kirkham's excellent summation.

Civil rights struggle lives on in La.'s public schools
Posted by Chris Kirkham, West Bank bureau July 28, 2007


September morning in 1965, Lena Vern Dandridge and a handful of black girls climbed on to Bus No. 75 for their first-ever school day with white students at Riverdale High School in Jefferson.

The studious 10th-grader had professional aspirations -- maybe she'd work in an office building some day -- but her father felt John H. Martyn High, the all-black school she was slated to attend, would not adequately prepare her.

So a year earlier, and with the backing of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation, her father sued to integrate the Jefferson Parish public schools.

On federal court documents, Dandridge's name appeared at the top, followed by 15 other black students.

"At the time I didn't pay much attention to it. I was a kid, I was just there to learn," said Dandridge, who now goes by Dandridge-Houston. "Looking back on it, it wasn't just education from textbooks. It was cultural."

Almost 43 years later, her name is still on the federal court docket, as the desegregation case against Jefferson Parish remains unresolved.

Across Louisiana, almost two-thirds of all public school districts still fall under federal court supervision to ensure a racial mix in schools.

Judges monitor attendance zones, busing policies, racial breakdowns and where new schools are built, but settling the lawsuits is up to each school board or plaintiff, in the absence of federal or state oversight.

Vestiges of the civil-rights-era South, many of the lingering cases go quiet for decades, as original plaintiffs die off or move elsewhere.

"People just go about their day-to-day activities," said Paul Baier, a professor at the Louisiana State University Law Center who specializes in civil rights law. "If nobody's continuing to ignite fires or scream about it, people won't remember."

But what the sheer volume of open desegregation cases means is up for debate. Resurrecting and closing the long-standing cases often stirs up dormant racial tensions in communities and is a time-consuming process for school boards.

And the track record for resolved cases is patchy: many of the districts declared fully integrated in recent years emerged from the lawsuits only after a painful process in which schools are shuttered and middle-class families flee to private academies.

In East Baton Rouge Parish, home to the longest-standing desegregation case in U.S. history until earlier this month, rigid, crosstown busing policies alienated the community and prevented much-needed tax increases for new schools.

State and national research has shown that, despite making great strides in desegregation since the civil rights era, levels of segregation have been on the rise since the mid-1980s. A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing race-based student assignments will raise new questions for school districts that emerge from federal court supervision.

Many researchers and lawyers say the legacy of unresolved school desegregation cases points to the inherent challenges of social engineering, even four decades after the journey began.

"In addressing the problem of desegregation in American society, we came up with the idea that schools were the places we could do that, where we could reweave the fabric of society," said Carl Bankston, a Tulane University sociologist who is one of the foremost researchers on school desegregation in Louisiana. "Maybe it's not that Louisiana schools have a long way to go, but that schools are a reflection of the greater problems in society."

At age 57, Dandridge-Houston has seen two full generations of her family enroll in Jefferson Parish public schools.

Her two grandchildren still quiz her about "the olden times," when she was one of the first to go to integrated schools.

She recounts the memories of that sophomore year in 1965 as if they happened last week: the name of her first bus driver, Walter Richardson; the whispered jeers and insults in gym class, "You're out of your element, baby," "Why don't you go back to where you came from?"; the cautious band of teachers standing watch in the mornings, waiting for signs of trouble.

About a month before she started school, her father, the Rev. Arthur Dandridge, a prominent local minister, took her on the 20-minute drive from their Little Farms home to catch her first glimpse of Riverdale High School, an all-girls school at the time.

"I remember saying, 'How does my daddy think I'm going to go to this white school on Jefferson Highway?'¤" Dandridge-Houston said. "I was like, 'You've lost your mind. Daddy has cracked for sure.' "

At the time Arthur Dandridge and lawyers A.M. Trudeau and Lionel Collins initiated the Jefferson case, there was a flurry of similar desegregation lawsuits across Louisiana.

By the 1970s, the state's racially divided past would force nearly every public school district in Louisiana to fall under federal mandates to integrate.

The 1896 Supreme Court case that set the doctrine of "separate but equal," Plessy v. Ferguson, originated on a passenger railcar in New Orleans. The state had enacted laws to resist school integration after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Every school system in the New Orleans area was under a court order by the 1970s. St. Charles, St. Bernard and New Orleans schools have emerged from their orders.

Public schools in Plaquemines, St. Tammany, St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes remain under federal supervision, according to the U.S. Justice Department, which keeps a list of some desegregation cases.

