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.

School board members and their Chamber of Commerce benefactors are denying any but the most altruistic motives. They're billing their student rezoning plan as a return to happy neighborhood schools, not a plot to roll back decades of racial progress. As an added bonus, they say, it's cheaper for taxpayers. Too bad they may find themselves testifying under oath about it all.

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.

"It's ugly," Maynard says. "I'd never seen anything like that before in my life as long as I've lived here in Davidson County. I've never seen a government agency just totally disrespect an entire segment of the population, the African American community. There was total disregard. They didn't care. There was no consideration of our issues and questions.

"The school board should have been focused on getting us out of corrective action and coming up with a strategic plan to deal with teaching and learning," he says. "To me, it's an example of a house burning down and the school board's trying to move furniture. It's mind-boggling to me."

Incredibly enough, no one bothered to seek legal advice on whether the action could expose the district to a lawsuit. Maynard calls that a "dereliction of duty."

The chamber and their buddies really should have asked a lawyer about all this first. If Garcia's memos aren't enough to prove intent to discriminate, an enterprising lawyer might uncover more ammunition by interviewing a few of the people who attended a chamber-sponsored conference in May in Miami.

Sources told the Scene that chamber types were lobbying public officials behind the scenes for resegregation, "twisting their arms and browbeating them." One source said he was told, " 'Middle-income families don't want their kids to be exposed to poor kids or adopt behavioral qualities or characteristics from poor kids.' " (See "Resegregation Plan?" June 12, 2008.)

If black leaders can't win a discrimination lawsuit, they might try one charging violations of the state open meetings law. Garcia's memos describe various secret meetings in which resegregation was discussed. All of them could have been illegal under the law, which at the time prohibited two or more members of a governing body from deliberating or deciding an issue except in a public meeting. A judge who finds sunshine law violations could nullify the school vote on rezoning.

"Business and community leaders met with selected board members while other board members were excluded," Garcia writes. "The agenda clearly became to have a student assignment plan that pushed for neighborhood schools. In essence, a neighborhood school plan is a disguised resegregation plan."

Woods says one public official, whom he declined to name, is already telling potential lawsuit plaintiffs about one seemingly illegal meeting.

"He said, 'Hey, I was there,' and he named the six or seven business people who were there along with two school board members and another board member on the speakerphone, and it was real explicit the way this person described it to me," Woods says.

Whatever happens with any lawsuit, the city clearly will struggle to reach consensus on any education issue. An informal alliance of various community groups for better schools has been shattered. Immediately, that's bound to complicate the search for a new superintendent. It was tough enough to find anyone willing to take over a failing urban district, but now blacks and whites are at each other's throats.

Nashville's white politicians who think of themselves as progressive—Mayor Karl Dean, Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors and at-large council members Megan Barry and Ronnie Steine all included—could try to bring the city back together. But they've remained conspicuously on the sidelines throughout the controversy, and it's unlikely they'll find the courage to become involved for fear of upsetting either side.

"This is just like the horror stories [during the time of Southern segregation]," Woods says. "I know we're not a perfect community but I sure thought we'd moved on beyond that problem, and now it's clear that we just haven't."