Closing Black schools to achieve integration
DeKalb County, Georgia and the closing of Hamilton High School
On April 25, 1969, a group of about 300 Black high school students and adults gathered in front of Hamilton High School in DeKalb County, Georgia to protest the county’s desegregation plan. In order to achieve full integration by Fall 1970, the DeKalb County Board of Education proposed closing Hamilton High and four other predominately Black schools. No white schools were on the closure list.
“We got the same run-around we’ve been getting,” said Robert Brown, a Georgia Tech student and an alum of Hamilton High School, when asked why the group couldn’t work through the school board to resolve their complaints. “We don’t mind going to white schools. We want integration. We want desegregation.”
But, by only closing Black schools, DeKalb County’s desegregation plan placed the burden for integration solely on the county’s Black residents. As State Representative James Dean of Atlanta made clear, this was the reason for the gathering at Hamilton High. The Black community, he said, felt “that integration should be a two-way street.”
Closing Black schools to achieve integration
The situation in DeKalb County was not unique. After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, many southern states were tasked with combining their Black and white dual school systems into unified and integrated ones. And, like DeKalb County, many local school boards approached integration by closing Black schools. According to historian Charles C. Bolton:
School desegregation plans often called for the closing of Black schools or the alteration of their identities as Black schools in order to allay White fears about their children going to schools in Black neighborhoods.
Of course, these integration plans—the ones that called for closing Black schools while leaving white schools open—were supposed to be illegal. As legal scholar Thomas S. Martin wrote in The University of Chicago Law Review in 1972:
Even those courts willing to intervene in school closing decisions apply very narrow standards of review. The Fifth Circuit, where the majority of cases arise, has held that only a showing of a racially discriminatory motive will prevent the closing of formerly black schools. Thus, courts have found denials of equal protection where black school closing are based solely on the reluctance of the school board to require white students to attend schools in black areas. This intent standard also voids closing based on fears that whites will flee the public school system…
Use of the intent standard to protect against discriminatory administrative decision making is, however, subject to severe infirmities. Motive is a very elusive factor, and unless courts are willing to infer discriminatory intent form the fact that black schools alone are closed, the doctrine merely provides protection against the unwise and uninformed discriminator who verbalizes his racial motive.
When unifying their dual school systems, local school boards were supposed to close schools for educational reasons only. But this educational rationale was often used to cover the racial motives driving many local board’s decisions about which schools to close. As Martin was quick to point out in his analysis, the educational reasons rationale didn’t do much to protect Black communities from facing integration on white terms:
By refusing to deal with the complex issues underlying the educational rationale [for closing schools] espoused by school boards, courts have failed to provide even minimal protection against discriminatory closings of black schools.
So, to take white flight as one example, Martin pointed out that:
All cases have, of course, precluded formal consideration by school boards of the white flight problem; such consideration would be evidence of racial motive invalidating the school closing decision… thus, there is some evidence that courts perceive the problem as a choice between a school system integrated on terms acceptable to whites (including black school closings) or one abandoned by whites.
As such, many courts allowed integration outcomes to be driven by white fear. The end result was a desegregation effort that didn’t work.
Why didn’t it work?
Vanessa Siddle Walker, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies at Emory University, has pointed out that Black educators and advocates fought for an additive model of school integration: one that would fold Black expertise into the integration process; to how states approached how they unified their school systems.
Here’s how Siddle Walker described it:
They [the Black educators] knew how to do aspiring climates. They knew how to advocate. And they wanted access to materials, facilities, and resources that had been previously denied. In an additive model, the children would’ve had all three: attention to climates that created aspiration, advocates, and access.
But, as the situation in DeKalb County made clear, that’s not what happened. Instead, because white anxiety about Black civil rights drove integration policy, desegregation was not additive. According to Siddle Walker:
In real time, that’s [the additive model] not what we did. In real time, what we did was an exchange model. Instead of maintaining wonderful climates and advocacy… the teachers were fired—those who knew how to create these wonderful climates, 50,000 or so by some estimates. The advocacy networks were sacrificed as the teacher organizations were fully integrated with agendas that were different from what they had had. And the access that they were given was never full. It was limited.
So, to bring things back to State Representative James Dean of Atlanta, integration should’ve been a two-way street. It should’ve been additive: not the transactional exchange driven by white fear that it was.
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I will continue this history in next week’s post with a story about Robert Shaw Elementary School. More to come soon…
Primary Sources
Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb Parents Ask Court to Stop Racial Segregation.” The Atlanta Constitution. July 6, 1968.
Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb Schools File Plan: Would Close 5 Negro Units.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 11, 1969.
Simowitz, Lee. “Negroes March in DeKalb Protest.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 26, 1969.
Secondary Sources
Martin, Thomas S. “Inequality in Desegregation: Black School Closings.” The University of Chicago Law Review 39, no. 3 (Spring, 1972): 658-672.