“There must have been a reason,” Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. “They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.”
“No reason,” wailed the old woman. “No reason.”
“What right did they have?”
“Catch-22.”
“What?” Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What did you say?”
“Catch-22,” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Memphis magazine, October 1981
Let’s start with three high schools — Hillcrest, Southside, and Westwood — that make up what is known, in the terminology of Plan Z, as a “cluster.” All three are predominantly black. Hillcrest is 73 percent black. Westwood is 99 percent black. Southside is 100 percent black.
Just before 7 a.m. every morning that school is in session, two big yellow school buses pull up in front of Hillcrest, just a few blocks south of Elvis Presley’s eternal resting place. Onto these two buses climb 120 students. All of them are black. Once loaded, the buses pull out, and make their way north.
There is nothing unusual about this, of course. For the past eight years, all of us have gotten used to such sights. These 120 black kids are being transported to some predominantly white high school to improve the “racial balance,” right?
Wrong. These two school buses are not headed to a predominantly white school like Craigmont or Ridgeway. They’re on their way to Southside, a school which last year had 1,224 black students and one white student.
But this is only part of the farce. At the same time that these 120 black students are riding buses up to Southside, five buses carrying over 300 more black students are being loaded over at Westwood High School. And where do you think these 300 students are going to be attending classes?
Hillcrest.
Now wait a minute, you say. What is going on here? In a nutshell, what is going on here is the reality of busing. No matter how one feels about the necessity of desegregating the city schools, this is what is really going on — black students are being bused from predominantly black schools to predominantly black schools. What’s more, this has been the rule rather than the exception for eight years now. Both Mayor Wyeth Chandler and school superintendent Dr. Willie Herenton have used the same word to describe this situation. Both have called it “asinine.”
But back to Hillcrest. In 1973, the first year of court-ordered busing, Hillcrest was a majority-white school. There were 695 whites, and 374 blacks (most of whom came from the Westwood area). The idea was to improve Hillcrest’s “racial balance” by busing some of its white kids up to Southside, and by busing some more black kids in from Westwood.
Over the years, though, the white students left Hillcrest. Last year, there were only 188 left, as compared with 589 blacks. Part of this was due to Whitehaven’s having become residentially integrated; part of it was due to “white flight.”
Rather than adjust the busing plan so that buses would not be carrying black kids around from one black school to another, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has prevented the school board from making any significant changes. So the busing patterns have been left pretty much the same. As a result, every morning 120 black kids travel from Hillcrest up to Southside, and are replaced with over 300 more black kids from Westwood.
This is only one example out of many. Over the past ten years, white enrollment in the Memphis City Schools has declined from 71,369 in 1970 to 27,173 in 1980. White flight — it has happened in every major American city that has tried to use using to desegregate its public schools. With 82,632 black students in the system — 75.3 percent of the total — there simply are not enough white kids left to achieve any kind of meaningful integration.
What’s more, 26 percent of the white kids who are still attending Memphis City Schools attend one of six schools in the Raleigh area, schools in an area which was annexed after Plan Z went into effect, schools which have had no busing from them. That leaves considerably fewer white kids available to satisfy the dictates of the federal court order handed down in 1973.
As a result of all this, busing in Memphis has been an abject failure. Last year, there were 108 schools in the Memphis City School system which were almost entirely black. There were 55 which were, to some extent, racially balanced. And there were only 9 which were predominantly white. Almost without exception, the black schools are still located within six miles of downtown. The racially balanced schools are located from six to eight miles from downtown — with half of them in Frayser and northeast Memphis. What few predominantly white schools there are are located in Raleigh (six) and in East Memphis (the three Ridgeway schools).
“I would be the first to submit,” states Dr. Willie Herenton, “that Plan Z has not been successful in insuring the desegregation of our public schools. The major reason for this is that the white community did not participate as planned in the desegregation program. The schools are even more segregated now than they were before Plan Z went into effect. There is no doubt about this.
