CLASS WARFARE
THE BATTLE TO KEEP SCHOOLS SEGREGATED GETS UGLY
To the west, railroad tracks snaked between warehouses, vestiges of boom times, when Birmingham was known as “the Pittsburgh of the South.” On the horizon rose Red Mountain, a slight green ridge. Clustered on the other side of its hump, outside the city limits, are some of the wealthiest suburbs in Alabama: Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Hoover and Homewood. They have the best schools in the state, and although Alabama has some of the worst schools in the nation, those suburbs frequently make it onto national best-schools lists. Many medical center faculty members live in these “over the mountain” suburbs, as do older Southern families.
Clemon did not go to school over the mountain. His grandparents were sharecroppers in Noxubee County, Mississippi. His parents moved to Alabama, where his mother worked as a domestic for a white Birmingham family, while his father was a bricklayer’s helper. He went to the Dolomite Colored Elementary School. “We had outside privies,” he remembered over lunch at City Club Birmingham. Other than the servers, he was the only black person in the room. At one point, two white men came over, and one of them greeted “the judge.” The other asked if the judge was famous, and the first one said yes, he was.
Clemon later went to Miles College, right outside Birmingham, and became involved in the civil rights movement, working with Martin Luther King Jr. He jokingly recalled unfavorable coverage on the movement from Newsweek back then. When I mentioned that I hoped to do research at the Birmingham Public Library, Clemon chuckled. “I desegregated that,” he said.
Clemon went to Columbia Law School in New York City, then returned to Birmingham to practice civil rights law. In 1971, he argued Stout v. Jefferson County Board of Education, in which a black parent sued the county school system, which she claimed was segregated by race. The federal judge ordered the schools to integrate. The schools of Jefferson County (the schools of Birmingham are a separate entity) remain under that decree.
Clemon eventually became Alabama’s first black federal judge, joining the U.S. District Court that ruled in the school desegregation case, and stayed on the bench for nearly three decades. In what must have been a surreal moment, the descendant of Southern slaves retired in early 2009 with a resignation letter to Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president.
More recently, Clemon found himself in another surreal situation. This past winter, he was in court arguing Stout v. Jefferson County again, this time because a Birmingham suburb called Gardendale wants to leave Jefferson County’s school system. Gardendale, which is mostly white, says race has nothing to do with its push for secession: It simply wants to control its schools.
Clemon is skeptical. “The intent is to create a local school system where they will have control over who comes in and that they will minimize the number of blacks who come in,” he told me in his raspy, slightly mischievous baritone. Local control has become a rallying cry in municipalities across the nation that want to form their own school districts. They all have their reasons, and the reasons all sound reasonable, but Clemon believes he knows what motivates Gardendale and some of its counterparts. He says those schools share a single feature that mild suburbanites, with their secret yearnings, will not name. But Clemon, who faced off against Bull Connor and his water cannons and his dogs, will: “No blacks.”
SOUTH BOSTON’S MASON-DIXON LINE
THE MOST remarkable thing about school integration in the United States is how rare it is, and has always been. The Supreme Court struck down separate but equal schooling with 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but it fell to federal judges of the 1960s and early ’70s to enforce that decision with orders like Stout v. Jefferson. Such court orders were frequently unpopular; when the opponents of integration lost in the courts, they took to the streets. The resistance reached its apex in 1974, when the blue-collar Irish of South Boston viewed the yellow school buses that had come to symbolize integration as the tanks of an invading army. Yet the buses came and went, in Boston and elsewhere. By 1988, widely acknowledged to be
On a winter afternoon that threatened tornadoes, retired federal judge U.W. Clemon stood at a window 31 floors above Birmingham, looking south. In the foreground was the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose medical center powers the city’s economy.
the high point of school integration in the U.S., nearly half of all black children attended a majority-white school. An achievement gap that once appeared to be intractable suddenly seemed like something that could be closed in a generation or two.
Since then, however, the gains of Brown v. Board have been almost entirely reversed. Last year, a report by the Government Accountability Office found “a large increase in schools that are the most isolated by poverty and race.” Between 2000 and 2014, the number of schools the report deemed “high poverty and comprised of mostly Black or Hispanic students” more than doubled, from 7,009 to 15,089.
