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."

So if the plaintiffs can prove Turner—one of the supposed architects of the plan—said in a meeting that he favors segregated schools for blacks and whites, that's a problem for school officials. Ditto the claims in the now-infamous tell-all memos from ousted Metro schools superintendent Pedro Garcia.

The lawsuit parrots many of the accusations in the memos, which Garcia wrote around the time he was succumbing to pressure to resign at the beginning of 2008. He casts the Chamber of Commerce, then-school board chair Marsha Warden and various other public officials as secretly conspiring 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.

"Unfortunately, this is a racially charged issue," he wrote. "I took the stand to oppose re-segregating the district. It was the right stand and I would do it again."

Like Turner, school officials already are denying what Garcia says they said. All of which means this lawsuit could turn on the credibility of the various witnesses. Will U.S. District Judge John Nixon believe Garcia or Warden, both of whom have reason to fudge the truth? Garcia was chased out of town and doubtless suffers from sour grapes, while Warden probably would prefer that people not see her as some kind of neo-segregationist stooge.

Whatever the case, brace yourselves for an ugly trial that's likely to reopen old wounds and expose Nashville as somewhat less than racially harmonious. It's not a pleasant prospect for Jerry Maynard. The at-large council member has been an outspoken opponent of the rezoning plan, but he says he's none too excited about what this controversy portends for race relations.

"Look where we are now," Maynard laments. "Is this something that we are supposed to be proud of—that we had to file a suit to keep our city from becoming segregated? As a city, we've already lost."

Email jwoods@nashvillescene.com.