“We have had years of experience with Plan Z. It has not worked. What is particularly asinine is that today we are busing black students from predominantly back schools to predominantly black schools. This does not make a whole lot of sense.”
“I don’t know of anybody — any black leaders even — in Memphis who is still in favor of busing outside of Maxine Smith and the NAACP,” states Mayor Wyeth Chandler. “Maxine Smith, because she brought the lawsuit and led the fight, may be the last remaining person who steadfastly believes that busing is an asset.”
The fight that Mayor Chandler refers to, the fight to desegregate the Memphis City School system, was indeed a long one. If it is possible to pin down any beginning, this fight began in 1954, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Topeka ruling, which stated that school districts should move to integrate public schools with all “deliberate speed.”
For the Memphis City Schools, however, “all deliberate speed” was something between a snail’s pace and a dead halt. Not until September 1961, did 13 black students enter previously all-white schools. Until this time, there had been two public school districts in Memphis: one black and one white. Black children living next door to white children attended different schools. But with the admission of these 13 black first-graders, all of that was supposed to change.
It didn’t. Officially, the bi-racial school district was abolished, but unofficially school officials did all they could to keep the system segregated. They drew school boundaries in such a way that there would be black schools and there would be white schools. Since Memphis was, to a much greater extent than it is today, a residentially segregated city, this task was not a difficult one. There was an additional failsafe: Should blacks begin to enroll in white schools, then school officials would grant white students a transfer to any school they wanted. Thus any white school which had an incursion of black students became a black school, usually within the space of only a couple of years.
Owing to the fact that Memphis in 1970 was an acutely segregated city residentially, transportation of students seemed to be the only logical way to desegregate the schools. In April 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the “Charlotte-Mecklenberg County” case that it was constitutional to use busing to integrate public schools. After this, it was just a matter of time before a specific court ruling could be applied to Memphis, and the buses could begin rolling.
In September 1972, U.S. District Court Judge Robert McRae ordered the Memphis City School system to implement what was termed “Plan A.” This plan utilized the redrawing of school boundaries along with the busing of some 10,000 students. Plan A was implemented on January 24, 1973, the first day of that school year’s second semester.
But for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, representing the plaintiffs in this case against the Memphis City Schools, Plan A was insufficient. NAACP leaders wanted the massive busing of huge numbers of pupils from one end of town to the other. They went back into the District Court, and obtained, in May of 1973, an order from Judge McRae to implement “Plan Z.”
Plan Z was, for the NAACP, a compromise. It called for the busing of 30,000 students to and from all but 26 inner-city schools. On the elementary level, almost all schools were “paired” and “clustered.” An example of this was the Winchester-Gardenview-Ford Road cluster, where students were to spend only two years in each school before being bused to the others. On the junior and senior high-school levels, “satellite zones” were used, whereby the students from a particular residential area would be bused to schools in another area. Students attending in the Harding Academy area, for example, in East Memphis were to be sent to Hamilton High School.
It never worked. The white half of the Plan Z equation never played ball. For white parents who waited too long to get their kids into one of the few private schools in town, there were makeshift “Citizens Against Busing” schools — unaccredited, but a place for the kids to go — set up in the basements of white churches. As the years have passed, the mechanics of busing because of this “white flight” have become even more out of kilter.
Of the examples mentioned above, the Winchester-Gardenview-Ford Road cluster is today about 87 percent black. And, of the 550 white students who were “projected” to attend Hamilton, only 22 actually were in attendance last year. And so on across the city. In some cases, like the Melrose Junior High School satellite zone out in the Massey Road/Balmoral area of east Memphis, not a single white student rode the buses last year.
Still, Maxine Smith and the NAACP refuse to see busing as the failure that the rest of the community — both black and white — have realized it to be. “Busing has been more effective,” says Maxine Smith, executive secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP. She believes that any shortcomings of Plan Z stem from the fact that it wasn’t even more inclusive than it was. “I think it is a shame,” she states, “that the whites did not give desegregation a chance. I am still concerned for the minds of the children who were taken out of the public schools because of busing. Because a desegregated education is the only realistic one. But let us not say that busing has been a failure — we have many more stabilized [integrated] schools now than we did. And with a more compete desegregation plan, I think that we can make it work in Memphis. I haven’t given up on this goal, and I won’t give up.”
