Divided we Fail

by Sarah Garland

  For the decade after May 1954, when the Brown decision was handed down, Gallup polls found some ambivalence about desegregation among black Southerners; the percentage of those who agreed with the decision fluctuated between 30 and 70 percent between 1954 and 1961. The poll findings were based on a small sample size, which partly explained wide variations between years, and black respondents living in the South may have been reluctant to express their true views. The numbers contrasted starkly with the 95 percent approval rating among black Northerners, a number that remained steady in the decade after Brown.20 By 1962, about 70 percent of American blacks, North and South, favored school integration, slightly more than the proportion among whites.21

  W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of the NAACP, was among the skeptical. In what seemed a shocking about-face from his earlier days as Booker T. Washington’s nemesis, Du Bois had published an article in 1935 titled, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” A year earlier, Du Bois had left the NAACP in part because of his dispute with its new leaders over the best way to uplift the race.22 Du Bois no longer thought integration was the most practical solution.

  In his article, he argued that in the face of white hostility, the black student needed the “sympathetic touch” of a teacher who understood “his surroundings and background, and the history of his class and group.” His conclusion was not necessarily that segregation should be maintained, but that it was beside the point: “Theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools.”23

  Fear for the well-being of black children was not the only reason blacks in the South were uneasy about integration in the lead-up to and the immediate aftermath of Brown. Black teachers and principals feared for their jobs. In a 1953 poll of 150 black teachers from the South, only about half said they would prefer desegregation to the segregated system.24

  The ambivalence about Brown in some communities was deepened by the fact that quite a few black schools were doing much better during the years leading up to the ruling. In many places, white school districts poured money into black schools both preemptively and in reaction to lawsuits forcing them to live up to Plessy’s separate-but-equal clause. The black schools in Hyde County, North Carolina, were a prime example. Before Brown was handed down, and just after, the white school board of Hyde County constructed new buildings, science classrooms, libraries, and gymnasiums for the black schools in a flurry of belated good-will.25 Blacks were wary about sending their children to white schools in a place where the Ku Klux Klan was not only alive but very active. They were also proud of the schools they had built and maintained despite meager school board investments during the many years of white neglect.

  Hyde County reacted to the desegregation order by proposing to close the traditionally black schools and transfer their students into the traditionally white schools. The black community was livid. They didn’t want desegregation if it meant losing everything they had worked for. Rather than give up, they chose to boycott: for two years, black children in Hyde County were kept home from school.

  In Louisville, Central High School also appeared to benefit from growing white apprehension over the tide of NAACP court victories in the early 1950s. Years earlier, when Fran Thomas was still a student, the Louisville school board had promised Central a new building. The only step that was taken, however, was to choose a site already occupied by dilapidated houses of the black poor in the California neighborhood. The board stalled for years on the new construction, however, because members said they were reluctant to start evictions, although, at the time, thousands of blacks were being uprooted from “slum housing” under urban renewal plans.26

  Atwood Wilson, who had become principal at Central in 1934, fought for the new building and more money for programs at the school for much of his tenure. Wilson was a quiet but awe-inspiring figure at the school.27 He had a degree from Fisk University, and master’s degrees in education and chemistry from the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado. He considered a doctorate, but he didn’t want to be away from his school for the amount of time it would take him to complete it. He pushed his faculty to extend their education, however, and some took off for Columbia University and other northern schools during their summer vacations.

  Wilson was single-minded about improving Central for black students. In the 1940s, he asked the teachers to draw up lists for the classrooms, labs, and equipment they would need in a new facility, and put the architecture teachers to work drawing up plans. The result was a ninety-five-page report that included plans for an ROTC unit, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, an auditorium, and a stadium. Wilson’s dream was to create spaces and programs for students across the spectrum of class and ability. Central would focus intensely on college prep, but the school would also expand its vocational offerings, which already included carpentry, tailoring, dressmaking, and mechanics. In 1947, he gave the plan to the school board for consideration.

  A year passed with no response, and Wilson took Lyman with him to confront the board. The costs had risen with inflation, and the board members said they would need to consider the plans in light of the new expenses. Meanwhile, the school’s 115-year-old building was oversubscribed by five hundred students, and the roof had begun to leak. Construction finally started three years later. In 1953, a few months after the school desegregation cases were argued in the Supreme Court, the new Central building opened. Board members dubbed it the “South’s finest high school for Negros,” and it probably was.28

  The school had its own radio studio and shops for tailoring, dressmaking, pressing and cleaning, sheet metal, carpentry, and auto mechanics. It also had a “beauty school . . . to offer training in beauty culture.”29 A space was left for a swimming pool, although it would take another two decades for the board to get around to having it built. The two-story building took up a whole city block and was constructed with yellow brick. In contrast to the heavy stone structure the school had previously occupied, there were lots of windows. There were no rats in the basement, and the roof didn’t leak.

