news Bogie, Bradley and Busing
The Story of Pinellas County School Integration A nine-part series exclusive to the Gabber By James A. Schnur
Gordon Young walked onto a crowded, tense campus as Boca Ciega High’s principal in the fall of 1968. Nearly 2,000 students attended Bogie, including less than 100 Black students. Before the end of the year, Gulfport and the sheriff’s department dispatched riot police to the campus and adjacent areas after hearing rumors of racial disturbances. Conditions deteriorated at the end of April 1969, with reports of students and non-students roaming the campus in search of a fight. Isolated incidents instilled fear as more than 20% of the student body stayed home, and Black parents – many of them from Jordan Park – launched a boycott. Green and the Swann Song of Segregation During the late 1960s, urban districts throughout the South used two strategies to forestall widespread, court-mandated desegregation. They either zoned a few token students of a different race to other schools to break the color barrier, or created so-called “freedom of choice” plans that offered parents flexibility to select schools within certain clusters or assigned zones. The net effect of these strategies was minimal. The U.S. Supreme Court addressed these tactics in its 1968 Green v. New Kent County School Board decision. Moving beyond the 1954 Brown verdict that had declared “separate but equal” facilities inherently unconstitutional, Green proclaimed that districts had to look at additional issues other than pupil assignment to end dual schools.
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CLEARWATER HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK
Part 6: The Rebel Yell of Parents Against Forced Busing
Beyond attendance zones, Justices added other metrics that educators knew as “Green factors.” These included enrollment trends, the composition of faculty and staff, availability of extracurricular activities and the relative condition of facilities. These broader measures would henceforth be used to determine whether a district remained dual in structure or had truly reached what the court called “unitary status.” Federal Judge Joseph Lieb ordered a revised desegregation plan that met the “Green factors” in March 1969. The plan he approved in August 1969 did not please James Sanderlin, the NAACP attorney who launched the Bradley lawsuit in 1964 because it kept nearly two-thirds of the county’s Black students in heavily segregated schools. Sanderlin appealed Lieb’s order to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, and won. The Fifth Circuit modified Bradley in July 1970. Through clustering
and new attendance zones, the judges had desegregated all public schools except Jordan, Melrose and Perkins elementary schools in St. Petersburg. Sensing disaffection among many constituents who disliked desegregation, Governor Claude Kirk decided to step up his attacks against any judicial decrees that mandated busing. Coincidentally, the governor many ridiculed as “Claudius Maximus” also spent much of 1970 campaigning for a second term in the governor’s mansion. Kirk courted votes by challenging court orders. When Volusia County on Florida’s east coast felt federal pressure to comply with a busing mandate in February 1970, Kirk called Vice President Spiro Agnew to ask that he and President Richard Nixon withhold funds for busing. After Manatee County officials began to follow an order by Judge Lieb, Kirk interposed himself into
theGabber.com | August 5, 2021 - August 11, 2021