It is easy, on an emotional level, to see why Maxine Smith might be reluctant to admit that desegregation (as attempted by busing) has been an abject failure. “I remember the sit-ins and I remember the black days at the zoo and the segregated department stores and all of those stairs going up to that top balcony at the Orpheum — I wonder sometimes if my heart isn’t bad from having to climb all of those stairs just to see a show. Well, I may have had to do it, but I swore that my children wouldn’t.”
But on a rational, pragmatic level, there are few left in Memphis who see busing as anything but a tragic and costly charade. And, to the chagrin and dismay of those few black leaders who still remain proponents of busing, many members of the black community have begun to speak out against busing, claiming that it is not only wasteful but counterproductive. “There are many segments of the black community,” states Dr. Herenton, “who are very unhappy with busing. Initially, I supported busing. I don’t ever want to lead anyone to believe that I am not in favor of desegregated educational settings in the schools; I am. However, I am a pragmatist. What we are doing today, busing, simply has not worked.”
Given the realities of the situation, Herenton has become an opponent — of sorts — of busing. “I don’t think that there is anybody in the city who would be more desirous of coming up with something more appropriate. Our school system has changed a great deal since busing was implemented. We now have policies that allow the full participation of blacks in all curricular activities. And I would submit that quality education can take place in all-black schools. This is not a popular position to take with the NAACP, but it is one that I will stand on.”
The rationale behind desegregation has maintained that since black schools were — undeniably — left short in terms of both money and attention throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that the only way to insure equality of educational opportunity was to put blacks and whites in the same classrooms. That way, white school administrators would be extremely reluctant to shortchange anybody. Also, it was assumed that by mixing blacks and whites at an early age, they would be better equipped to deal with a bi-racial society once they got out of school.
Today, this rationale still is viable. But we no longer have a situation where “minority students” are getting the short end of the stick. Blacks have become an overwhelming majority in the Memphis City Schools (75.3 percent last year). There is now a black superintendent of schools. There are qualified and dedicated black teachers throughout the system, and there is an open policy which states that any black student can transfer to any school if it offers programs that he cannot obtain at the school to which he is assigned.
And while few would argue with the assertion that a desegregated education is the only “realistic” one in a society like Memphis’, neither would few argue with the fact that such an education is by and large a pipe dream. If we have learned nothing else from eight years of busing, it should be this: it is impossible to have a desegregated learning environment if there are no white students. Further, it is impossible to have white students as long as busing is used as a tool to desegregate the schools. And it is in this sense that busing becomes a very real tragedy for the city school system. Because of the methods employed to achieve integration, integration will never be possible. A veritable Catch-22.
The NAACP leadership, however, does not see things quite this way. To them, it is a real shame that the white community did not participate in the “desegregation experience.” For them, Plan Z has not been successful for other reasons.
Richard Fields, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense fund (which has both represented the plaintiffs and paid the expenses for Memphis’ desegregation case) states that “Plan Z, when it was adopted, was not a desegregation plan — it was a ‘partial desegregation plan.’ It left 26 schools in the inner-city all black, and we objected to that. We wanted — and we still want — a desegregation plan for the entire city. We think that because Plan Z did not include the entire city, it was doomed to at least partial failure from the beginning. It should have included all of the students in the city schools.”
While such logic may seem to fly in the face of the existing facts, this is nevertheless the NAACP’s position. For the NAACP, busing failed not because it drove so many white students out of the system, but because more students — both white and black—were not included in the first place. But hang on —it gets even more confusing from here on in:
To correct Plan Z, to eliminate the busing of black students around to predominantly black schools, the NAACP is hoping to get the Memphis City Schools to agree to begin busing kids from the inner-city schools out to the last predominantly white schools in Raleigh and Ridgeway. This fall, they have their golden opportunity to do just this.
