The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  For me the regret for not sending our children to integrated public schools goes deeper. Although we never left New York City, my family and I engaged in a form of white flight. We withdrew, leaving it to other people who did not have our financial and social resources to make the public schools work and try to make integration a reality. Every time I say that I can understand the lawyers who fought against the NAACP’s Northern school desegregation cases and the judges who did not comprehend what was at stake, or have the fortitude to make the hard decisions to go against their friends and neighbors, I think of myself because I gave them their excuse.

  * * *

  While Kitty was winning the private school war at home, I was fighting Northern campaign cases in Indiana—one in South Bend and the other in Kokomo. In both instances black children were assigned to broken-down, impoverished schools located in the spreading urban blight that was then an epidemic at precisely the same time those municipalities were building brand-new public schools for white middle-class families creating new, racially segregated suburbs on the outskirts of both cities.

  Despite losses in Gary, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, Bob wanted the NAACP to take a leading role in South Bend and Kokomo. His assumption was that the local federal judges would rule against us, leaning on the other NAACP Northern campaign losses. However, Bob still believed that the Supreme Court would listen to his “impact,” or de facto, argument.

  Ground zero for the case in South Bend happened three days after we lost the Cincinnati appeal from Judge Peck’s second-district court decision. A ceiling collapsed in South Bend’s Linden Elementary School, which was 99 percent black. It was the third time. Fortunately the kids were on vacation. The local NAACP branch demanded that the South Bend school board close Linden Elementary and send the children to surrounding schools. I got the assignment to try to make that happen, and immediately asked for and got a hearing to achieve that goal.

  Despite a local architect’s unchallenged testimony in 1966 that South Bend’s old, barely functional, wooden, and severely overcrowded 99 percent black Linden Elementary School was a dangerous firetrap, the local U.S. district-court judge, Robert A. Grant, denied my request for a preliminary injunction to close the building and assign the children to neighboring schools that had empty seats. I was stunned, as were the mothers sitting in the courtroom. Should I have sought out a highly credentialed Indianapolis or Chicago architect and paid any fees out of my own pocket? I asked myself. The local guy maybe was not up to the judge’s elitist standards. If my children were in that school I would have left no stone unturned to close the building. Now I would have to tell the mothers I would keep fighting. But that would not relieve their fears; I was just another white man in another white court who failed to protect their children. Later I tried to get Father Theodore Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame and a South Bend power broker, to help me put some pressure on the school board. Although he was a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and an outspoken advocate of integration, I couldn’t even get him on the telephone.

  The following year a newly hired NAACP lawyer, Richard Bellman, joined me in South Bend to begin a full trial of the entire school system before Judge Grant. After some irate teachers testified about the horrible conditions in Linden, and my threats to call more to talk about the overcrowding, double sessions, outdated books, and lack of supplies in the other predominantly black schools, the school board threw in the towel. We worked out a settlement in which Linden would be closed and the administration would develop an integration plan for the other schools. At the end of the school year, however, when it was unclear whether Linden would reopen, the black community took to the streets. The cops were called. Rocks were thrown, shots were fired, and a demonstrator was wounded. Linden, however, was not reopened. But the administration reneged on its promise to integrate its schools, and Judge Grant warned me that if I tried to get him to enforce the settlement he would pay particular attention to the board’s one black member. Overwhelmed with work, I put the case on the back burner, and it took another lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice years later to complete the job.

  In the summer of 1967 I journeyed to Kokomo, Indiana, a relatively prosperous city of 55,000 (and growing, fueled by new industrial plants), to try a school case there. I wanted to spend a little time at home with Kitty, who was pregnant with our third child, and my growing family, and I needed some time to prepare the case. But the judge, Cale Holder, labeled me “Mr. Steel from New York,” and gave me only one month. Somehow, with the help of Patrick Chavis, a fine local attorney and well-known African American state senator from Indianapolis, I managed to see Kitty give birth to Patrick and return a few days later, find expert witnesses at Indiana University, and put together our trial witnesses.

  Virtually all of Kokomo’s black community of three thousand lived in a small segregated area near the urban core of the city. In contrast to the much more prosperous white neighborhoods, the streets and sidewalks were either unpaved or crumbling, and lighting was nonexistent. “Ghetto” accurately described the area. Until the 1954 Brown decision the elementary schools were openly segregated. Thirteen years later the situation was not much improved. White teachers engaged in racial name-calling, and one-third of the city’s black elementary schoolchildren were assigned to two paired old, run-down, almost 90 percent black, pathetically outdated buildings called Willard and Douglass. At the same time, in the all-white suburbs, the school board was planning a ten-million-dollar educational park, as well as a new junior high and elementary school. Our objective was to close Willard and Douglas and stop the new construction, which would segregate the schools even further.

