Margaret Cate sits by a table near the window of her kitchen in Green Hills, her eyes staring emptily into space. She is blind—or nearly blind, depending upon the clinical definition. Margaret Cate is not as young as she once was, she admits with a smile. Nevertheless, she has vivid memories of an afternoon in September1957. It was the opening of the school year, and Cate served as principal of Hattie Cotton Elementary School on West Greenwood Street in East Nashville. She already knew that this was the year in which, if all went as planned, Nashville’s public schools would be integrated.
“It was the first day of school,” Cate recalls. “Most of the the children had left. Then three cars rolled up in front of the school and stopped. I was in my office when my secretary came and said three white men were asking how many black children had enrolled that day. It so happens that only one had enrolled—a little girl who was sitting in my office because no one had come to pick her up. We told the men one black child had come. They could see her sitting there, but they didn’t say anything and left. I didn’t know who they were; I thought they might be school administrators. It wasn’t unusual to have administrators visit my school.
“Shortly after dinner that night I was at home on North 14th Street when I heard something that sounded like a blast. I remember wondering, ‘What in the world was that?’ Then the telephone rang, and I learned the blast had come from Hattie Cotton School. The supply room, the library, audio visual room—everything was badly damaged. The whole east end of the school was destroyed. Someone had placed dynamite on the steps.”
Hattie Cotton was the only public school in Nashville that suffered an outright attack during the drive for school integration In that way, Nashville was lucky. It still is.
Nevertheless, desegregation has troubled Nashville for 40 years. The language has changed. Nowadays, there is talk of “magnet schools” and “open zones,” but the issues have never really changed. The basic issue is still one of equality, but the questions have evolved. Many blacks and whites are now asking whether it is good to have an educational system which attempts to assimilate one culture into another. Assimilation, they suggest, may not be the answer anymore. Parents grumble that busing is an inconvenience and a lost cause, if not an outright failure. There must be a better way, educators, parents, and politicians insist.
During the next couple of weeks the Metro Board of Education will face, head-on, the challenge of restructuring Nashville educational system. The goal is to create high-quality schools that are more fairly distributed across the city, schools that do not require a child to give up his heritage in pursuit of an education. It is the sort of plan that seems to respond to a changing world. Yet it is a plan which must satisfy the plaintiffs in a 40-year-old lawsuit. It is a lawsuit which dates from 1955.
On college campuses, the rising multi-cultural movement has attempted to forestall what is perceived as the wholesale destruction of traditional black, Hispanic or Latino cultures. The result has been a sort of resegregation, based on the premise that the nation would be better off if distinct cultures were preserved and if the Melting Pot was tossed in the garbage. On some college campuses, dormitories are reserved for black students, Hispanic students, and Eurasians.
For some multi-culturalists, the “colorblind” Supreme Court justices of the Civil Rights era were sending out not-so-subtle messages that race-related subcultures in America are somehow inferior to the white majority. Busing may have been established to break up “separate but equal” school systems, but now many blacks have begun to face the fact that, for the most part, they—and their children—are the ones who’ve been asked to spend all those hours in school buses, in order to attend “superior” white schools in mostly white neighborhoods.
Some conservative critics of busing plans and desegregation efforts in general have even turned the old racist charge back on itself. Who was the more racist, they ask, the Jim Crow bigots in Alabama and Mississippi or the Supreme Court justices of the Supreme Court who saw the bigotry, to be sure, but decided that black culture was something that could be removed from a child’s experience, like a virus, who decided that black children not only could, but wanted to be, just like whites?
“I don’t know that it’s a resolvable tension,” says George Cate, who, like his aunt, Margaret Cate, has had a long involvement with Nashville’s public schools. (He was the first vice mayor of Metro and the last appointed head of the Metro School Board.) “I mean, yes, if you read the Brown v. Board of Education decision, it is certainly implicit that black culture and communities are somehow inferior and black students need to be exposed to the white community. It was not until the busing programs were set up that blacks reacted negatively, realized that they were the ones who were being asked to give up their community schools, ride an hour or more on the buses, and be assimilated. You have to wonder whether the integration and busing agendas haven’t done as much harm as good.”