Conscious attempts at integration are rare today because the same court that struck down separate-but-equal struck down the best remedy for it. In 1974, 20 years after Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court ruled in Milliken v. Bradley that integration could not take place across district lines, so that Detroit, where the case was brought, was prevented from integrating by exchanging its kids with white and wealthy Bloomfield Hills. In 1986, in 1991 and again in 1992, an increasingly conservative Supreme Court said it wanted desegregation orders lifted once certain conditions were met. The Supreme Court’s most severe blow since Milliken came in 2007, in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 case, in which it prohibited the use of “explicit racial classifications” in school admissions. Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” By conflating integration with discrimination, Roberts effectively reversed Brown v. Board.
The breaking away of school districts is a related phenomenon, one that has stymied integration by appealing to smaller local concerns over grander public ones. More and more, parents see a school in the context of what it can achieve for their child: Education for all has lost out to Princeton for mine.
This resegregation is not restricted to the South. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a wealthy suburb that feeds into Northgate High School is trying to separate from the Mount Diablo Unified School District. Northgate’s median income is $126,000,
“[THESE SCHOOLS] ARE MAGNETS FOR FAMILIES WHO CAN AFFORD TO PAY THE ‘TUITION’ REPRESENTED BY COMPARATIVELY HIGH PROPERTY VALUES.”
about $50,000 higher than that of the Mount Diablo district. Were Northgate to break away, it would be 65 percent white and only 8 percent Latino. Proponents of separation in Northgate use exactly the same code as those in Gardendale. It is the language being used by secession-seeking districts like East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Malibu, California. The latter fight is especially bizarre because it is taking place in one of the most privileged enclaves of Los Angeles. “Parents say they are eager to detach themselves from overly bureaucratic school administrations,” NBC News reported in late 2014 of Malibu’s efforts. “Others worry that their association with schools that serve at-risk students hurts property values.”
THE BEST PLACES TO LIVE
GARDENDALE is not one of the “over the mountain” Birmingham suburbs. It is in north Jefferson County, less hilly and less wealthy than southern suburbs like Mountain Brook. In the 19th century, the settlement was called Jugtown because there was a jug factory there. There were coal mines nearby too, and the city has retained the vestiges of its blue-collar past. Gardendale’s median household income is $56,967, whereas Mountain Brook’s is $126,534. Gardendale is 83 percent white. Mountain Brook is 96.5 percent.
There had long been a small group of powerful men in Gardendale—many of them parishioners at the Gardendale First Baptist Church, the town’s most prominent civic institution— who decided it was going to become more like Mountain Brook by attracting the well-to-do young families that were, by then, moving farther south, to the exurbs of Shelby County. They wanted Gardendale to do what six other towns in Jefferson County had done: split from the county school system. The centerpiece of the new, independent Gardendale Board of Education would be a $55 million high school Jefferson County had just built in the middle of town for its own system.
By 2013, there finally seemed to be sufficient public will to break away from Jefferson County, so Gardendale decided to hold a vote on a new property tax to fund its four schools, which would serve as a referendum on secession. Right before the tax vote, an advertisement in The North Jefferson News pictured a white girl. Above her was a question: “Which path will Gardendale choose?” The ad listed “Places that chose NOT to form and support their own school system,” including Center Point, Pleasant Grove and Hueytown, all of which are majority black. It also lists districts that seceded from Jefferson County and “are listed as some of the best places to live in the country”: Homewood, Hoover, Vestavia and Trussville. All those school systems are very good. They are also very white.
The property tax passed. The following spring, Gardendale formed its own board of education. For the position of superintendent, the city hired Patrick Martin, a young administrator who’d run a school district in central Illinois.
The Gardendale school system prepared to open in the fall of 2014. The city’s leaders seemed either unaware or uninterested in the inconvenient fact that Gardendale was bound by Stout v. Jefferson County, which forced Jefferson County to integrate its facilities, students and teachers. Yet other Alabama municipalities had navigated Stout, most recently in 2005, when Trussville pulled its schools out of the system. Gardendale was justified in thinking it too could leave the Jefferson County school system.
Jefferson County, however, proved less willing to divorce. There was that $55 million school, and there was the Stout desegregation order, which the county argued would be hurt by Gardendale pulling away so many white students. Gardendale, for its part, has tried to avoid arguments about race, which it must know it cannot win. It claims instead a basic American right, which is the right to be left alone.
POORER AND BLACKER
GARDENDALE High School looms over Gardendale the way the Eiffel Tower looms over Paris. Two enormous wings meet at a colonnaded atrium that looks out at the town’s modest center. The red brick and white cornices are both Federal touches, but the building’s size and youth are less suggestive of history, with all its varieties of darkness and decay, than of a present-day suburban optimism and health. This continues inside. The hallways are clean, and the children who