  A year after the Brown decision came down, even as students basked in Central’s new, state-of-the-art facilities, the school was preparing for a new era of integrated schools. It seemed like the country had suddenly, unexpectedly made a huge leap forward in its race relations, and things were changing fast.

  Chapter 8

  Early in the morning of September 10, 1956, the superintendent of the Louisville public schools took his position in front of the stone arches and columns surrounding the doors of Male High School, a sprawling brick building just south of the city’s downtown business district.1 Male, the all-boys’ school opened in 1856 that had handed down its old building to Central, was Louisville’s best, and proud of it. In 1950, protests had broken out when the city announced that Male would have to admit girls. It took two years to force the school to open its doors to female students, and the district was never able to make the school give up its name.

  In 1956, just a few months after its hundred-year anniversary, another of the school’s cherished customs was about to be challenged. That September, for the first time, black students would cross under the arches and take their seats in the school’s venerable classrooms. The protests against admitting girls had taken place mostly in the confines of school board meetings. This time the superintendent, Omer Carmichael, was prepared for violence in the streets. The mayor, the police chief, and the school board president joined him at his post. Newspaper and television reporters dispatched by national media outlets waited nearby to witness the violence firsthand.

  Louisville was one of the only Southern cities that had set a timeline to desegregate in the wake of Brown.2 Carmichael was an unlikely maverick, however. He was a farmer’s son who had graduated from a one-room schoolhouse in Clay County, Alabama, just southeast of Birmingham in cotton country.3 Carmichael started out a
s a teacher in another one-room schoolhouse, but quickly moved up the ladder. He became superintendent in Selma, where he made a few small efforts to combat the inequities of segregation, including banning the practice of addressing black teachers by their first names. He moved to Tampa, where the KKK was “in its heyday,” and then to Lynchburg, where he adjusted the teacher-rating system that determined salaries and was heavily skewed against black teachers. Blacks were still paid less than whites, but he was proud that he had raised their salaries somewhat, and pleased that by the time he left, black principals ran all of the black schools.

  On the day in 1954 that the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision, Carmichael took a bolder stance, perhaps encouraged by the Kentucky governor’s public approval of the ruling.4 Without checking with the school board first, Carmichael announced that Louisville would comply with Brown by 1956: “There will be problems but they are not insurmountable . . . the group to suffer most will be the Negro children in the early stages of integration. The real problem will be with the adults, however, not the children.”5

  Louisville held tight to its racially tolerant image, keen to sell this image to the outside world. Just as the United States was struggling to hide its racial troubles as it competed with the Soviet Union for the world’s allegiance in the Cold War, Louisville was fighting to attract industries and workers to revive its fortunes in the post–World War II boom. The chamber of commerce had launched a big push to lure trade shows and concerts to the newly built fairgrounds, and the city was in the midst of demolishing slum housing to clear the way for the redevelopment of the downtown.6 The bombing of the Wades’ house—two days before Carmichael made his announcement—threatened the city’s carefully laid plans.

  After the Brown decision and his promise that Louisville would comply, Carmichael spent the next two years frantically working on a viable desegregation system and fielding angry questions from white parents. The education department held question-and-answer sessions with PTAs, recruited ministers to preach the value of integration from their pulpits, and posted notices in the newspapers. Teacher training didn’t go as smoothly as hoped. Carmichael discovered a deep-rooted racism and anger among many in his teaching force. Some called the prospect of teaching black children a “bitter dose” or “simply repulsive.”7 The NAACP also complained—that the school district was moving too slowly. The biggest worry, however, was caused by the White Citizen Councils.

  The councils had formed across the South to hold the line against integration in the wake of Brown, and Milliard Grubbs, the man who had germinated the idea that the bombing of the Wades’ house in Shively was the work of Communist infiltrators, founded the Louisville branch.8 Members included some of the Wades’ white neighbors. In the lead-up to the first day of school, meetings were held calling for the assassination of the Supreme Court justices and crosses were burned on school property, including in Parkland, where white parents were agitating to have their middle school district lines redrawn to keep out blacks.9

  So as students trickled into Male that morning in September 1956, Carmichael was nervous. Some of the students lingered to watch and pose for photos. More arrived, some of them black. They walked up the stairs and disappeared through the doors. The officials waited for something to happen. Nothing did. The five hundred police officers patrolling other schools around the city called in their reports. Nothing. A handful of picketers from the White Citizens Council showed up briefly at education department headquarters, then disbanded. Carmichael was elated. Louisville could reclaim the mantle of racial tolerance and progressivism, and bury the uncomfortable tensions provoked by the bombing in Shively. The city’s track record on race could now be a role model, not an embarrassment.