Vanderbilt Political Science Professor Richard Pride suggests that the trend in desegregation efforts may be headed toward cultural separation rather than assimilation. In his1985 book, The Burden of Busing, Pride detailed the trials and tribulations of Nashville’s desegregation plan and the reactions busing provoked among both white and black families. At the same time he exploded the myth that busing has been academically harmful. According to Pride, test scores actually rose among black students after Metro’s busing plan was inaugurated, and white scores did not fall. Nevertheless, he admits, the gap between achievement test scores of blacks and whites “remained substantial.”
At the same time, Pride cautions, “Schools are not the only test of cultural strength. Churches, families, all play a crucial part. Nashville, I believe, has had one of the most successful desegregation programs in America, and I hope it doesn’t take a step backwards because of some false assumptions.”
The story of school desegregation in Nashville begins in 1955, before Metro Government was even formed. That year separated lawsuits were filed against the city and county school systems. When the city and county governments consolidated to form Metro Government, the suits were merged, and became Kelley v. The Board of Education. Robert W. Kelley had tried to enroll one of his children at East High School in 1955, only to have the school principal deny the request. The suit alleged the school system had discriminated against black students.
The lawsuit was eventually decided in1971, when U.S. District Court Judge L. Clure Morton instituted Nashville’s first busing plan. A storm of protest greeted Morton’s decision; the judge’s life was threatened.
The 1971 busing plan remained in place until 1980, when Metro went before another federal judge, U.S. District Judge Tom Wiseman, and argued that nearly a decade of busing had ended the problem of discrimination. Metro asked Wiseman to lift the federal court order of busing.
Avon Williams Jr., the attorney for the plaintiffs in Kelly v. The Board of Education and a well-known Nashville civil rights leader, vigorously argued against Metro’s request. Wiseman eventually ruled, audaciously, that Metro was correct, that busing was fraught with problems, and that less busing, rather than more of it, was needed. Rather than trying to achieve a minimum of 25 to 30-percent minority presence in schools, Wiseman ruled, 15 percent would be enough. (For the record, Metro schools in 1995 enrolled 70,635 students, of whom 54.5 percent are white, 40.8 percent are black, 3.7 percent are Asian, and 1 percent are “other.”)
Williams appealed the case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1982, the court overturned Wiseman’s ruling. The result was a plan that retained busing, with a few modifications. Several open-zone “magnet” schools would be created. And a four-tier system of schools would be created. In grades 1-4, blacks children would be bused to schools in white neighborhoods. In grades 5-6, white children would be bused to primarily black schools. In schools comprising grades 7-8, and in high schools, large school zones would be created to serve both blacks and white.
Today, Metro is essentially under this same integration plan developed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Today, the stark political reality is also that a more conservative Supreme Court has begun to question busing plans around the country. In 1995, for example, the Court ruled that Kansas City could end its busing program. It was Clarence Thomas, the only black justice on the court, who asked the poignant question “Why is it assumed that a majority black culture is somehow inferior?”
And so it is that once again, Metro finds itself trying to get the entire desegregation issue out of the courts, where it has remained since 1955.
“Times have changed; neighborhoods have changed,” says George Cate. “The school board feels that it is time that some local autonomy be put back in this issue, that court approval not be required every time a change in the plan is requested.”
If changes are to be made, indeed, the School Board will have to make them. Yet it is Metro Council and the mayor who will have to come up with the money to fund them.
If history is any guide, things do not look too good. The history of Nashville’s school system is plagued with white flight. As a result, many whites who send their children to private schools, don’t really care to see any more of their tax dollars funneled into public education. Voters refused in 1981 and in 1990 to fund school improvements by raising property taxes. The 1981 referendum lost by roughly 5-1, while the 1990 vote went down by a 2-1 margin. It’s questionable just how much good will exists when it comes to upgrading the public school system.
Metro schools certainly need the money. Neighboring Williamson County, with a population of 100,000, spends roughly $1.51 per $100 of assessed property taxes on its schools; in Metro—with a population of more than a half million—the per-student expenditure is more like $1.02.
“Tennessee is 36th in income among the states and 44th in per-pupil spending. That gap says something about our priorities,” says Craig Owensby, communications director for the school board. “Both the local and U.S. Chambers of Commerce have done studies saying our central office was too lean, that we needed more administrators to get everything done.”
