Divided we Fail Read Online Free PDF Page B

Carman’s, Fran’s, or Deborah Stallworth’s testimony. After they stepped down, he told the lawyers he didn’t want to hear people’s opinions about racism, or about the school system’s failures to eliminate the remnants of segregation. He wanted to see evidence.
    Steve Porter and Aubrey Williams, representing the two groups who wanted to push desegregation even farther, tried to provide it for him. They brought data showing that more than half of the high school classrooms did not meet the racial guidelines. In hundreds of classrooms in the Jefferson County schools, only one or two black students were enrolled. In dozens, there were none.
    At the same time, not only were black children less represented in the district’s gifted and talented program, they were much less likely to be recommended to take the entrance test. And those who did take the test were much less likely to be recommended to join the program than white children, even if they scored in the top percentile. In fact, more than two-thirds of black middle and high school students who did well on the Advance Program tests were refused entrance to the program by the teachers and counselors who made the final determinations, compared to one-third of white kids. Wasn’t this a stigma of inferiority? Telling black children as a group that they belonged in the lower academic classes, even when they tested high enough to qualify for the higher ones?
    â€œYour honor, this is not just a little program. This is not an advanced placement course that kids get to choose and not choose,” Steve Porter said. “This is not discipline and a kid acts up and it doesn’t matter whether he’s black or white, the teacher is going to do something about it. This is every class in the system. . . . It’s bad.”
    The lawyers also hammered on the differences in test scores and grades that still persisted twenty-five years after the advent of busing, showing that the implicit promise of
Brown
—that black children would be brought onto equal footing with whites—had not yet been kept. “The court’s goal [in
Brown
] was to repair the damage to the hearts and minds of the children,” Orfield had said during his testimony. “That can’t be done by letting the kids in the front door and then treating them unfairly inside the building.”
    Ultimately, however, the judge was not convinced that the “numbers spoke for themselves.” The judge’s roots were conservative, and he was trying to keep his opinion as limited as possible. He didn’t want to make new law, or set a new precedent. The Supreme Court’s only explicit order in 1954 was that the segregation between schools be dismantled.
Brown
might have inspired hope that children would be integrated inside classrooms and that their academic outcomes would be equalized, but it had never made those steps a legal requirement. Judge Heyburn was focused on the simpler question of whether any schools in Jefferson County were still racially identifiable: Had the school system complied with the letter of the law and ensured that no school went out of bounds from the racial limits? Was racial intimidation still a factor that kept black people from making free choices in where they sent their children to school?
    The lawyers tried to get him to see these questions from a different angle. The superintendent, Daeschner, argued that the very problem that had prompted the lawsuit in the first place was evidence that the district had been unsuccessful in rooting out racially identifiable schools: “If we were doing the job that we should be doing and trying to do, we would be able to recruit, if you will, a proportional number of whites to blacks” at Central High School, he argued. The school might have a majority of white students, but both blacks and whites in Louisville still identified it as a black school, and for white