  Elsewhere, desegregation of schools in the South began terribly, if at all. In a few smaller towns, the transition went smoothly, but elsewhere, violent mobs blocked black students from attending white schools.10 It was becoming clear that in the majority of Southern cities, the order of things would not be too disrupted by pronouncements coming out of the Supreme Court. A year after the Brown decision was announced, the justices handed down a second decision, Brown II, outlining how they expected school desegregation to be carried out: with “all deliberate speed.”11 Southern school districts interpreted the line to mean “slowly,” and as years passed, it seemed clear many hoped to get away with “never.”

  School districts dragged their feet with the blessing of state governments; the federal government expressed little interest in forcing them to act.12 In 1956, President Eisenhower was in the middle of a contested reelection campaign.13 The Suez Canal crisis and a catastrophic drop in agricultural prices had taken precedence over the South’s intransigence on desegregation. Race was a problem that Eisenhower generally tried to avoid. He, along with his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, publicly supported Brown, but the president was wary of pushing the issue any further during an election year; racial justice was never a winning campaign issue for presidential candidates.14 The Supreme Court, after all, had not set any deadlines for the South to comply with its decision.

  Nevertheless, in the few places in the South that did attempt to comply, the violent reaction captured national headlines. The Eisenhower administration knew the president needed a stronger response and a positive angle.15 At a White House press conference on September 11, 1956, a reporter asked Eisenhower if he had any plan for making desegregation work. He was prepared with his response. He said he deplored the violence, and then pointed to Louisville’s success story: “I think Mr. Carmichael must be a very wise man. I hope to meet him, and I hope to get some advice from him as to exactly how he did it, because he pursued the policy that I believe will finally bring success in this.”

  The next week, Carmichael received an invitation to the White House. He was suddenly a national celebrity. The New York Times praised him in an editorial, and Time magazine lauded his success in an article titled “How To Integrate.” The superintendent spent forty-five minutes with the president explaining his strategy, and Eisenhower emerged from the meeting impressed. Carmichael had handled the desegregation mandate in “the truly American way,” the president said.

  Eisenhower’s words were prescient. Carmichael’s strategy to integrate schools looked good from afar, but it had little effect on the deep racial divide between Louisville schools. Although all of the city’s schools were opened to black students, and by the next year 78 percent of students were in a mixed-race school, many of those schools held only one black student or only one white one.16 Ten schools were still all black and eight were all white. Fewer than half of Louisville’s black students went to integrated schools in the years after the program was implemented. Only eighty-seven white children out of more than thirty thousand in the city went to a school that was previously all black.

  This discrepancy between the hype and the reality in Louisville was rooted in the choice provision of Carmichael’s plan, which ensured that no white parents who objected to integration would actually have to send their children to a school with black students. The lesson whites took away from the reverberations of the unfortunate Shively incident was that pushing blacks and whites together too fast was unwise. The best strategy, many believed, was gradual change, letting whites become comfortable with the idea of sharing their schools with blacks, and perhaps someday, their neighborhoods.17

  As a key part of this inch-by-inch strategy, the school choice provision allowed parents to request transfers away from their assigned school without explanation. Of white students assigned to traditionally black schools, 85 percent requested a transfer. Black parents were also hesitant to send their children to white schools. Of black students assigned to traditionally white schools, 45 percent requested transfers. More than 90 percent of transfers were granted. In addition, teachers in Louisville were not integrated, meaning black teachers taught only the handful of white children who went to the traditionally black schools. The black students who acquiesced to integ
ration entered environments that were entirely white except for their fellow students. At Central High School little changed in the aftermath of Carmichael’s decision. Except for one white student, the school remained all black.18

  As the limits of Carmichael’s program became clear, local civil rights activists realized that the struggle for school integration in Louisville was just beginning, as it was across the South. The school choice strategy pioneered in Louisville was also a favored strategy of other Southern cities. The policy allowed districts to open schools to racial mixing, but in practice, most white parents were allowed plenty of wiggle room if they didn’t want their offspring mixing with blacks. The plan had another weakness: It covered only the schools inside the city limits. Jefferson County was a separate district. Whites who moved to the suburbs were beyond the city’s reach, and most of the county schools were still lily-white.

  As the 1960s progressed, the South’s slow-and-unsteady approach to integration became untenable. In the courts, the NAACP was pressing dozens of cases calling for the rapid and proactive desegregation of the schools.19 At the same time, a new movement, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson in the Brown case, had taken to the streets to push for the integration of everything else.20

  In April of 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to preach at Louisville’s Southern Baptist Seminary, where he repeated his now-familiar call for blacks to rise up in nonviolent resistance: “We’ve made the world a neighborhood, now we must make it a brotherhood. We must all live as brothers or we will all perish together as fools,” he told the audience.21 The same day, forty black students—most of them younger than eighteen—followed his instructions and were arrested at sit-ins in segregated restaurants downtown.22