The Metro Chamber’s Community Report Card (prepared by an independent citizen’s panel) rates the school system in five categories: equity, learning, security, efficiency, and communications. The progress in each category is rated either “significant,” “good,” “fair,” “poor,” or “unacceptable.” In the area of fiscal efficiency, the Report Card consistently reports that the system handles its money well; there simply isn’t enough enough.
On July 23 the Metro School Board will vote on “Commitment to the Future,” a proposed plan that, if it is implemented, would get the city out from under the 40-year-old federal busing order. Approval of the plan is almost certain.
The plan is the product of a two-year study by a 20-person committee of “Excellence and Equity,” appointed by Schools Director Richard Benjamin. It promises to get the city out from under the court order by providing a massive infusion of funds for improvements to existing schools. It proposes converting from a four-tier grade system (1-4, 5-6, 7-8 and 9-12) to a three-tier system (grades 1-4, 5-8, 9-12). The plan also includes the construction of as many as 12 new magnet schools. Those magnets would aim for a racial balance of 60 percent white, 40 percent black, plus or minus 10 percent.
The plan will take years to implement—just how many years no one is sure. It will also cost $310 million. Not only must the plan go to Metro Council for funding after it is approved by the school board, but it ultimately will have to go to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, in hopes that the court will lift the busing order. And that approval will require the cooperation of the original plaintiffs in the Kelley v. Board of Education suit of 1955. The attorney now representing the plaintiffs in the case is Richard Dinkins, who inherited the case from his late law partner, Avon Williams Jr..
“The schools have various ongoing capital improvement needs that have to be funded,” says Phil Ashford, policy advisor to Mayor Phil Bredesen. However, Ashford stops short of saying that full funding is a possibility.
“The administration has been supportive of the various initiatives,” Ashford says. “In 1993 the mayor gave $110 million to the schools, as part of the tax increase which helped finance the arena. The mayor anticipates similar amount in this instance. But these capital improvement needs exist anyway. If they can be made to work with desegregation efforts and cut down on large-scale busing, so much the better. The mayor has not yet given thought as to whether a tax increase might be necessary.”
Thus, there’s likely to be a lot of spending—on top of the $200 million necessary to build the Oiler’s Stadium. A cynic might say that “A Commitment to the Future” appears to be an attempt to end busing the old fashioned way—by buying off the opposition. Will Dinkins and the original plaintiffs go for it?
“It’s too soon to tell,” Dinkins says. “I will say that busing will never end entirely in Metro. We’re too big from county border to county border.”
Statistics seem to bear Dinkins out. According to the school system, only one-third of students who ride Metro schoolbuses do so for the purpose of desegregation. What’s more, the school knows it doesn’t have a prayer of getting the case out of the courts without Dinkin’s cooperation.
“Once we get [the plan] passed, we’re looking for some feedback from the plaintiffs, “ says Metro School Board Chairman Ed Kindall. “I haven’t personally talked with [Dinkins] much about it, but there have been one or two meetings with our attorneys—the attorneys for the plaintiffs and the staffs. Once we get this passed, we will meet with them again and get their feedback. It is our intent to go court and end what has really been a 40-year injunction against having a dual school system. We think the new plan will mean even more integration.”
Pride, for one, thinks that, while the new plan, in the popular mind, might chiefly be intended to end busing, the plan’s proponents are not giving enough consideration to the dangers of cultural separatism. Indeed, the fact that all the schools—particularly the poorer ones—may be getting more resources may be a way to sugar-coat that danger. And that bothers him.
“There is a sense, sometimes, in which Nashville tries to finesse issues too much,” Pride says. “When the stadium issue first arose, the mayor tried to avoid a referendum, when that’s exactly what he should have encouraged—facing the issue head-on. I get the sense there’s some of this on the part of the school board. The notion of leadership is, ‘Can we PR this thing through?’ instead of ‘Can we get the public to really face up to the issues?’ If this thing were to go very far forward and the public not really get a say, I don’t think the community would ever accept it and make it work.”
