In room CCII (make that 202) of Martin Luther King Latin Grammar Middle School in Kansas City, Missouri, Ms. Dickerson's rhetoric students are engaged in a public-speaking contest. Sixth-grader Jo Ann Carter, dressed in the school uniform of white blouse and plaid skirt, has chosen a speech by the school's eponym: "If something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect," she declaims forcefully, "the whole world is doomed."
Jo Ann's mother Catherine Carter looks on approvingly. Jo Ann has earned all A's except for a B in phys ed, and her mother's got the report cards in her pocketbook to prove it. "I was lucky to get her into this school," says Carter, a medical secretary. King, a one-story brick building in a ramshackle area well east of Troost Avenue--Kansas City's approximate racial dividing line--offers an enriched program of classical language and related subjects such as rhetoric. "Well, not lucky--I lied. She didn't get in the first time, so I applied again and said she was white."
This is what things have come to in the latter days of school desegregation in Kansas City. For the sake of desegregation, blacks are sometimes barred from the most popular schools on account of their race, lest they tilt the enrollment too far from the goal of 35% white students. Like most urban systems, the Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) has lost white students to the suburbs in droves, which has made the task of achieving racial balance nearly impossible. After deciding that inner-city students could not be bused out to the suburbs as part of a mandatory desegregation plan, a federal district court ordered the state and KCMSD to spend $1.7 billion to create a top-notch system, in part to lure suburban whites. Then, last June, the Supreme Court decreed that the district court had no authority to order expenditures aimed at attracting suburban whites.
When the history of court-ordered school desegregation is written, Kansas City may go down as its Waterloo. Said to be the nation's most ambitious and expensive magnet plan, Kansas City's effort is unlikely to be matched anywhere. In fact, the high court's action has accelerated the pace at which cities across the country are moving to undo mandatory desegregation (see map). And the federal judiciary, which long staked its authority on the enforcement of desegregation orders, appears eager to depart the field. Chris Hansen of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City observes, "The courts are saying, 'We still agree with the goal of school desegregation, but it's too hard, and we're tired of it, and we give up.'"