Massachusetts News

by Paul Joseph Walkowski

February 15--The remarks of the state’s Attorney General attributing violence in Massachusetts schools to lack of racial integration, have not set well with the five parents challenging Lynn’s "voluntary" integration plan.

The little noticed comments by Thomas F. Reilly occurred during a visit to his office by a group of Lynn students last January 19th on Martin Luther King’s birthday. They were reported by the Lynn Daily/Evening Item.

According to the Item, Reilly said his office was prepared to defend the city’s race-based student assignment policy in federal court because urban centers with integrated classrooms in the early grades were less prone to the type of violence that occurred at Columbine last year. "If you look at the random violence," the Item quoted him, "you’ll see that it’s taking place in suburbia."

Reilly says that integrating classes early will expose students to different racial and ethnic difference at an age where the exposure will be beneficial. 

The remarks went largely unnoticed until last week when the state, joined by the U.S. Department of Justice, proffered their public safety arguments in federal court before Judge Nancy Gertner and a stunned defense team. 

"It’s politics as usual," said Attorney Bob Roughsedge, who is a member of the legal team defending Lynn parents and children. 

"He’s trying to latch on to whatever is the cause de jure..." said Roughsedge, who sees the Attorney General’s remarks as political. "He sets up his governor’s campaign by saying to voters, ‘I did something for the schools. I think integration will prevent bad things from happening in Massachusetts as they did in Columbine.’" 

"Think about it," Roughsedge told Massachusetts News, "the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is saying that seventy-five students, being turned down from school on the basis of race, is not a lot. Seventy-five is more than half of what my graduating class was at Latin Academy. I don’t consider that a small amount. In fact, even if the figure was one, that’s too many because the Constitution protects individuals."

Roughsedge said he believes the Attorney General’s office latched onto the safety argument as a last resort, but at the expense of minority children who are being denied equal access because of their race. "It’s ironic," said Roughsedge, "that the state’s Racial Imbalance Act is actually being used to deny minority students seats because they are minority." 

Ann Walsh, head of The Children First, a group of Boston parents who have a similar case pending before Judge Gertner agrees. "This [argument] is riding on the fears of people, coming out of all the violence that occurred in a few schools in the Midwest," Walsh said, "Safety is an issue that will catch peoples’ attention. He’s doing a very good job of putting a spin job on something." 

Walsh points to the violent incident that occurred between "a Moroccan girl who was attacked by the students coming out of Boston High. They leave out the fact that this girl was attacked by black girls."

Reilly’s reference to Columbine, Roughsedge says, is also off the mark. The attacks in Columbine were white on white. How integrating Columbine would have prevented violence, Roughsedge says, is something the Attorney General has yet to explain.

Defendants are not the only ones, however, pursuing their novel approach. The Justice Department has jettisoned the "diversity" argument, an argument that lost in the First Circuit. The Justice Department is arguing that preventing "racial isolation" will contribute toward a more peaceful society and contribute to "preparing students to live in a pluralistic society through integrated public schools."

"Avoiding racial isolation and preparing students to live in a multiracial, pluralistic society" is a compelling enough reason, Justice Department lawyers wrote in their brief to the court, to trump the constitution’s command of equal protection.

The basis for this argument is not startling or new. It comes from the long ignored premise of the state’s Racial Imbalance Act itself. The Act, Justice Department lawyers wrote, "was promulgated in response to a State Board of Education Report which concluded that racial isolation is detrimental to sound education in that ‘it does moral damage by encouraging prejudice within children regardless of color’ and ‘presents an inaccurate picture of life to both black and Negro children and prepares them inadequately for a multi-racial community, nation and world."

If the purpose of the Act, and similar government coordinated integration plans, however, was to promulgate integration, hard realities disprove the weaker science. Twenty years after busing began in Boston, the school system has fewer whites than it did in 1974. Boston’s white student population is only 16 percent. Where have they gone? They have fled the system rather than participant in a government mandated scheme. 

And Boston isn’t unique. 

A review of the racial composition of school systems across the country by Massachusetts News shows that white flight is the rule, not the exception. Integration by force is not working.

• Atlanta, with 60,024 students is only 6.6 percent white.
• Baltimore, with 107,416 students is only 12.8 percent white
• Birmingham with 41,133 students is only 5.9 percent white.

• Chicago with 428,184 students is only 10.3 percent white.
• Cleveland with 76,504 students is only 20.3 percent white.
• Dallas with 157,622 students is only 10.2 percent white.
• Detroit with 182,937 students is only 4.8 percent white.
• Los Angeles with 680,430 students is only 10.9 percent white.
• Milwaukee with 101,253 students is only 21.1 percent white.
• Minneapolis with 49,157 students is only 32.1 percent white.
• New York with 1,070,307 students is only 15 percent white.
• Newark with 44,160 students is only 8.8 percent white.
• Philadelphia with 212,865 students is only 19 percent white.
• Providence with 24,535 students is only 24.7 percent white.
• Richmond with 27,872 students is only 8.9 percent white.
• San Francisco with 61,007 students is only 12.5 percent white.
• St. Louis with 46,208 students is only 17.8 percent white.

• Washington, D.C. with 77,111 students is only 4.0 percent white.

"The focus should be education," Roughsedge says. 

As for the issue of school violence, he says, the state’s racial isolation argument makes no sense. "Violence can be cured by nonracial means, such as discipline and security in the schools. It doesn’t mean you have to have state managed diversity. I mean, how can you look at a child in Lynn of any race and say that he or she should be disadvantaged by anyone else?" 

"Where the state argument fails," Roughsedge says, "is that they think you can burden individuals for the benefit of certain groups. Where there are lingering effects of past discrimination against specific minorities, if there is no race-neutral alternative, you can create a plan that addresses those lingering effects, but once the effects are addressed, the plan must terminate and you can go back to a race-neutral plan." 

Judge Gernter, who ruled against issuing an injunction last year when asked by attorneys for The Children First, is expected to issue her ruling on the plaintiffs’ request for injunctive relief this March.
 

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