Judging from the materials issued by the school system, the goals of “A Commitment to the Future” are laudable. The school board has emphasized student achievement and, naturally, excellence and equity. The plan offers three important “structural” conditions: Students should attend three or fewer schools during their school careers; students should attend integrated schools “to assist in improving mutual understanding”; in order to encourage family involvement, students should attend schools closer to their homes.
No matter how you read it, though, and no matter how impressive its language, the success of the plan is contingent upon one factor: money. That’s why busing—or, to use a euphemism, “transportation”—remains an issue.
The new plan guarantees a ride to every student who attends a magnet school. Eventually, there could be 18 or more magnet schools sprinkled all over Davidson County. So it’s likely that Metro will spend more money on busing after the plan is implemented than it does now.
Traci Libros, director of zoning for the Metro school system, predicts there will be “a lot less transportation in terms of time and distance because more students will be going closer to home. The magnet schools are voluntary, and the transportation offer is a way to make access to them equitable.”
According to John Dietz, director of business services for Metro Schools, the ongoing annual operating costs of the plan are estimated to be more than $75 million, on top of capital costs of $310 million.
“We will have an additional $22.7 million for the purchase of computers and buses,” Dietz says. “It is correct that new transportation costs will be more than the old transportation costs. In 1995-96, the transportation budget was more than $15 million, so you can get an idea of what we will be spending, though we haven’t finalized it yet.”
As ammunition in its campaign to convince the public that greater educational spending is necessary, the school system has done its share of comparison shopping. The school board points to a 1991 study of the top 100 school systems in the country, compiled by the National Center for Educational Statistics, an adjunct of the U.S. Department of Education. The report even summarizes the 30 school districts that now have NFL teams.
“The spread sheet shows a low of $3,670 per student per year and a high of $7,838 with the average expenditure being $5,560 [in NFL towns],” Dietz says. “The chart shows that, if Nashville had been an NFL city at that point, it would have been the second lowest in terms of per-pupil expenditure, $1,750 below the average. Who was below? Houston.”
The “Commitment to the Future Plan,” would require an additional $75 million in operating funds every year. Those funds, if divided among the 70,000 Metro public school pupils, would mean another $107 in per-pupil expenditure.
“It would certainly assist,” Dietz says, “but it wouldn’t put us near the top. You look for different comparisons, and this is just one. There are 48 school systems which are considered great city schools. In that analysis, Nashville ranked 46th in terms of per-pupil expenditure, and was $1,541 below the average. The average was $5,643, and Nashville was at $4,112. “
It may not worry members of the school board—or some Metro Council members—but “Commitment to the Future” is a major revamping of Nashville’s school system, and the costs have not yet been finalized. The $72 million annual operating budget and the $310 million capital improvements costs are really nothing more than best guesses. No one should be surprised if the plan costs more, a lot more.
“We have to do a six-year capital improvements budget each year,” says Joe Edgens, director of operations for the school system. “Right now we project $215 million over six years. If we do a new capital improvements budget for the “Commitment to the Future” plan, it’s probably going to cost about $90 to $100 million more than that. If we’re creating a three-year structure now,—going to K-4, then 5-8, then high school—when you get to the 5-8 you have to have outdoor tracks, gymnasiums, and football fields. To be honest, I’m still working on all this, trying to fine tune just what it will cost.”
Kindall says it is “very important” that Bredesen show as much enthusiasm for “A Commitment to the Future” as he did for the Oilers Stadium. If the mayor supports the school board plan, however, he will only give more ammunition to critics who regard him as a big-spending liberal. Bredesen is likely to lose some sleep once the plan is approved.
“We’ve had a couple of meetings with the mayor and though this is a lot to absorb in a couple of meetings, he has a pretty good idea of where we’re trying to go,” Kindall says. “As far as public input is concerned, I’m satisfied that we’ve had a substantial amount of it. I think the amount of public support can be and will be substantial once the public is aware of what we’re proposing—locating the new schools equidistant from neighborhoods, for example, or taking the 5-6 schools and making them into 5-8’s. Once people clearly understand that, I believe the support will be much greater than it is now.”
