12 minute read
The Showdown
Maurice Lucas walks the long corridors of Cleveland High School, peeking into classroom after classroom where every desk is filled, every space crammed with students.
The president of the School Board pauses by a row of lockers. Senior class portraits line the walls. In the Class of 1972, young women wear their hair long and parted, young men sport splotchy facial hair. Step by step, trends change. But one thing stays the same: every portrait displays beaming white and black faces.
– MAURICE LUCAS
Barely a mile drive to the other side of the town, Lucas prowls the halls of East Side High School, where a stern-faced principal barks the seconds before final period. Lucas slaps the principal on the back, giving him credit for raising East Side’s school grade to a B and pushing to go higher.
“Things are really changing here,” Lucas says, reading a bulletin board titled “IB MISSION STATEMENT.”
Again, the halls are lined with graduating class portraits. Senior class after senior class stares straight ahead, smiles fixed. As much as things have changed, the skin color of every graduate remains the same: black.
The railroad tracks that once separated white from black neighborhoods have been removed. But Cleveland, home to 12,000 residents, remains a town divided. Public schools on the east side of town remain all black, while schools on the west side are more integrated, with white students clinging to a bare majority.
Compared to the rest of the Delta, schools on the west side of the old tracks stand out. Cleveland High, with 562 students, is about 50 percent white, 50 percent black—just like the town itself. Cleveland High, in fact, holds the rarest of distinctions. It is the Delta’s only integrated public high school. Meanwhile, all of East Side High’s 346 students are black.
Now the Justice Department wants to change all that. In what seems a flashback to the integration wars of the 1960s and 1970s, the department has accused the school district of operating predominantly onerace schools nearly 45 years after a federal judge first ordered it to desegregate. With an eye on all-black east side schools, the Justice Department argues that Cleveland “has fallen woefully short of its affirmative duty to do everything in its power to desegregate schools.”
Some here fear that if the courts try to engineer more integration, it could lead to the same wholesale white flight that has plagued schools in every other Delta city.
“Every community you can name where they did that, that school went to pot,” says Lucas, one of two black members on the five-member school board.
After a brief visit, U.S. District Judge Glenn Davidson called Cleveland “an oasis” in the Delta. He implemented a “freedom of choice” plan, giving all students the right to choose their school. But in April, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Davidson to show how “freedom of choice” would satisfy the Supreme Court’s longstanding desegregation mandate. A judge questioned whether white parents would enroll their children in primarily black schools. Either prove “freedom of choice” works, the court said, or consider the Justice Department’s alternatives.
In January, as this magazine went to press, the school board and Justice Department had given U.S. District Judge Debra Brown, who inherited the case, competing plans.
And now Cleveland waits. And worries.
The school district wants to keep both Cleveland High and East Side High but use incentives – for example, prestigious magnet programs and the ability to take early college credit courses at Delta State University – to lure white students to East Side. The Justice Department wants to consolidate, creating one fully integrated middle school and one fully integrated high school. That could create a high school
Tenth grader Denisha Cook, left, and 11th grader Makayla Kimble discuss the school desegregation lawsuit in Cleveland. PHOTO BY JARED BURLESON.
Cleveland Alderman Gary Gainspoletti says the city’s healthy economy is at least partially due to “a school system that’s worked.” PHOTO BY ERIN SCOTT
75 percent black, 25 percent white.
Historically, in the Delta, these numbers have led to white flight. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, black students became dominant in integrated public schools from Tunica to Vicksburg. White students fled to segregation academies that sprang up almost overnight. Bayou Academy, founded in 1964, is a product of those times. Today the sprawling Cleveland private school on the western edge of town enrolls about 350 students, nearly all white.
Over time, this sort of white flight added to the Delta’s already crippled economy, discouraging new business and driving some residents to move to areas with better schools. Cleveland has been the only Delta town that has maintained a healthy economy, vibrant downtown, and an integrated high school. With stable employers like Delta State University, with 4,785 students, and Baxter, a medical supply company, Cleveland has not suffered nearly the economic slide experienced by surrounding communities.
