(9 of 9)
The J.S. Chick Elementary School represents the kind of school Newsome thinks there should be more of. Chick, whose African-centered program was fashioned by its enterprising principal, Audrey Bullard, occupies a bleak, brown brick building in a rundown east-side neighborhood of Kansas City. Ninety-eight percent of Chick's 327 students are black. "With a Eurocentric curriculum, it appears one race is superior over the others," says Bullard. "The African-centered curriculum makes them feel, 'I'm a part of this. I'm not on the outside looking in.'" Something must be working: Chick's students outscore some of the magnet schools' pupils on standardized tests.
On a recent morning in Lola Franklin's third-grade class, the kids are wearing paper crowns signifying their status as African kings and queens, and they are standing one after another to shout out a dizzying variety of facts. "Welcome to Guinea-Bissau! The official language is Portuguese."
"The main religion is Islam!"
"Sheep, cattle and goats are the principal animals!"
"Who can name an African-American comedian?" inquires Franklin.
"Eddie Murphy!" "Bill Cosby!"
"And some American comedians?"
"Whoopi Goldberg!"
"No, an American comedian," she corrects them.
"Roseanne!" a boy calls out.
"Good," says Franklin.
Clint Bolick, litigation director for the libertarian Institute for Justice in Washington, predicts court-ordered desegregation schemes will be gone in 10 to 15 years. Their fatal error was in making racial balance a goal, which eventually led to admissions preferences for whites, "turning Brown on its head," says Bolick. "What all this shows is that social engineering doesn't work."
But a great deal of social engineering went into creating school segregation in the first place, points out William Taylor, a Washington lawyer who has worked on civil rights cases for 40 years. Taylor laments what he sees as the courts' "peculiar notion that segregation is the natural condition and desegregation goes against the natural order of things. The court's own finding in Brown was that segregation had been imposed by law and practice for many years. Missouri is a good example. You have racially restrictive covenants, racially restrictive ordinances. The notion that somehow segregation came about all because of people's individual preferences is wrong."
Engineered or not, American society is facing "awesome demographic changes," says Harvard's Orfield. "In around 2050 there's going to be about half nonwhites in the total population, in 2020 about half nonwhites in the school population. We have to figure out how to run our institutions in that kind of a society. 'Separate but equal' is the most well-tried experiment in American history. It was policy for 60 years, and we have no evidence that it can work, given the distribution of power and resources in our society."
Four decades after his research helped decide the case that was supposed to change everything, perhaps Kenneth Clark still puts the issue most succinctly: "Talk about 'separate but equal,' " he says. "If they're going to be equal, why are they separate?"