Under an agreement with the School Board, Plan Z is currently undergoing a “thorough reassessment.” Whenever members of the School Board have tried to take steps to correct the obvious failures of the busing plan, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has turned them down. The NAACP leaders are the representatives of the plaintiffs; as such, any agreement to tamper with Plan Z must have their approval. They have been waiting for this “thorough reassessment,” because they see this as the perfect time, what with budget cuts and school closings, to press for a massive change in the desegregation plan.
And what if the School Board (which has already voted to “cooperate” with NAACP Legal Defense Fund) should decide that they do not want a more massive desegregation plan one which would involve the busing of kids from the inner-city and the Raleigh and Ridgeway areas? “Hopefully,” Richard Fields states, “we can handle this reassessment under a consent agreement [which would then require only a signature from Judge Robert McRae, who ordered busing in the first place]. We don’t want to have to go back into court with this. But we have to have these changes. It is the only way that we can get more schools and more students involved, and have effective desegregation.”
“Busing has, in any number of ways, been a total disaster for our community,” states Mayor Wyeth Chandler. “There is an awful lot of money being spent on busing, and it’s so asinine because this is money that goes down in the same block with reading and writing, and hiring teachers and making people better citizens. The cost of the whole process is just bleeding a system that is in trouble financially to begin with.”
During its first year, busing cost only $1,762,935. But since then, owing to the tremendous rise in gasoline prices as well as a 5.6% annual increase in the cost of the contract with the R.W. Harmon Company — which actually operates the buses — the cost has risen to $5,175,066 for the 1981-82 school year. Over the past nine years, then, busing has cost the Memphis City School system $34,138,008. This is to say nothing of the money which is lost from tax revenues each year as a result of the huge decline in enrollment in the system.
“Aside from that, you have destroyed the whole concept of the neighborhood school,” Mayor Chandler continues. “People all over town — whether they are black or white — want to reopen the neighborhood schools. The neighborhood school is a lot more than just a place for education. It is a central meeting place for the community, the place where the neighborhood gets together to discuss its problems.
“And then, of course, busing has had an adverse effect on the city’s population. There are a good number of people who are quite willing to move to Germantown or Bartlett and pay the high taxes and pay the high price of homes in order to save the money that they would have spent to send their children to private schools. Many of these people are [from] outstanding families and their loss to Memphis has been severe. I just get the feeling that they are spending millions of dollars to take children from one neighborhood to another, and in the end the educational process is not as good as it was. But then, education was never the goal. The School Board has always maintained that they did not see anything positive educationally from busing. But they were told, by Judge McRae, ‘I am not interested in education; I am interested in integration.’ So that is the stamp that you ought to put on busing — it has perhaps done something in the area of integration, but it has done nothing for education. It’s just been an incredible situation.”
Richard Fields, the NAACP attorney, has a different view. “Desegregation is more economical for the system, because now that they are closing schools, we are going to have to transport the students from those closed schools anyway.”
But let’s look more closely at what Fields is saying to try to get cause and effect straightened out. Is busing more economical?
On April 6 of this year, the School Board approved a plan whereby ten schools would close at the end of the school year in June. These schools (which are now closed) were: Douglass and Messick Senior High Schools; Lester and Melrose Junior High Schools; Fox Meadows, Leath, Longview, and Prospect Elementary Schools; and Gragg and Patterson Alternative Schools. In the case of at least half of these schools, they were chosen for closing because their enrollments had been decimated by busing.
For example, Melrose Junior High School was to receive half of its students from the Massey Road/Balmoral area in East Memphis. As has been stated, not a single student came to Melrose Junior High from this area. That left the school seriously under its capacity, and when the Board began looking for schools to close to shore up a $20 million deficit in the budget that they had proposed, Melrose Junior High was one of the first to go.
