Not once did anyone talk to us about why we were making this massive transfer of bodies. Oh, we knew it was Black and white. But only at Governor’s School the summer after 10th grade did I learn about the gross inequality in public education prior to integration. At this residential program that drew gifted students from across the state, my classes were a mix of Black and white students. In Psychology class, an African American boy and I took to sitting together. While we waited for class to start or loitered after class was over, we talked. He was politically-minded, and in one of our conversations, he told me how his Black public school had to make do with white students’ used text books. “Nasty books, with torn, underlined pages.” He was kind, but frustrated with me, agitated that I was ignorant about the racism that had gotten us into this mess. Apparently, it was easier to move children’s bodies around in the name of equality than to shift our truths.
The chaos of annual reassignments had made me feel as if I were in the trenches of desegregation—arriving at school at seven a.m. because there weren’t enough buses to go around; eating lunch at ten in the morning; watching friends disappear into schools across town. Years later, I realized my focus on the personal had been so complete, I never saw the system.
Yes, Charlotte’s willingness to massively rearrange children to end discriminatory schooling was an eye-popping commitment to the Constitution. And the Charlotte plan worked: schools desegregated and Black students gained access to better school resources. But that wasn’t enough. Both my Jackson friends fleeing integration and my righteous butt seated in all-white classes were caught in the same web of racism spun by our white culture. Now, when I hear myself telling my stock story comparing Mississippi’s disastrous white flight to Charlotte’s model of success (its tag: “the city that made desegregation work”), I shut my mouth.
I have to wonder: if we white folks had recalibrated and faced our racism head-on, would a white parent in 1997 have sued the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district to void the Swann order? Would the court in Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education have agreed? We’ll never know. The court declared racial balance achieved. The grand experiment ended, and Charlotte schools promptly re-segregated.