Kindall hopes so. So does the entire school board. The board and Metro Council will ultimately have to answer to the voters. The last time Nashville was embroiled in the desegregation fight, in 1982, parents objected to the closing of three of the city’s best-known high schools—Bellevue, Joelton and Goodlettsville—which would have been closed down as part of the Appeals Court’s busing plan. The parents banded together to force a change in the Metro Charter and to do away with the appointed school board.
“[The parents] thought, somehow, that an elected school board could defy the Federal Courts,” says Cate. “How naive they were.”
As expected, “Commitment to the Future Plan” has become the main issue in the Aug. 1 school board race, which comes barely a week after the plan is scheduled to be put to a vote by the existing school board. Although only one incumbent on the nine-person board (Cornelius Ridley) is not seeking re-election, some of the challengers—notably Murray Phillip, Rev. Ken Riggs, and Stephen Downs—have expressed concern about the plan. If enough challengers win seats on the school board, the plan may proceed half-heartedly at best. Phillip has even called for halting it altogether. School administrators, who asked not be identified, shudder at the thought of Phillip on the school board. Dinkins, of course, will be watching the results of the election carefully, as will Bredesen, Metro Council, and ultimately the judges on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Already, members of the current school board are disagreeing about how the plan will be monitored, once it is implemented. If there is a major turnover on the board, their disagreements will become irrelevant.
Of course, Metro school students and their parents always have an alternative to any new plan. A quick glance at the Nashville Yellow Pages, reveals approximately 50 schools, some of them religiously affiliated, in Davidson County. That’s an increase of nearly two-thirds since court-ordered busing started in Metro in 1971. In 1969, 9 percent of local first-grade students were enrolled in private schools; by 1979 that figure had ballooned to 20 percent. Since 1979 that figure has not increased appreciably.
The current population of the school system is figured at 70,635. In June, 1971, before busing began, the school population was 66,393. The growth of the school system has hardly kept pace with the growth of Nashville. Clearly, private schools have been absorbing a large share of the student population.
No matter what happens on July 23—and thereafter—the story of integration and busing in Nashville will probably always be a troubled one. It is true the city accepted the court mandate with a minimum of violence, but there was more than a minimum of protest. In 1970 Casey Jenkins ran against Beverly Briley for mayor on a platform of massive resistance to busing. Cate remembers school board meetings that routinely lasted until 1 or 2 a.m. due to the flood of white students asking to be transferred out of black schools for various reasons, most of which, ostensibly, had to do with a desire to take a certain course that was only offered at a nearby white school. Each transfer request required a vote by the full board.
Wiseman’s 1980 attempt to curtail busing in Nashville might have stood and might have made history, had it not been for the one man who has come to symbolize the Civil Rights struggle in Nashville. Attorney Avon Williams Jr. may have been the man most hated by white Nashvillians in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Intelligent, stubborn and arrogant, Williams single-handedly pushed to keep the integration issue in the spotlight.
Many whites despised Williams because he sent his own children to private schools, even while he was demanding that other people’s children be bused. Whites bristled when he publicly stated that white women exercised most of the political power in town through the bedroom, and they went ballistic when he pushed to have white children bused into black neighborhoods as a form of “compensation” to black culture.
Williams, however, was the front-line figure. It was his grand gestures that made the news. Such grandeur seems to have little to do with the day-to-day business of children piling onto schoolbuses and driving hours across town. In the heat of the moment, it is hard to assess whether or not, 40 years later, the victory will seem so great. It would have been hard to predict that, 40 years after Kelley v. Board of Education, Nashville would be considering sending black students to schools in their own neighborhoods.
For Margaret Cate, in any event, that long-ago day at Hattie Cotton Elementary School remains a vivid reminder of the simple realities behind the headlines.
She was photographed for Life magazine, standing amidst the rubble of her school, but before long, Cate recalls, “The parents of my children pitched in. We reorganized the classrooms and the cafeteria and went right on with the classes. We suffered a minimum of psychological damage and a lot of physical damage. But I’ll tell you something. It was an act of terrorism that worked. While I was at Hattie Cotton, not another black child enrolled. That day brought out the best and the worst in a lot of people.”
That’s the way it is with volatile issues—the volatile issues that people care about. At least for the moment—at least until they become a part of everyday life
