Disputed accounts of a secret meeting may affect Metro's rezoning controversy

In dragging the city back into federal court over school integration, the NAACP is citing purported new evidence of the white establishment's racial motivation in drawing up Nashville's student assignment plan.The lawsuit claims white leaders of the Community Task Force on Student Assignment, which recommended the plan to the school board, "have stated several times that black children need to go to their local neighborhood schools and not to white neighborhood schools and that will be better for everybody." Indeed, the plan stopped the busing of black children to the white suburbs this school year.

Asked to name these task force members, the attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Larry Woods, declined, saying he would do so as his case proceeds. But sources say one of them was state Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Democrats' political caucus.

Turner, a beefy firefighter from Old Hickory, allegedly made the comments during an until-now secret meeting at the Legislative Plaza. Also present were Chamber of Commerce President Ralph Schulz and some of the city's most prominent black leaders, including former vice mayor Howard Gentry, state Rep. Brenda Gilmore, council member Jerry Maynard and NAACP director Marilyn Robinson.

Schulz had been drawing fire from critics who believe he pressured the school board to adopt the rezoning plan as good for business. He apparently sought the meeting to try to patch up relations. It didn't work out that way.

Accounts vary as to what transpired, with Turner hotly disputing as "a lie" any suggestion he made remarks that were in any way racially insensitive. But according to one of those attending the meeting, it had only just begun when Turner launched into "a long monologue."

The source tells the Scene that Turner informed the assembled leaders they were "causing trouble." "You need to get on board with this," Turner supposedly said. "Everybody's for this. Look, this is the way to have neighborhood schools, which everybody wants including the blacks in town. This rezoning plan will put the whites in their neighborhood schools and the blacks in their neighborhood schools, and everybody will be better off. We've got a few blacks in my district, and they just love this idea.'

"And then literally," the source says, "literally, he said, 'I talk to blacks in my district, and they're some of my best friends.' "

The Scene's source says, "We were absolutely stunned at the language and intent and concept of this meeting. We were sitting there shell-shocked that in 2008 people would see the world the way this was being presented to us.

"When he finished talking, there was just silence. Nobody knew what to say to him. How can you have a conversation at this level? That was the reaction."

It went downhill from there, apparently, with Schulz then going on a tirade. As the source describes it, Schulz "gets all red in the face and starts sticking his finger at us and saying, 'There are people out there calling me a rednecked segregationist and I won't have it. I won't have it. I'm not going to let any of you call me a rednecked segregationist.'"

Says this source: "We all went out in the hall afterward and just looked at each other, like did we just take a trip to Mars? No, actually we thought, 'Did we just take a trip to the 19th century?' "

Schulz wouldn't comment on the meeting, but Turner is outraged by this account of his remarks.

"That's a lie," he says, "a goddamn lie."

To be fair, not everyone at the meeting remembers it the same way. Maynard, for one, says, "I don't remember Mike saying that. But I don't remember everything Mike said. I do remember him saying busing was the worst thing that ever happened to Nashville."

Gentry says flatly, "Mike didn't say that in that meeting. I would not have been silent if that had been said." As for Schulz, he did deny being a segregationist "but he did not say redneck," Gentry recalls.

Turner says he was only trying to mediate the bad feelings between black leaders and the Chamber of Commerce, and this is what he gets for his trouble.

"I did say busing was a failed experiment," he says. "But I didn't say what your sources say I said. Whoever said that is lying. They're lying through their teeth or they need to get their head checked."

Despite the he said/she said nature of this account, the meeting could become a strategic part of the NAACP-backed federal lawsuit. The suit attacks the rezoning plan as a "segregationist fraud," the product of powerful white racists scheming to consign black children to substandard educations in the name of neighborhood schools.

But to win, as Vanderbilt law professor Jim Blumstein explains, the plaintiffs don't have to prove all that. All they need to prove is that, in adopting the rezoning plan, school officials were at least partly motivated by race.

"To establish the liability of the school district under the Constitution, the plaintiffs do not have to prove that race was the predominant factor," Blumstein says. "They have to prove that race was a factor.... The school district can act in ways that have a negative effect on integration as long as that's not the purpose or a purpose behind it."