The school district produced an expert witness with extensive experience in school desegregation cases. Christine Rossell of Boston University, a public policy scholar whose books include School Desegregation in the 21st Century, noted that the student body at Cleveland High is already steadily becoming blacker. In her report, she warned that combining the two high schools would inevitably lead to white flight, destroying the very integration the government wants to foster.
The Justice Department called her findings irrelevant.
It is no wonder that, in a town once divided by train tracks, emotions and
opinions over the court case likewise divide. Parents, students, alumni, teachers, and even those unaffiliated with the school system all have an opinion.
But this is not the 1960s. And these opinions are not as clear-cut as a train track.
Some black citizens support consolidation, while their neighbors worry that consolidating East Side High would strip students, alumni and the community of a school legacy that has become so much a part of their identity.
“There are individuals on the east side who want to maintain that East Side symbol. Their father, their mother, their auntie, their brothers, their sisters, played football on the Trojan field, they went to those classrooms, they fell in love, they got married,” says Willie Simmons, a black state senator.
White citizens almost uniformly oppose consolidation, but for varying reasons: the risk of jeopardizing the quality of their children’s education, the threat of white flight, and the fear of messing up a good thing – Cleveland High, a racially balanced school in its own right. Still others welcome the potential for change.
Tonya Short, whose son, Konnor, attends all-black D.M. Smith Middle School, testified for the government. “I think the school district emulates the city itself,” she says. “You have whites who live on one side of the track or what used to be the track. Then blacks living on the other side.”
Short says that her son performed at an above-average level when he attended Hayes Cooper Elementary. At the middle school on the east side, however, he has dropped to borderline proficient.
“I have yet to see him pick up anything and study it. Whereas at Hayes Cooper, he was spending three to four hours a night on homework and preparing for tests or doing assignments,” she said. Short, like many black parents, supports a single high school because she believes it would improve her child’s education.
Other parents are not so eager. Brandyn Skeen, a white mother of three children in Cleveland’s public schools, worries that the town could face a fate similar to Indianola and Clarksdale, where all-black schools continue to struggle. However, she is reluctant to pull her children out of public schools.
“I would have to let it play out. I would have to see what happens to my child’s education and monitor the progress or lack thereof,” she says.
Lucy Janoush, a former booster club president whose daughter, Mary Parker Janoush, recently graduated from Cleveland High and took International Baccalaureate science and math courses at East Side for the advanced instruction and college credit, fears white flight. “I think that it is absolutely critical for the community for people to have choices.”
When asked why whites might leave, she cites perceived differences between the two sides of town. “There are significant cultural differences between the blacks and whites of this area. I just look and listen and decide. I don’t think there’s any race that’s any worse than another. But there’s definitely cultural, ethical, moral differences,” she says. “I think there are concerns among parents of their
Judson Thigpen of the local chamber of commerce says schools are important for economic expansion. PHOTO BY ERIN SCOTT
TOP: Former booster club member Lucy Janoush outside Cleveland High School, where her daughter graduated. “It’s absolutely critical” for parents to have choices, she said. BOTTOM: Mary Parker Janoush, a 2013 Cleveland High graduate, says the adults should let the kids decide. PHOTOS BY JARED BURLESON children being around more of that kind of situation than you would want them to be.”
Janoush’s daughter would not like to see her alma mater disappear. She believes that much of the conflict stems from a generational divide.
“This is an adult fight. If you go around and ask kids, the people who are actually going to school, they don’t care. It’s not fair, because I think everybody’s standing around, all these adults are pushing to combine. We should let the kids decide,” she says.
She worries that if the schools are combined, many white parents would pull their children from public schools and that the decision “wouldn’t necessarily be the kids’ choice.”
Sitting in a gas-station-turned-coffee shop, Denisha Cook, a black 10th grader at Cleveland High, and friend Makayla Kimble, a white 11th grader, sip coffee from Styrofoam cups and ponder issues that seem to have vexed this area forever.
