Pedro's Smoking Gun

Bullying and secret backroom deals culminating in a ram-it-down-their-throats vote to resegregate schools—that's the way outraged black leaders are describing last week's polarizing Metro school board action and the events leading up to it.

A decade after Metropolitan Nashville finally won release from school desegregation decrees, it looks like we're headed back to court again. Despite a conservative Supreme Court that now imposes an extraordinarily high burden of proof on aggrieved individuals in such cases, the potential plaintiffs in any new Nashville lawsuit have reason for optimism. That's thanks to ousted school superintendent Pedro Garcia and his dutiful transcription of the activities of city leaders and their business friends. Call it Pedro's Revenge.

The Supreme Court has created a mandate for plaintiffs to prove "intent," the decision-makers' actual motivation to discriminate against a minority group. It's a near-impossible standard and rarely met. But Garcia might have delivered what lawyers like to call "the smoking gun" in the form of memorandums he wrote around the time he was succumbing to pressure to resign at the beginning of the year.

The memos cast the chamber and various public officials as participating in a kind of secret white conspiracy to remove as many poor, black children as possible from the upscale Hillwood and Hillsboro neighborhoods, the ultimate goal being to reverse white flight for the betterment of the city's economy. When Garcia resisted, he says, he was threatened, intimidated and eventually forced out.

"I mean if Dr. Garcia is accurate in that memo, yeah, that's the smoking gun," says Larry Woods, the Nashville civil rights lawyer and political activist. "I don't think any judge is going to be happy reading those memos and hearing him testify."

Woods, who already has been informally advising various groups on how to sue the school board, says, "There are easily a dozen different organizations in town that are extremely upset.

"They see this as a step back from Brown v. Board of Education [the landmark ruling that desegregated the nation's schools] and a step back toward Plessy v. Ferguson" [the notorious 1896 decision that gave us the doctrine of "separate but equal"].

To at-large Metro Council member Jerry Maynard, perhaps the city's leading black public official, the really amazing thing is that the school board did it—royally pissing off an entire segment of the population—at a time of crisis for the district, when maintaining community solidarity would seem to enjoy a high priority. The system has failed for four straight years—and counting—to meet student achievement standards under the No Child Left Behind law. In the law's mounting scale of sanctions, the state Education Department now controls spending and hiring, and the district remains leaderless without a new director to replace Garcia.

In last week's bizarre, down-the-rabbit-hole meeting, we had just finished hearing state education officials patiently explain how poorly the failing district has been teaching its students—with economically disadvantaged black children, of course, among the most in need of help. Then the board voted 5-4 to rezone the system to lump many hundreds more of those very students in one place in blighted North Nashville. (Where else?)

Hillwood High's black enrollment will drop from 49 percent to 24 percent. Pearl-Cohn High, already 88 percent black, will go to 93 percent black with 87 percent of those children poor enough to qualify for free- and reduced-priced lunches.

"Even Ray Charles can see that's racial and socioeconomic isolation," said Ed Kindall, a black board member who opposed rezoning. "I went to segregated schools. If we start in this direction, what's going to stop us from ending up with two school systems?"

Rezoning was sold as a money-saver (four schools will close), but the school administration now says it'll save only $2 million—at least in the first year. It'll be a net loss in the unlikely event that the school board keeps its promise to spend an extra $5 million annually to improve North Nashville's schools.

The chamber claims implausibly that it took no position on rezoning. But business-backed PACs, including the chamber's own Success PAC, gave $10,500 to Karen Johnson, the black school board member who joined four white colleagues in voting for rezoning. That's almost two-thirds of all that she raised for her 2006 election campaign. Another key vote for the plan, David Fox, took $10,000 in campaign money from business PACs, largely funded by business titans Thomas Cigarran and Orrin Ingram.

Last week, announcing its favorites in next month's elections, the chamber refused to endorse two of the members who voted against rezoning, even one who's running unopposed.