NEWS & OPINION FEATURE
BLACK HISTORY OF CHARLOTTE: PART 5
it,” Chairman David Harris stated. “We’re picking up momentum every year.” But board members could not stall much longer. In January of 1965, the Swanns joined several other Charlotte families in a lawsuit, Swann v. Board, which would upend Charlotte school assignments and transform districts around the nation.
Making Law Reality
The Swann case arose because neither federal legislation nor Supreme Court rulings could advance racial justice on their own. Turning a mandate for equality into onthe-ground reality required hard, patient work, community by community. Julius Chambers, the lead lawyer in Swann, had BY PAMELA GRUNDY come to Charlotte to do just that. Born in nearby The following is the final chapter in a five-part Mount Gilead, Chambers overcame the third-rate history of Black culture in Charlotte. Visit qcnerve.com to read the complete series.
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The battle over segregation in Charlotte schools brings highs and lows for all communities
In September of 1964, Vera and Darius Swann wrote the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education to request that their son James be assigned to predominantly white Seversville Elementary. The Swanns had recently returned to Charlotte after years of mission work in India. Darius had joined the Johnson C. Smith faculty as a professor of theology, and the family had moved onto the Smith campus. When the school year started, they sought to enroll their son at Seversville instead of all-Black Biddleville Elementary. “We believe that an integrated school will best prepare young people for responsibility in an integrated society,” they wrote the board. “Having lived practically all of his life in India, James has never known the meaning of racial segregation. We have been happy to watch him grow and develop with an unaffected openness to people of all races and backgrounds, and we feel it our duty as parents to insure that this healthy development continue.” Their appeal fell on deaf ears. The all-white school board was focused not on the value of school desegregation, but rather on accommodating white families who opposed it. A decade after the Supreme Court required schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” only 722 of Charlotte’s 20,000 African-American students attended predominantly white schools. The board unanimously rejected the Swanns’ request. “We have a plan, and we’re working toward
hundreds of cases and devised innovative legal strategies that produced landmark Supreme Court rulings in the fields of education, employment, and voting rights. “We were the legal arm of the civil rights movement in North Carolina,” explained longtime colleague James Ferguson II. “We were litigating in court every day fully confident that we were going to bring about some change in the social and political fabric that had fostered three centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, bigotry, prejudice, and brutality against Black people . . . It was exciting to prepare a case. It was exciting to talk to people who had a problem because you felt like there was something you could do through the courts to make a difference.” Of all those cases, the one that would mean the most in Charlotte was Swann v. Board.
Senate in 1971. “As I view it, the only way that we can obtain quality education for all children, Black and white, is to accomplish racial mixing of students in the various schools.” Chambers argued Swann before federal judge James McMillan in the spring of 1969. He cast his net wide. Charlotte’s still-segregated schools, he contended, were a direct result of the Jim Crow policies that had separated the city into Black and white sectors. He laid out evidence that revealed striking gaps in performance between Black and white students, and showed that Black students who attended majority-white schools performed far better than those who remained in all-Black schools. He ended with a staggering conclusion: The only way to remedy the wrongs of Jim Crow segregation, and to ensure that all children received equal opportunities, was to fully integrate every school in the 83,000-student system. McMillan was taken aback by Chambers’ ambition — no one had ever called for that degree of change. But he listened carefully, and by the end he was persuaded. In late April, he issued an order that required Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) to eliminate all racially identifiable schools — a mandate that would require cross-town busing on a massive scale. The ruling set off five years of conflict that nearly tore the city apart.
Victory and Loss
A MEETING OF THE CONCERNED PARENTS’ ASSOCIATION, 1969. COURTESY OF THE ROBINSON-SPANGLER CAROLINA ROOM, CHARLOTTE MECKLENBURG LIBRARY
education provided by that community’s profoundly unequal public schools to graduate first in his class at UNC Chapel Hill’s newly desegregated law school. The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund tagged him as a rising star and sent him to Charlotte to pursue civil rights cases. Two months before the Swanns made their appeal, in the same week that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 24-year-old Chambers opened a law office on East Trade Street. Chambers would become the most celebrated civil rights litigator of his generation. At a time when judges were especially open to applying legal remedies to racial wrongs, he and his partners filed
Why School Integration?
Participants in the Swann case saw integrated education as essential to a more equal society. As the Swanns noted in their letter, they believed that integrated learning would prepare children, Black and white, to work together in a post-Jim Crow world. For his part, Chambers focused on resources. Since whites controlled public funds, he argued, only schools that educated white children could be sure of getting what they needed. “I don’t think that those who are now in power would provide the facilities and services that would be necessary in order to accomplish [separate but] equal educational programs,” he would tell the U.S.
Historically Black schools were among the first casualties. Swann was decided at a time when Black Charlotteans had legal but not political clout. The school board continued to focus on protecting white students — especially those from well-off families — regardless of the effect on Black students. The board had closed several historically Black schools back in 1966, not long after Swann was filed. In August of 1969, three months after McMillan’s ruling, it abruptly shuttered several more, including Second Ward High. In 1965, Mecklenburg County had seven Black high schools. By the fall of 1969, only West Charlotte High remained. Many Black Charlotteans had been wary of school integration. While they knew Black schools were underfunded, they feared the loss of the supportive environment they provided. “I never felt that our kids would get the same thing in the white situation as they would get from
