I enjoyed the Martin Luther King Jr. editorial titled "Apart Together" Jan. 17, but it's sad that I must challenge the conclusion that "school desegregation is a reality" today. Even though conservative scholars such as Willmoore Kendall acknowledge that public education is the one place we should do something about equality, very little has been accomplished in the Deep South, and conservatives across the nation, including President Bush, are attacking affirmative action in higher public education.
I've just completed a roots trip to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, the Delta, New Orleans, Little Rock, Dallas and Tennessee, and I see one evil thing - school resegregation. Why?
A man who resides on Paschal Street in Plaines - street over from the closed street where Jimmy Carter lives - told me that it's due to one thing: the GOPers' "school choice."
A man at the LaGronge, Ga., County Club tennis courts said it was the "seminal opinion rendered by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (a Republican) in the case of a George school district." That is, "where resegregation is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications," opined Kennedy, who most likely was the swing vote in the 5-4 Bush v. Gore political, if not ideological, decision.
It should not come as a surprise that the 20 most rapidly resegregating school districts are concentrated in the South, with Texas and Georgia occupying eight of the top 10 spots thanks to "school choice" and Kennedy.
I visited an elementary school that had 46 percent black children, 44 percent white last spring. But when the opening bell sounded this fall, the black population had leaped to 95 percent, the largest shift I saw during my six months in the South.
If this is not bad enough, white teachers are fleeing black schools. Some see that trend as a troubling symptom of the resegregation of the South. And a study at Georgia State University singled out how race was a significant factor.
Additionally, the man in Plaines said that the education reform law that "tied teacher pay to test scores" was another reason white teachers are bailing. They are refusing to teach in the low-income districts of Georgia. And who can blame them?
Most Republican whites in the South who talked with me admit that the slaves have been freed, but that common schooling should be available at taxpayer expense in neighborhood schools only. That is the code word for "seg" schools.
School desegregation in the South is almost a myth in many areas. The South was where the federal courts had to drop the white Dixiecrats kicking and screaming into integration. Richard Nixon plowed that fact into what's known as the "Southern Strategy," and a white majority became Republican. The Republican Rehnquist Court has stopped the dragging, and George W. Bush gave America "school choice." Therefore, "the South is rapidly resegregating" says the Harvard Civil Rights Project. I saw it with my own eyes. Can you believe that I wrote the introduction to the Fort Pierce, Florida school desegregation plan for the federal court sitting in New Orleans? Well, I did - but those days are long gone.
The self-righteous separatists have won this 40-year battle. That is, diversity killed the left. But I still like the old values: defending the scapegoated poor, investing in jobs and training (as opposed to claiming that the goal is to create jobs, while the real goal is giving money to the rich as a worthy end in itself), and halting the draining of resources away from the public and into the private hands of the few - the plutocrats. Believe me - that's not Dr. King's dream.
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