All of which makes Mayor Belton’s own crusade seem that much more remarkable: she wants to end court-ordered busing in her city. Bet-ter for African-Americans, she says, to spend the millions in transportation money improving inner-city schools. Better to build affordable housing throughout Minneapolis. Better to rely on “children going to school in their own neighborhoods,” she told NEWSWEEK. If that means fewer integrated classrooms, so be it.
Expect the unexpected in the arena of race, politics and culture. A century ago next month, the Supreme Court codified segregation – “separate but equal”–in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Forty-two years ago, the high court issued new marching orders: integration with “all deliberate speed.” Now things are in flux again. Familiar remedies for discrimination–busing, affirmative action, specially drawn voting districts–are under attack. Old questions, once thought answered, are asked anew: if separate really is equal, is it wrong? “Many of the assumptions that undergirded the civil-rights movement have been eroded,” says Ron Walters, a professor at Howard University. “Clear lines have been erased.”
Education is one of the muddled places. There is a growing sense among urban officials–white and black–that busing has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any. Massachusetts Gov. William Weld wants to overturn a state law that mandates racial balance in classrooms; Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Arizona are trying to do away with mandatory busing. So is Prince Georges County, Md., a well-to-do–and majority black–Washington suburb. Its Democratic county executive, Wayne K. Curry, wants to get rid of busing, too. He, like Belton, is African-American.
In state-supported colleges, the issue isn’t busing but admissions and scholarships. Georgia’s attorney general wants to join California and Colorado in scaling back preferences in public universities. In Texas, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily suspended an order abolishing an affirmative-action program at the University of Texas Law School, but no one thinks the threat has eased. “The A-bomb has still dropped,” said University of Texas provost Mark Yudof.
The racial-preference rules that apply to the federal government itself are under pressure. In Florida, a court just invalidated a congressional district drawn to enhance the chances that a black would be elected. At least half a dozen other districts–all represented by recently elected blacks–are at risk. Meanwhile, prodded by the courts, the Clinton administration is grudgingly rewriting affirmative-action rules in federal contracting. New guidelines, to be issued next month, still use race and gender as factors, but no longer “set aside” business for minorities and women.
Why all the tumult? The simple–and simplistic–answer is a federal judiciary stocked with 12 years’ worth of Reagan and Bush appointees. Since 1989, a series of Supreme Court and lower-court rulings have limited what can be used to increase the access of minorities and women to contracts, schools and other benefits. “It shows you just how important judicial appointments are,” says David Bositis, an expert on race and politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. In a major speech, Bob Dole just pledged to avoid choosing “liberal” judges if he beats Clinton in November.
But there is more at work than partisan politics. Demographics are equally important. In many urban school districts there are few whites left. Indeed, while the number of racially mixed classrooms climbed dramatically in the ’60s and ’70s, integration has slowed since. The newest trend–as usual–is in California, where an anti-affirmative-action initiative is on the fall ballot. Immigration has made race there a matter far more complicated than black and white. Hispanics and Asians are larger minority groups, so conservatives like Gov. Pete Wilson and Terry Eastland, author of the new book “Ending Affirmative Action,” claim Martin Luther King’s dream is their vision, too. “In California, you just can’t have anything less than a truly colorblind society,” Eastland contends.
There’s another demographic trend undercutting the ideal of an integrated society. It’s “voluntary resegregation,” a fancy term for the old American tradition of sticking with your own kind. Many upwardly mobile blacks–whether searching for a college dorm or a house in the suburbs–are choosing to live with each other rather than with whites. In Washington, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles, well-to-do African-Americans are flocking to suburbs they can call their own. “They don’t want the pressure and the hassle of living in a white world after work,” says Bositis.
There is an emotional current as well. Like other groups becoming absorbed into the mainstream, some blacks now–finally–have the painful luxury of worrying about a loss of ethnic identity. There is a rising concern that in the quest for fairness, access and integration, something has slipped away. “There’s another side of the ledger,” says Walters of Howard. “There’s been a loss of community for us.”
What happens now? No one thinks core antidiscrimination laws are in jeopardy. Though Republicans helped get the anti-affirmative-action measure on the California ballot, Dole does not plan to tie his own campaign there to it. And neither Dole nor Newt Gingrich plans to push a bill Dole introduced to abolish all federal preference programs.
Yet parts of the liberal African-American leadership– based in Washington, New York and the elite universities–feel threatened. At Harvard last weekend, leaders of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “The Talented Tenth”–the revered historian’s term for the black best and brightest–gathered to discuss Plessy’s 100th anniversary. Educated in the Ivy League, holding powerful jobs, they remain firm public believers in preferences. But some of them have come to doubt the value of integration.
One of the conference’s hosts was Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the university’s Department of Afro-American Studies. In a new essay for the book “The Future of the Race,” he recounts both the pride and the estrangement he felt as a student at Yale in the late ’60s, and the sense of “survivor’s guilt” he says burdens many successful blacks who worry about the culture they’ve left behind. For her part, back in Minneapolis, Mayor Belton has no time for wistfulness. Doing away with busing is more practical than ideological; she worries about what will happen if “the money dries up.” “I don’t have the time to intellectualize these things,” she says. She was too busy for Harvard. She has a city to run.