Conversely, Fox Meadows Elementary was closed not because no students came to it on buses, but because the white students in the area had been withdrawn, presumably to be enrolled in private schools. That left only 18 percent of the white students who were supposed to be attending Fox Meadows actually in class. Again, the school was operating way below its capacity, and it was closed.
Then you have Douglass High School. Douglass sits in a sort of isolated neighborhood in north Memphis, not far from National Cemetery. Under Plan Z, Douglass was supposed to have had 236 white students (most of whom would have been bused in) and 587 black students (most of whom live nearby). It never got either amount.
By 1980, only 40 white students were attending Douglass. But what really depleted the school’s enrollment was the fact that over 300 black students were being bused out Jackson to Craigmont.
So when it came time to discuss the school closings at Board meetings last spring, swarms of parents—black parents—from the Douglass community showed up in protest. According to Dr. Herenton, “it was the parents’ contention that they didn’t ask for busing, and that the children who would normally be in Douglass were being bused out to Craigmont. So they appealed to the Board to give them their students back. If we had been able to do this, Douglass would be at capacity, and it wouldn’t have had to be closed. Well, I understood what they were saying, but we couldn’t do anything about it—we are under a court order, and we have to abide by it.”
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund refused to let the school board bring back the Douglass students. If this were done, they reasoned, Craigmont would be almost 100% white, and Douglass would be almost 100% black.
But at the same time, in an incredible example of double-think, the NAACP leadership refused to let the School Board close any of these schools. In this case, they reasoned that to do so would cause the creation of more all-black schools, once the students were redistributed by the Board (which the NAACP has never trusted). The Board was caught in a no-win situation. The School Board could not redistribute students in order to keep these schools open. And the School Board could not close the schools.
Not, that is, until the NAACP Legal Defense Fund cut a deal. The School Board, at Dr. Herenton’s request (to expedite the whole process), agreed to cooperate with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in this fall’s “total reassessment” of Plan Z. In return, the School Board would be allowed to go ahead and close the ten schools that it needed to so as to come up with a workable budget.
As Dr. Mal Mauney, a Board member and an ardent foe of busing, remembers: “In order to maybe get some conciliation from the Legal Defense Fund, we agreed to this massive restudy of Plan Z. The NAACP was holding that over our heads the whole time, saying, ‘we’ll consent to the closings if you’ll consent to the reassessment.’ I was opposed to cooperating with them on this. I oppose it even more now. I don’t want to cooperate with that bunch of rattlesnakes on anything. But what else could we do?”
And so we are brought full circle, so to speak. There is a reassessment of Plan Z going on, the results of which will have to be put before Judge McRae on November 15. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund wants a massive busing program involving huge numbers of children and all of the schools in the system. And according to Richard Fields, there are other plans on the horizon. “Now we are thinking that we may need to consolidate the city and county schools, since the county gains in students while the city loses them.”
Dr. Mauney has heard talk of this before. “Now that the NAACP thinks that they are going to be able to start busing kids from say, Carver, out to Raleigh and vice versa, their final goal — their avowed aim — is to go out into the county and chase the last white student from one end of it to the other, so that they can catch him and put him on a bus to go someplace. I suppose after that they will try to start crossing state lines. They’ve already destroyed the public school system in Memphis—what else can they do?”
Is such a move, a consolidation of city and county school systems, possible? Sure it is. It’s already happened in other cities which have experienced almost identical patterns of “white flight” — Wilmington, Delaware, and Charlotte, North Carolina, to name just a couple. And there are suits pending in courts in cities across the country over city/suburb busing. Sure, it could happen.
But what does the School Board want? What are they going to be pushing for in thse negotiations over Plan Z?
It is hard to tell, from what people at the Board of Education are saying. “When we sit down with the NAACP lawyers,” says Dr. Herenton, “I am hoping that we will be able to look at where we have been and come up with a more productive plan that the one we are now using. I am more concerned with every youngster having access to the same educational opportunities regardless of his race or socio-economic status than I am in busing students across the city.”
