Public School Integration Still ‘Best Goal’

When my daughter pulls hard on the heavy glass doors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School and races upstairs into her fifth-grade classroom, she is living my dream.

Thirty-two years ago, when my friends and I pulled hard on those very same glass doors, we were unwitting foot soldiers in the second wave of a revolution we knew nothing about. But it changed our lives.

Our parents–working-class and middle-class African-Americans and whites–volunteered to send us to this “experimental” school because they believed we would learn something essential by learning together. Indeed, many of the white parents, mine included, moved specifically to Evanston, Ill., because of its historic commitment to voluntarily integrating its public schools in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like many cities across the nation, Evanston today is struggling with dramatic re-segregation. Voluntary integration is no longer widely accepted. Residents in our hometown are debating whether or not to launch another school integration effort. But this time, instead of facing cheers, they face weary, frustrated African-American parents and community activists, tired of bearing the burden of busing children away from their neighborhood. There is currently a movement to create an “all-black neighborhood school.”

Racial segregation in our nation’s public schools has risen to a degree unseen since the 1960s. Ambivalence about integration has hardened into hostility. For example, over the past year the school board in Wake County, N.C. abolished the district’s integration policy–killing one of the nation's most renowned public school integration efforts.

There is ample research fully exploring the losses associated with this massive re-segregation – from tumbling standardized test scores to falling grades and dropping class rankings. We must also consider the far less measurable loss of lessons not learned, lives unchanged and friendships not made.

Evanston was right the first time. Integration was—and remains—the best tool and the right goal.

Why?

As a mother, I have seen a difference in my daughter. She was born in a small, homogeneous university town in Oregon. When she was 4 we moved to Cambridge, Mass., for two years. Her world changed from a nearly all-white Oregon town to one of the nation’s most diverse cities. In Cambridge, my daughter’s public school kindergarten class looked like the United Nations. She had friends of all hues and social classes, from several continents representing multiple races, ethnicities and cultures.

We moved back to Oregon when she was 6. During our first week back, she made an observation.  

“Mama, why do the dark-skinned people in Oregon look the same but the ones in Cambridge are all so different?”

I responded, “They don’t. It’s a trick your brain played on you. Here, there are only a few African-American people in town and you don’t see them very often. You don’t know them or go to school with them. In Cambridge, you played with and learned with children from all kinds of backgrounds every single day. Many of your friends were African-American. You knew their personalities, their families and their stories very well. They were your friends. So when you saw them, your brain couldn’t just think only about skin color. Your brain and heart saw the whole person. That’s what happens when you live and learn with all kinds of people. Your brain and your heart open up.”

I recall my childhood. Our collective image of school integration is grainy 1960s television newsreel footage of those brave black students guarded by federal troops, walking tall through mobs of raging whites. The integration I remember, inside what was then called the Martin Luther King Jr. Experimental Laboratory School, was much quieter. Some of us walked. Others were bused from opposite ends of our town at the leafy edge of Lake Michigan.

As children, we spent so much time talking and learning about getting along that now, as adults, we always get there when we start talking: Race, class, power, powerlessness. We dive right in, unafraid, because we learned how to talk to each other, to hear each other, long ago. 

I was reminded again of just this point when I dropped my daughter off at school this morning, at our school. Those doors are still so heavy. I pulled hard. She ran in, vanishing into a swirling circle of friends. I watched, seeing my past, and hopefully, her future.    

Cytrynbaum is a journalist and instructor at Northwestern University.