In some cases, school boards reached settlements with plaintiffs decades in the past, but never officially pursued unitary status. The Justice Department lists the St. Tammany Parish case as still open, but board attorney Harry Pastuszek said the district for years has operated as if it were under unitary status.

He said he will look into the history of the original case, now archived in Fort Worth, Texas, to see if the district was actually declared unitary.

Seeking an end to the cases also calls up memories of the underfinanced, overlooked black schools that existed before the court orders were in place. Kovach's proposal last fall to seek unitary status sparked a series of contentious hearings, where black community leaders referred to the desegregation suit as a "sacred" document.

A controversy over hiring practices in Tangipahoa Parish schools, particularly the decision not to hire a black head football coach at Amite High School, has put that school board back in federal court with the NAACP in recent months.

And the Lafayette Parish School Board was released from federal court supervision last year, only after the district was forced to close several historically black elementary schools.

"The changes forced on school districts to achieve unitary status become emotional issues within the community," said Carl LaCombe, president of the Lafayette Parish School Board. "For districts that haven't tried it yet, I'm sure those board members read the news, also. They're saying to themselves, 'Do I want to put my community through this?' "

As the clock continues to tick on many desegregation cases across the state, experts warn that over the years cases have had an unintended consequence: Middle-class whites and blacks flee integrated public school systems after fears of declining quality of education.

New Orleans public schools were one of the first systems in the state to be released from court supervision, after administrators shifted attendance zones to maintain balance in schools. But by the time the district was released, white students were leaving in droves for public schools in surrounding parishes. By the mid-1980s, low-income, black students made up 90 percent of the district.

"If this was all about desegregating schools, it didn't work," said Stephen Caldas, a desegregation expert at Hofstra University in New York who formerly taught at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. "The consequences were pretty much the opposite of what we want: The middle class left, took all of their social capital and financial capital, and moved to the middle-class parishes that surround them."

East Baton Rouge Parish schools were released from federal court supervision a few weeks ago in a case that dated back to 1956. But many critics have said the long federal case there strayed from its intended goal.

During the intervening 51 years, a federal judge recused himself, and two parish towns, Zachary and Baker, formed their own school districts in protest. Schools fell into disrepair; no new school taxes were passed for nearly three decades, from the late '60s until 1998.

Former Superintendent Gary Mathews, who ran the district from 1995 through 2001, publicly said conditions in the schools were "comparable to that of some Third World countries."

Up until 1981, little was done to integrate the schools, so a federal judge stepped in with a sweeping plan to bus students and combine many schools.

The decision caused white families, who at the time made up 60 percent of the student population, to largely abandon the system. Since the late 1970s, the number of white students declined from nearly 42,000 to fewer than 8,000, and private school enrollment has surged. Black students make up nearly 80 percent of the district's population.

"The very children for whom the desegregation order was intended turned out to be those who were harmed the most by the atrocious forced-busing plan that was in place," said Mathews, who now works as a superintendent in Williamsburg, Va. "My view is the courts had the right motive, but they were employing the wrong means."

Jefferson Parish schools still have years to go before they achieve unitary status. In March, the school system revised its federal order to address inequalities, and the system has until December to sign off on the plan with plaintiffs' attorneys.

"These cases were never intended for you to be under these court orders forever," said Grant, Jefferson Parish's School Board attorney. "Probably if we could have continued with the attorneys on the other side and continued a dialogue, I think what is happening today would have happened sooner."

The board has employed a community task force to examine minority student and faculty issues and hired attorney Charles Patin of Baton Rouge, who worked to achieve unitary status with the Rapides Parish school system and others across the state.

Patin has encouraged more dialogue between the board and the community to minimize surprises along the way. "That way you're not just out there hitting and missing," he said.

Jefferson also is considering a federal grant program aimed at transforming poor, largely black campuses into magnet schools aimed at attracting a more diverse student body.

But the magnet school proposal has a mixed history. The plan was instrumental in improving deteriorating inner-city Alexandria schools in Rapides Parish. Yet sometimes the schools are accused of creating a two-tier system, where white and black students remain separated within school walls because they attend different classes.

Rapides Parish School Board member Herbert Dixon, who is black, was initially skeptical of abandoning the court order, but he embraced the plan after seeing the federal money transform underperforming schools.

"When we made the commitment with these inner-city school concepts, we let the community play a part in the things they wanted to see," Dixon said. "If everybody keeps their word, everybody puts the right foot forward, you're not going to have the plaintiff class kicking and screaming."

Chris Kirkham can be reached at ckirkham@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3786.