GREENWOOD — The U.S. Justice Department’s Vanita Gupta and federal Judge Debra Brown should get together and commit to make a fact-finding trip together five years from now.
The suggested destination: Cleveland, Mississippi.
That way they can see whether their dismantling of a semi-integrated public school system in that Delta city creates more integration or less.
If Cleveland follows the pattern of other school districts in Mississippi, and that of most school districts in this country with similar racial demographics, the answer is almost certain to be less.
Recently, Brown agreed with the Justice Department zealots to try yet again their consistently failed approach of trying to force families to schools they aren’t comfortable attending. The judge ordered the Cleveland School District to consolidate its two high schools into one and its two middle schools into one because she found it unconstitutional to have racially balanced schools and virtually all-black schools co-existing in the same community.
“This victory creates new opportunities for the children of Cleveland to learn, play and thrive together,” gushed Gupta, the deputy assistant attorney general.
That’s only true, though, if whites don’t leave the school system, which is a much more likely outcome, if Brown’s decision stands, than what the Justice Department fantasizes happening. Even the judge acknowledges that some white enrollment loss is likely.
Cleveland school officials, which offered less radical solutions to this longstanding lawsuit, are contemplating whether to appeal the judge’s decision.
Maybe what Cleveland had fashioned to try to integrate its schools in compliance with federal oversight dating back to 1969 wasn’t perfect in getting white and black students into the same classrooms. Nevertheless, what it had achieved was a whole lot better than what most communities with a 50 percent or larger African-American population had been able to do.
From middle school on up, roughly half the black public school students in Cleveland and all of the white ones have been attending schools that are close to a 50-50 mix. If the schools are merged, the white percentage will be at best 25 to 30 percent, but probably much lower based on what has been the pattern historically with school desegregation. The tipping point for white flight has been around 40 percent. Once the white percentage drops below that at a school, the exodus of whites becomes progressively worse and irreversible. Greenwood High School demonstrated that a couple of decades ago.
Thus, based on experience, not some pie-in-the-sky idealism, the outcome of this court order will be definitely fewer white students attending integrated schools in Cleveland and, within a few years, most likely fewer black ones, too.
We hope we are wrong. We hope that Gupta and Brown can say five years from now that they were right to not accommodate the perceived comfort level of white families, that by being dissatisfied with half a pie of integration they have created a whole one in its place.
But if they are the ones who are wrong, then they will have done great damage to that community, fueling its depopulation and its resulting economic decline. That will be good for no one, black or white, in Cleveland nor for the Delta at large.
It is a great gamble Gupta and Brown are taking with the future of that city. If it comes up snake eyes, they should come back to accept responsibility for making things worse instead of better.
Kalich is editor and publisher of The Greenwood Commonwealth.