Even if kids could decide this case, Cook thinks a lot of white students would not want to go school with so many black kids.
“There’s a lot of kids who aren’t exactly … accustomed to having that many colored people at the school. I can name a couple. They say, ‘If that happens, then I will certainly change schools or go to Bayou [Academy],’” says Cook.
Kimble nods in agreement, adding, “Most of Cleveland High would go to Bayou Academy and other private schools that have white people in the majority.”
Sit long enough with students and other problems of race arise. When Angel Trigo, a Filipina 7th-grader at majority-white Margaret Green Middle, began dating a black student in her class, word spread quickly.
“I told one person about it and he got all mad. He called me words that didn’t need to be said. I was like, ‘You don’t need to be racist about that because we’re all the same, just different colors.”
Alittle out of breath after visiting schools on both sides of the tracks, Maurice Lucas flops down into a plush leather office chair in the back of the windowless, fluorescent-lit school district office.
Lucas believes the schools are fine
the way they are. “Everything that we are doing is working,” he says.
To Lucas, it doesn’t matter if schools on the east side stay 100 percent black. What’s important is how well they perform.
“I remember in 1989, we did surveys at East Side. A black boy asked, ‘Mr. Lucas, what does having a white child sitting next to me do to help my education?’
“I said, ‘I don’t know.’
“He said, ‘I’m going to tell you. Nothing. I’m going to do well wherever I go.’
“That young man is a general now, and he keeps in touch with me. He’s at Fort Bliss, Texas. Look at this: 90 percent of all black doctors, black lawyers, guess where they go to school? Historically black colleges and universities.”
For civil rights activist Margaret Block, those are fighting words. “I mean, how are you going to be on a school board and have some simplistic crazy thought like that?”
Leaning forward in her burgundy armchair, in a living room filled with African art and civil rights books, she adds, “It doesn’t matter who you’re sitting next to in a classroom. This is a global society, a multiracial society.”
White schoolteacher Eron Jenkins, who teaches eighth grade at all-black D.M. Smith Middle School, agrees students need a dose of the real world. And that includes students of other races. “Our students need diverse schools,” Jenkins says. “It’s not that they need to see white faces. But they need a greater worldview. A worldview that goes a little bit outside of, not even Cleveland, Mississippi, but that particular community. They need that. Everybody does.”
One thing all sides can agree on: a healthy public school system is important to Cleveland’s future. Rare is the town that survives without one.
“From the economic development standpoint, we need a very strong public school system,” says Judson Thigpen of the local chamber of commerce. “That’s one of the first things companies look at when they’re wanting to locate.”
Gary Gainspoletti, a Cleveland alderman, used to live in Clarksdale, where a desegregation plan created a nearly allblack public high school. “Clarksdale used to have 20,000 people. Their sales tax revenue used to be double what Cleveland’s is.
“Today, population-wise, we’re about the same size, but the sales tax revenue in Cleveland is remarkably higher than Clarksdale. And it’s all a product of a school system that’s worked.”
– JUDSON THIGPEN
To Sen. Willie Simmons, it’s a matter of dollars and cents. One school is more efficient than two.
A local business owner himself, he sits at the back of his spacious restaurant, the Senator’s Place, off of Highway 61. A line in the shape of a question mark snakes the buffet counter. Customers — ranging from white to black, young to old, silk ties to muddy work boots — sit side-by-side, sharing conversation and cornbread across tables.
“Because it’s so new to us, it’s very emotional,” he says. “But I think Cleveland and Bolivar County as a whole is an area where citizens adapt, adjust and move forward.
“If the court steps in and says it’s time to change, Cleveland, home to Delta State University, which is a great institution, the future home of the Grammy museum, second in the world to exist…”
Simmons eyes two grade-school boys— one black, one white—hiding under a table. As a waitress counts to ten, they whisper and giggle, unable to contain themselves.
The senator cracks a wide, lopsided smile. “…We’ll step up to the plate and say, ‘Let’s go forward.’ It will work,” he says. Design by Taylor Davenport.
JOHN LEWIS