  Purely by luck the trial turned in our favor. The school board attorney, asking one of our witnesses about her complaints, caused her to blurt out a fact she had not told us—that a black first-grader had had her mouth taped shut by a teacher. A bored judge became interested. He inspected Willard and Douglass and listened intently to our educational experts explain why segregated schools damaged black children. Unlike Judge Peck in Cincinnati, he understood. Months later, long after the trial was over, Holder issued a ninety-four-page opinion. He ordered Willard and Douglass closed, but did not stop the construction of the educational park or the other new schools, as they had not been zoned yet. The following year both Patrick Chavis and I complained bitterly but to no avail, when the judge allowed all the Willard and Douglass children to be reassigned to neighboring schools, increasing their racial concentration.

  Back in New York in the Hamptons, building sand castles at the beach with my children after that hearing, I thought about the mothers I met when we fought school cases, the children playing at their feet filled with energy but destined for a hard life where many doors would be closed. The black parents I met in Cincinnati, South Bend, Kokomo, and at least a dozen other cities and towns where the NAACP fought to obtain at least some semblance of integration, were trapped. Housing discrimination dictated where they lived, and employment discrimination further reduced their options. Black women raising their children alone were the most powerless, and their children were the ones who needed good public schools the most. Drugs were beginning to infiltrate the ghettos, and the menace of violence was hanging over the streets.

  At Grandma Bessie’s apartment after summer vacation was over, I sought out Lorraina in the kitchen and told her about my cases. If I asked about Duby and Sister Baby—I can’t remember if I did—she would have said they were doing fine, but I certainly never ventured to ask about the schools they attended. I was afraid that if she needed help, I would fail her. Maybe she feared that also. As she showered me with warmth and affection I felt like a fraud—a champion of her people, so serious about things she knew about firsthand—the occasional visitor who disappeared out of the kitchen to take my place at the family table.

  13

  1968

  Despite positive court decisions in the Ethridge case and in Kokomo, the Nort
hern campaign yielded few meaningful results. The Supreme Court refused to review any of the federal court of appeals decisions that hinged on Bob’s insistence that school segregation in the North was just as unconstitutional as the South’s Jim Crow version.

  Even the Ethridge case had stagnated. Moreover, Governor Rhodes didn’t appeal the decision, which cut off the possibility of a higher-court ruling. As with most civil rights wins, the issue became enforcement, and not a single black in the all-white trades had gotten a job on the stalled Medical Science Building. Judge Kinneary had not set a hearing date to enforce the decision, and a second action that we filed, Welsh v. Rhodes, sat in front of him without any movement. In Kokomo, where again there had been no appeal, the school board was doing as little as possible to desegregate the schools, and Judge Holder had rubber-stamped whatever paltry actions the board had taken. In the area of protecting demonstrators, the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts had become hostile. As I saw it, we were in the midst of a judicial backlash.

  In the larger civil rights arena, major problems eclipsed our court cases, prime among them America’s war against the Viet Cong and Communist North Vietnam. While the more militant black leaders who were beginning to come to prominence in the mid- to late sixties dismissed him for preaching nonviolence, Martin Luther King, Jr., had tacked noticeably to the left. He took the SCLC to the North and planned the Poor People’s Campaign. King also opposed the Vietnam War and argued that black youth were being used as cannon fodder. Meanwhile, the more-establishment-oriented Roy Wilkins insisted that military decisions lay beyond the purview of the civil rights movement. Ironically, Wilkins’s position broadened the appeal of more forceful activists like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who had advocated black power and rejected nonviolence. As a result the possibility of a united movement was falling apart, with Wilkins getting pushed toward the sidelines. At the same time Bob Carter quietly began to act independently of Wilkins and the NAACP old guard that supported him. In the area of school desegregation, for example, Bob began supporting community control in the predominantly nonwhite schools of the North.

  For Bob, however, segregation remained a critical issue. Having decided Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court proceeded in a series of cases to strike down openly enforced Jim Crow segregation in public facilities, and to uphold the new provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But its failure to take meaningful action in the South, where for many years school segregation remained the norm, or to review any of Carter’s Northern school cases, underscored the Court’s avoidance of enforcement, leaving that issue to the next generation of justices. As a result Bob’s Northern campaign had made little or no progress, not because it was ill conceived but because he was attacking deep-rooted prejudice supported by multiple components of the white power structure—from the politicians to the courts to the unions and the school boards—as well as white majority voters who felt they’d “given” enough.

  As for me, I was battling burnout. We were running a footrace in a bog, and the NAACP legal department had developed a siege mentality. Younger activists began advocating more aggressive tactics. Roy Wilkins and the old guard on the NAACP board believed in the long view—that you push for change, and that meaningful reform took time. But what was writ large in the form of racial unease and uprisings across the nation was creeping into the fabric of the NAACP, where the board was divided between “young Turks” who said it was time to get tough and the old guard. Under Bob’s leadership the legal department increasingly found itself aligned with the young Turks. It was a natural evolution: Bob wanted results. He wanted black kids to get educated, and black workers to get their fair share of the better-paying jobs. The cases that came our way reflected the change among Movement people, and the tension was palpable.

