Divided we Fail (3 page)

After they arrived, the number of blacks grew quickly as whites fled to new neighborhoods in the east and south. The white congregation of the Baptist church on the corner sold the building to a black congregation. In Parkland's quaint business district, the shops that had thrived as an alternative to downtown—the pharmacy, the bakery, and the A&P—stayed longer. Eventually, the Masonic hall was taken over by the African American division, the Prince Hall Masons. As the 1950s progressed, a few of the businesses closed, and some were taken over by black owners. To the north of Gwen's house, Virginia Avenue's Queen Anne and Victorian homes were subdivided, and swaths of buildings in Little Africa, a former black shantytown on the outskirts of the neighborhood, were razed to make way for housing projects. The Cotter Homes that replaced them in 1953 became known as the worst projects in the city.

The schools Gwen attended became increasingly black. When she started at Central High School in the mid-1960s, her classmates were all African American. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the race riots sweeping the nation came to Louisville. Gwen was a junior in high school when the Black Panthers held a rally in Parkland. A few of the men came knocking on her mother's door and asked her to put up a sign of support in the family's window, but she slammed the door in their faces. Gwen wasn't allowed to leave the house for days. Instead, she watched on television as her neighborhood ignited in fury and flames. Two blocks away, shops burned and looters rampaged. When she finally left the house, she walked into a wasteland. Owners had abandoned their ravaged stores in Parkland and most never came back.
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The business district stayed boarded up for nearly two decades, and many of the black middle class left, too, encouraged by the relaxation of housing segregation in the suburbs.

Watching her neighborhood disintegrate in the wake of Martin Luther King's death left Gwen angry. She looked around at her once close-knit
community and saw a desolate ghetto full of strangers. She didn't understand where their fury came from, but she saw what the turbulence of the 1960s had done to her home. She had not thought much about racism before, but now she knew to look for it. She moved away from Parkland when she got married, but when her grandmother died and left her a house on 28th Street in the early 1980s, she came back.

By then urban renewal had come to the neighborhood, but to Gwen, everything seemed worse.
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There were new apartment buildings, but Parkland's shops were still mostly boarded up. The streets were filled with idle people—gang members and hustlers and the elderly. The well-dressed church people came to the Baptist church on the corner and then left.

Gwen blamed the decline of the neighborhood partly on a school desegregation system that sent the neighborhood's children out to all parts of the city. She believed it undermined Parkland's already fragile community. In the 1950s, the neighborhood elementary school had been housed in an old brick building on the east side of Catalpa. Then it was called simply Parkland Elementary, after the neighborhood. A few years after the school district began busing in white students, a new building was constructed on the west side of the street. Perhaps to erase the uncomfortable memories conjured up by the name Parkland, the school's name was changed in 1985 to honor Milburn Maupin, Jefferson County's first African American central office administrator.
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After Parkland was looted in the riots, Gwen found security and comfort among her peers and teachers at Central. After what she had seen, a black school, where children would be insulated from racism and hate, made sense to her. Dionne's experiences at Frost showed her that nothing much had changed in forty years. When Dionne decided on Central as her first choice for high school, Gwen was relieved that her daughter would soon be enveloped in Central's protective armor.

Dionne's fixation on Central gathered force as her family fell apart. Not long after her father moved away, her worst fear came true. After years of stooping over refrigerator doors and washing machines as they slid down the line at the GE plant, Thurman was diagnosed with spinal cancer. He continued working at the factory until a month before his death. For Dionne, watching him spiral into dementia drained her of the spunk her teachers had praised her for in elementary school. After he died, Dionne, once the tiny girl with the big personality, became quiet and withdrawn.

Around the same time, a favorite aunt died suddenly of an aneurysm. The unfairness of the double tragedy was almost unbearable to Dionne. Gwen felt frantic as her daughter grew more distant. She didn't know how to help her, and she was grieving, too. Her older boys were struggling in high school, and Gwen—a housewife for years—now had to support all of them. It would get easier, both mother and daughter felt, once Dionne reached high school and finally came home.

