School seeks to end racial integration
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- For 35 years under court order, the yellow buses have picked up black children from the city's Oxmoor Valley and carried them up the hill and across city limits to affluent, mostly white suburban public schools.
Rita Jones Turner was one of the first children to be bused to Vestavia Hills after a 1970 federal court order required the district to enroll black students from her neighborhood. The bus, which was often late and sometimes never came, took her to a middle school where teachers tried to put her in remedial classes and white classmates tore barrettes from her hair.
Jones Turner's youngest son, a ninth-grader at Vestavia Hills High School, makes the same journey up the hill into a friendlier environment. But in September, he came home with a letter saying that the Vestavia Hills school board had filed a motion to end the desegregation order.
The school district is among a growing number across the United States seeking to have the decades-old federal desegregation order overturned; this year, dozens have succeeded.
Now, Jones Turner, a 45-year-old consumer debt counselor, is struggling with the idea that the personal hardships she endured during the 1970s would just be part of a failed social experiment.
"We were used, mistreated, downtrodden, and discriminated against," she said, as she retraced her old bus route one recent afternoon. "I have no problem with being a sacrificial lamb for the good of the community, but to have the system back out now is not fair. They made a commitment to educate black children."
Those fighting to keep the desegregation order in place are particularly disappointed that the issue would be revisited in Birmingham, where much of the civil rights movement's history was made.
In the last 15 years, city leaders have built museums and monuments to commemorate the four schoolgirls who died in a 1963 bombing of a black church, and the demonstrators who were met by attack dogs in a march led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. the same year.
But the district says its request is a matter of economics, not race -- that absorbing the black children of Oxmoor Valley is an unfair burden on its budget.
Vestavia Hills' desegregation order was to be in place until 25 percent of the school system's population was black. Today, 7 percent of its students are black, with about a quarter of those from Oxmoor Valley.
After the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision found school segregation to be unconstitutional, and a follow-up ruling in 1968, many school systems were ordered to bus children from other districts to achieve integration.
This fall, the justices will hear appeals from parents in Seattle and in Louisville, Ky., who say it is unconstitutional for officials to consider race when deciding what school a student will attend.
Meanwhile, over the last 15 years, courts have lifted desegregation orders in more than 100 school districts from Alabama to California -- often after districts showed they were making a good-faith effort, successful or not, to achieve racial integration. This year, federal courts have sided 36 times with districts seeking to overturn desegregation orders involving the Justice Department.
Only a few requests to end the orders have been rejected.
In Birmingham, civil-rights activists, lawmakers, attorneys, pastors, and residents recently have come together to oppose Vestavia Hills' request to end the order.
A US district judge has scheduled a conference on the case for Wednesday.
Vestavia Hills Superintendent Jamie Blair said the issue was one of funding and capacity. In the last four years, he said, the number of Oxmoor students in the district has risen from 75 to 132.
"Simply put, it's an overcrowding issue," he said. "Our city has no control over the amount of housing built in that area. We're providing schooling to all the folk in Oxmoor, but their tax dollars go to the City of Birmingham."