However, Johnny B. Watson, assistant superintendent for pupil services — the man who is involved with directing the day-to-day business operation — states that “I don’t think that it is the Board’s objectives, and I know it is certainly not the plaintiff’s [represented here by the NAACP] objectives, to try and make any attempt to eliminate busing. I think that the staff and the plaintiffs are closer together on this now than we have been in a number of years.”
Watson goes on to state, though, that “I would say that we have enough ‘salt-and-pepper’ neighborhoods now in the city that we did not have before busing started, and that if we were to revert to pre-Plan Z attendance zones for the schools, we would be surprised at what kinds of integration we would see. Certainly, if we were to do this, we could cut out some of the busing.”
Chances are we will not get to put Watson’s reckonings to the test for quite some time. Not only are the School Board and the NAACP both saying that there will be busing of the Raleigh, Ridgeway, and inner-city schools, but die-hard opponents of busing — like Mayor Chandler — seem resigned to the fact that for the immediate future we are stuck with it.
Plan Z, if it has shown anything definitive, has shown that “white flight” is a very real phenomenon in Memphis. It has also shown that many black parents see no sense at all in having their children bused from the school nearest their home to a predominantly black school across town. It has also shown — quite clearly — what will happen if and when an amended busing plan is approved in the near future. One can prognosticate with almost total confidence.
When the notifications hit the mailboxes in Raleigh and east Memphis telling parents their children have been reassigned to schools which are predominantly black, Memphis City Schools will suddenly find itself minus some 6,000 white students. This will leave the system with about 80 to 85 percent black enrollment. Black parents will feel even more hoodwinked as their kids board the buses to attend the “new” predominantly black schools in east Memphis that have been vacated by the whites. The predominantly black schools that they have been bused from will be pronounced “under capacity,” and as the fiscal tourniquets tighten even more about the neck of the already gasping public school system, these vacated inner-city schools will be closed.
Germantown will grow, as will Bartlett, Southaven, and West Memphis. Private schools will once again see an influx of students. Taxpayers will carp even more loudly about subsidizing a public institution that serves only a small portion of the public. Charges of racism will fill the air. Only this time, after having had eight long years to document the total failure of busing in Memphis, these charges will fall on deaf ears. It is undeniable that huge segments of the black community are tired of the NAACP presuming to Know Best what they need and want. Try telling Dr. Willie Herenton, an opponent of busing to achieve desegregation, that he is a racist.
While most intelligent people will continue to view desegregated schools as a desirable goal, they will also continue to realize that busing is not only not the tool by which this can be achieved, but that it is actually counterproductive to this end. With a school system that is 80 percent black, the most egalitarian arrangement that busing can produce would be one in which al 152 schools in the Memphis City School system would have about 80 percent black enrollment and about 20 percent white enrollment. If that is desegregation, then school buses are spaceships.
The final clincher here, the last malicious turn of the screw, is the fact that We the People are helpless. Despite our democratic form of government, whereby the will of the majority is supposed to prevail (and in this case, a biracial majority), there is not a whole lot we can do to stop this.
Decisions concerning the public schools are made in the federal courts, as they should be, to protect the civil rights of minority groups. Only in this case, the only minority group being served calls itself the NAACP.
“There has been talk of constitutional amendments,” Mayor Chandler states, “but I’m dubious. I suppose it could be done, to take the schools away from the jurisdiction of the federal courts. But I don’t think we are ever going to see that. No, what I foresee, someday, is new leadership coming to the NAACP, new leadership that will realize that busing is, in truth and in fact, a total failure. They’ll come back to federal court and ask that it be ended.”
The Mayor thinks about this for just a minute, staring out at the flags on the Civic Center Plaza. “But then sometimes I think that this is their goal — to turn busing on all the whites who don’t want their children to be bused, and force these people out of the city. Maybe they think that if they keep this up Memphis will eventually become a black city. Maybe that is their ultimate goal. It certainly has been one of the results.”
Note: John Branston revisited this topic in detail in this great 2011 piece.