  At black colleges and universities in the South, we were increasingly involved with aggressive student leaders at odds with administrators who were more interested in maintaining calm than promoting racial progress. In the cities there was an increasing number of uprisings, called riots by the media. The causes were different—ranging from poverty, joblessness, and disenfranchisement to the predatory draft that was sucking black youth into the war in Vietnam—but all boiled down to protest against the untenable existence to which the nation’s black population was relegated. As the protests mounted and the NAACP scrambled to deal with one legal fire after another, the courts—including the nation’s highest—became more and more hostile toward anything that did not involve some form of overt racism.

  Fatigue, anger, and a sense of frustration were constants. Ironically, it was my work in the North that really focused these feelings for me. Nothing appeared to be changing in the North. The schools remained segregated. Construction sites swarmed with white workers—no blacks to be seen. I still had to hail taxis for Bob. Black unemployment was high, and the cities were exploding with racial violence. The police were engaging with trapped ghetto black youth as if they were the enemy—and in some instances that wasn’t too far from reality. In the South, by contrast, there were signs of change in the cities. Hotels and restaurants were no longer enforcing Jim Crow, and blacks were beginning to vote. That said, the benchmark for social change in the South was low.

  The Vietnam War started out as a tough issue for me. I was not like Major Warner, whose jingoism and hatred of the Soviet Union blurred his ability to see the issues around anything tinged red, but I had hawklike reactions to what was called the “domino theory”—the idea that if all of Vietnam turned communist, other nations would follow. Perhaps it had been my Culver training. But the barbaric senselessness of the war eroded my views. Somewhere, too, I knew that the black waiters at Culver were now fighting for their lives in the jungles of Vietnam.

  “It’s a civil war,” Kitty kept saying. “We’ve got no business being over there in the first place.”

  I equivocated for a while, but it wasn’t long before I found myself following Kitty’s lead. Saluting the flag was one thing I had been trained to do since I was thirteen, but killing all those poor peasants was something else, and when the marches started, we joined the thousands who were opposed to the war.

  Roy Wilkins did his level best to contain the opposition to the war at the NAACP. The organization’s official stance remained unchanged, but little by little, at the request of our more militant branches, Bob had started assigning his attorneys, who by then numbered six, to represent black students who were disciplined and/or arrested for antiwar activities. We tried to keep a low profile, but word circulated through the corridors. To say the least, Wilkins was not pleased.

  Having joined the protest movement, I was rankled by the NAACP’s nonposition toward the war. When Senator Robert F. Kennedy refused to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Democratic primaries in 1968, I despaired of a possible political opening to end the war.

  That’s why I watched with interest when Eugene McCarthy, a staunch opponent of the war, entered the New Hampshire primary and shocked the nation by winning almost half the vote. Friends quickly joined his campaign. I traveled to the Wisconsin primary to see for myself. Everything that was grinding me down at the NAACP fell away. I felt revived. Opposing the war seemed like the most useful thing I could do. I took a leave of absence from the NAACP and joined McCarthy’s campaign to help with race-related issues. As a white guy, I knew I would have questionable standing, but the campaign had no black staffers as far as I knew, so I saw a real need there. Shortly after I joined the campaign, Robert F. Kennedy sensed that Johnson’s poor showing in New Hampshire put the nomination within reach, and he announced his candidacy. Bob Carter was a Kennedy man, but that didn’t worry me too much. I couldn’t change horses in midstream, and Bob appeared to understand.

  After President Johnson withdrew from the race, Vice President Hubert Humphrey joined Kennedy and McCarthy. Humphrey was the hands-down favorite of the NAACP establishment because of his strong support for the civil rights legislation of
the sixties. When it came to the war, Humphrey and the NAACP were in complete alignment: Don’t oppose and say as little as possible. Sensing an avoidable fracas, Humphrey chose to stay out of the Democratic primaries, believing he could win the nomination through backroom politics and avoid the furor over the war altogether.

  I was in McCarthy’s Indiana primary headquarters on April 4 when I learned of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination. That night the black areas of Washington, DC, were engulfed in flames, and President Johnson called out the National Guard to put the down the unrest. Bobby Kennedy rushed to Coretta Scott King’s side, sealing his place in the hearts of black America.

  Watching King’s Atlanta funeral on television, I sensed a darkness descending on the nation. King was my generation’s greatest American. There was a strong ring of truth in everything he said. The beauty of his voice and the purity of his expression inspired me and had sustained me many times when circumstance made me wonder if we could ever overcome the scourge of racism in America. After the funeral I went through the motions of working on the dispirited McCarthy campaign until primary day in Indiana, where Bobby Kennedy won both the black and the white working-class vote.