It was 70 years ago this month that the Supreme Court decided in Brown v. Board of Education that it was unconstitutional to keep America’s schools racially segregated.
It took 15 years for any school district outside of the South to do anything about it. And in those cases where districts in the formerly Confederate states did try, it didn’t go so well. It wasn’t Brown v. — it was Gov. George Wallace and his German shepherds of Alabama, and elsewhere, v. any Black kids going to school with their own.
The first district outside of Dixie that tried de facto racial desegregation via busing was in my hometown of Pasadena, in 1971.
District administrators had stopped drawing elementary, junior high and high school boundaries to intentionally keep the Black kids and the White kids — along with the Latino, and the Asian-American kids — apart. They just pretended it was cool to ignore the segregation by neighborhood.
My elementary, Arthur Amos Noyes, had 365 students. In my K-5 years, every single one of them was White. By 6th grade, one African-American girl had moved into the northeast Altadena neighborhood.
Now, that middle-class area is actually fairly well integrated, the old racial covenants lifted. But that’s another story.
Our junior high, Eliot — named after the guy who invented junior highs, Harvard educator Charles Eliot — was quite well integrated, “naturally.”
But in my first year of high school, by court order, we were the first cohort to be bused, not to the formerly mostly White Pasadena High School, but to the formerly mostly Black John Muir High School, alma mater of Jackie Robinson.
Most of us — all, actually; I don’t recall a single complainer in my class — were down with it. Muir was equidistant from our homes. A bus arrived to take us to campus so our moms didn’t have to drive us there.
But rather than settled law, this turned out to be a matter of dispute. Integrationist school boards, led by the great Al Lowe, a Chinese-American businessman, brought us together. The next election cycle an anti-busing board majority would be elected. The equally great superintendent, Ray Cortines, an integrationist, kept getting hired and fired by different boards.
It was my first experience of politics. Only experience, really. Pre-journalism, I could join the fray. We marched on the Ed Center in protest when they tried to fire Ray. I gave a perfectly awful speech at the microphone, which I will forever remember to my chagrin likened integration to Wonder Bread, which “built strong bodies, 12 ways.”
I had known Ray, who also grew up in Pasadena, since he was interim principal at Muir. He went on to be superintendent in San Jose, San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles. Still know him. Ran into him in line at Total Wine the other day. He’s in his 90s, fit as a fiddle, buying a case of chardonnay.
He’s fine. I’m fine. But we lost. By which I mean, the schools in Pasadena are segregated as ever. I gave a talk to a Muir class last month and on the order of 90% of the students were African American.
We lost to, first, White flight. Then the private schools, formerly only populated by the upper classes, multiplied. Pasadena is said to have a higher percentage of students in private school than anywhere in the country.
“School integration exists as little more than an idea in America right now, a little more than a memory,” Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina told the Associated Press. “It’s actually an idea that a pretty good majority of Americans think is a good idea. But that’s all.”
I wish it were different, but looks like it will never be.
Larry Wilson is on the So Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com uthern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com