To get into Central would not be easy. For seventy-five years, it had been the default school for all of Louisville's black students. But by 1995, as Dionne was preparing to apply, the school had been transformed into a selective magnet school under the leadership of a new principal, Harold Fenderson. The change had been implemented ostensibly to draw in more white students and to shed Central's reputation as a black school.

Fenderson, a Baptist preacher in his spare time, aggressively promoted the school and courted new partnerships with local businesses and universities to augment the school's programs, but his efforts seemed to be backfiring, at least when it came to attracting more whites.
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Many of the career tracks focused on preparing for jobs, rather than for college. The business magnet included classes on managing a Super America convenience store, a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and a bank branch. The medical program focused on nursing, veterinary science, and dentistry. The offerings did not necessarily evoke the sorts of careers that might draw elite white suburbanites whose sights were set on graduate degrees and six-figure salaries.

And most Louisvillians still thought of Central as the black school. The flow of white applications for Central remained anemic, but enthusiasm for Central among black students grew and applications poured in.
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Under Louisville's desegregation plan, which was still in place twenty years after it had been implemented by court order in 1975, Central had to keep its percentage of black students under 42 percent. As fewer white students applied, more black students were turned away.

Dionne wasn't worried about her chances. It didn't occur to her that she might be turned down. She could already picture herself walking through the hushed hallways described to her by her parents and reading legal texts that would propel her toward a high-powered career in law. The thought that she would be able to sleep past sunrise on schooldays for the first time
since second grade made the vision sweeter. Her mother called a church acquaintance employed at Central for advice. They attended a school fair, where they visited only Central's booth. She sent her application materials months early just to be safe. When Frost Middle School mistakenly sent Dionne's seventh-grade transcripts to their house instead of Central, Gwen wrote an urgent letter to the high school explaining the error to make sure it wouldn't affect Dionne's chances.
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The day Dionne received her rejection letter, Gwen began making phone calls. She called family members and the woman she knew from church who worked at Central, but there was nothing anyone could do. Another letter arrived a day later, this one from Pleasure Ridge Park High School, Dionne's assigned home school, a forty-five-minute bus ride away in the South End. The letter invited them to attend an orientation, but it had arrived late. The orientation had taken place earlier that week.
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Dionne was despondent. Gwen was angry. On August 16, the
Louisville Courier-Journal
ran an article about a protest at Central. Around a dozen black parents and community activists had gathered at the school to rally against the racial guidelines. Their picket signs read, “Let our children choose,” and one protester told the paper that they were there to challenge a system that “always put the burden on African Americans.”
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Not long after, Gwen received a phone call. The activists were meeting again to organize another protest at Central and Dionne had been identified as one of the students who had been denied admission. Parents who thought their children had been unfairly treated were invited to come and express themselves. Gwen promised that she and Dionne would be there.

Chapter 2

Ja'Mekia Stoner's first rejection letter had come a year earlier, in the summer of 1995.
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It was stamped with the Jefferson County Public Schools logo and addressed to her mother, Jacquelyn, who had just arrived home on the bus from her job at a nursing home in time for the mail. The West End was steamy after days of rain, and a rambunctious crowd of cousins and neighborhood children was cooped up on the front porch that served as their living room in the summer.

Ja'Mekia and her little brother, La'Quinn, spent summer days throwing water balloons from the bathroom window at their cousins outside, playing ball in the street or, if no one was around to play with, hunkered down with a book in one of the shabby but comfortable blue chairs on the porch. Curfew was late, but they were confined to a range within sight of the house. The pulse of activity on the block contrasted with the shuttered and silent campus of Shawnee High School down the street. The truants and gang members who had spent school days lingering around its periphery were elsewhere for the season. Jacquelyn picked up the mail and rifled through to the letter with the rainbow logo. She slipped it open and read it to herself.

