Having gone as far as it could, the great pendulum that is the law began to inch back last week. After two decades of trying to achieve racial integration by the numbers, the Supreme Court of the United States took a step back, and ruled that schools need not be fully integrated before the courts let local districts regain control of their schools.
There was a good reason for the court`s decision to drop its old policy of micro-managing school districts till the numbers of black and white students were roughly balanced: It wasn`t working.
In this case out of Georgia, about 60 percent of the 77,000 students in DeKalb County`s public schools are black, and better than half of them go to schools that are at least 90 percent black. No matter what the law, nobody can integrate the public schools if there aren`t enough white kids in them to go around.
Call it White Flight or Population Shift, but one clear effect of insisting on integration-by-the-numbers has been to drive white families out and re-create segregated school systems, particularly in the heart of America`s great cities. Here was another instance of the very American strategy of destroying something in order to save it.
Back in the 1960s, the dream took shape: By shifting students modest distances, every school would be racially balanced, and so would the communities that their students would eventually shape. It was a noble dream. In many cases it worked and is working. In others, it was an impossible dream, as should have become evident once students had to be bused more than 20, 30 or 40 minutes to school. There is a point at which transportation takes the place of education. Parents won`t stand for it and shouldn`t. Education is too important to be replaced by hours on a school bus. Nor may any family, white or black, stick with a school system where simple physical security cannot be assured.
Even now a scandalous amount of money is being spent in some places on transporting students to school, sometimes by taxi, in order to meet the requirements of a federal court. When a dream sours, it can become a bureaucratic nightmare.
The court isn`t giving up on the dream, it`s just reshaping it. The essential test of whether school districts meet constitutional requirements in the future will not be sheer numbers but whether the school district is making a ”good faith” effort to comply with the law. School districts will no longer be responsible for population patterns they did not and cannot control. In the future, only official acts that encourage racial segregation will subject a district to the courts` jurisdiction.
In the Georgia case before the court, the district judge had given up making student assignments-but he kept jurisdiction over staff assignments and other decisions a school district can control. The aim is still to promote racial integration, but realistically. Common sense seems to be replacing the practice of theory for theory`s sake.
Where did the old, court-ordered approach go wrong? It may have been spawned by a basic misunderstanding: the belief that blacks and whites are separated only by physical appearance rather than culture, that we are only different colors rather than different ethnic groups. The folly of demanding that, say, Italian and Jewish and Irish students all be balanced numerically in the school systems of our great cities by force of law might have been immediately apparent. But many of us unthinkingly assumed that white folks were just blacks with paler faces, and black folks white under the skin.
It might have helped if Black had been spelled with a capital letter, the way Negro once was. Perhaps then it would have been more apparent that we were dealing not with race (a dubious and increasingly useless concept) but with ethnicity, which has a way of holding on. See current events in what once was the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe.
This doesn`t mean integration is any less necessary, only that it can`t always be achieved by the numbers. After all, Southerners have shared a largely common culture for generations regardless of color, racial taboos, or previous condition of servitude. Americans must now bolster our common culture, all too long neglected, if we`re going to be one people.
No matter what the make-up of a school, its students should be learning American history, American literature, American culture, and the American language, all of them glorious mixtures. There is such a thing as an integration of ideas, too. No nation that knows Whitman and Faulkner, Ralph Ellison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tecumseh and Washington, Lee and Lincoln, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Emily Dickinson can be called un-integrated.
We are marvelously mixed and all the same, too. E pluribus unum, the theory is called. Americans are a distinctive people quite apart from our ethnic origins and, yes, continuing ethnic identities. The Constitution of the United States is not an Anglo-Saxon document, but a peculiarly American product. Just as jazz, as Walker Percy once pointed out, didn`t come from Africa; it was born on Perdido Street in New Orleans.
It isn`t necessary to demand that folks give up anything of their intimate selves in order to be American. Americanism is an addition to, not a detraction from. The model of integration may no longer be the court-administered school district but the Army outfit in World War II movies, the squad that embraced a variety of ethnic types yet was no less American.
Scoop Jackson, that much underrated font of common sense, used to say that he was a liberal but he tried not to be a damfool. Many of us are still integrationists but we try not to be damfools. If one route to unity and equality now appears to have been unrealistic, others beckon. If one way to achieve the dream has led to a dead end, other routes open. We`re not retreating. As the Marines say, we`re just advancing in a different direction.