Jacquelyn decided not to show it to Ja'Mekia—she wanted to break the news more gently. She explained that it looked like there wasn't enough room for her at Central High School that year. Ja'Mekia was on a waitlist, but she would probably have to choose another school. The explanation did
not satisfy Ja'Mekia. Central was a big school with plenty of space and she was in the Advance Program. She had worked so hard to ace her courses, usually as the only black student in class. What more did they want? Jacquelyn tried to comfort her daughter as she began to cry, and then to argue.

Jacquelyn was rail thin with a soft, tentative voice and an air of fragility. Ja'Mekia was stockier and more assertive, a poised debater who spoke in a precise but rapid-fire diction that could easily drown out her mother's more hesitant drawl. Jacquelyn didn't want to take the school's side in this fight. She didn't want her daughter to think she wasn't good enough. Ja'Mekia's grades were fine, she explained quietly, it was just that she was black. Ja'Mekia began to cry again, and Jacquelyn joined in.

Like Dionne, Ja'Mekia had attended a school in her neighborhood only briefly—for Head Start and first grade. Then the Jefferson County school system assigned her and La'Quinn to Eisenhower Elementary in the South End. When the children were young, Jacquelyn moved the family often, and each new home meant a new school zone. The family had most recently landed at a rented three-bedroom house at 41st Street and Market, near Shawnee High. The neighborhood had been a solidly white middle-class enclave in the 1950s, but its bungalows and cottages had gradually been taken over by middle-class blacks in the 1960s. By the 1990s, the neighborhood was home to the working poor. It resembled other clusters of once dignified but now decaying housing stock in the West End. The one difference was that the neighborhood's children were paired with the East End, not the South, under the city's busing plan. For the final grades of elementary school and for middle school, Ja'Mekia and La'Quinn were bused to the far eastern corner of the county, the wealthiest area of the city.

Norton Elementary, where Ja'Mekia attended fourth and fifth grade, was located across the road from the Standard Country Club and less than a mile from the lush campus of one of Louisville's most prestigious private schools, Kentucky Country Day. Ja'Mekia woke up at 5:30 in the morning to catch her first bus to the county depot, where school buses from across the county exchanged students. There, Ja'Mekia switched to another bus that headed past the downtown skyscrapers to the new brick four-squares and mini-mansions of East Louisville. In sixth grade, she was assigned to Kammerer Middle School, a short trip from Norton. Like Norton, Kammerer's black enrollment hovered below 25 percent, close to the minimum allowed under the desegregation plan.
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Ja'Mekia did well at Norton, and even better at Kammerer. Jacquelyn had her tested for advanced placement, and Ja'Mekia passed easily. At first, Ja'Mekia was nervous about being the only black student in most of her advanced classes. Louisville required its schools to maintain enrollments close to the actual percentage of blacks in the city—30 percent. Nearly all schools fell between 40 percent black on the high end of the spectrum to 20 percent on the low end.
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But programs within the schools, like the Advance Program and special education classes, were exempted from the racial guidelines. The Advance Program—Louisville's version of an accelerated curriculum for students deemed to be “gifted”—was around 11 percent black. Ja'Mekia was afraid of being thrust into a white world, of being labeled the “black white girl” by her friends from the neighborhood. So what? her mother responded. Ja'Mekia stayed in the advanced classes.

Jacquelyn may have had a soft, tentative manner, but it disguised a steely determination to push herself and her children ahead. She encouraged her children, but she did not indulge them, particularly when it came to school. When La'Quinn passed first grade without knowing the alphabet or how to spell his own name, Jacquelyn rode the public bus to his school to talk to the administrators. Told he could catch up with his peers in second grade, she politely but firmly demanded that her son be held back. Assuming he could master two years' worth of school in one year was absurd, she argued, and letting him pass would most likely set him up to fall further behind each year. The school relented and let La'Quinn repeat first grade. And when the school system notified her that Ja'Mekia and La'Quinn would be bused to Fairdale, she moved the family to the rented house on 41st Street.