Doughnut Desegregation

DETROIT LIKE most urban areas is a doughnut city. The white flight to the suburbs has produced metropolitan centers in which lily-white rings surround black cores. While the suburbs prosper, sucking off more and more of society's wealth, the inner city, predominantly black, is left to wallow in poverty. America is becoming, or has already become, what Disraeli termed "two nations," in our case one white and rich, the other black and poor, each unable to bridge the gap of polarization.

A case to be heard by the Supreme Court tomorrow will have a direct bearing on the future of the Detroit doughnut and others like it. The court will have to decide whether school children can be bused across city boundaries in order to achieve racial balance. This ruling will have important repercussions for school systems throughout the nation.

Busing to desegregate schools within a single district, as opposed to busing across districts, has been constitutionally acceptable for years. In Detroit, for instance, busing children to schools within the urban district is an established practice. In Detroit the school board has violated the law by clearly segregatory policies. School officials shaped school attendance zones and assigned students so that blacks and whites attended different schools. In the aftermath of a court decision requiring Denver to integrate its school system because of invidious school board policy, Detroit must desegregate all schools in the city proper.

A group of NAACP-backed plaintiffs contended in 1970 that a "Detroit-only" remedy would not desegregate the city's schools, since almost 65 per cent of the city's school age population is black. No matter how mixed, the system would remain "racially identifiable as black," in violation of the Constitution. The black plaintiffs have argued that only a busing scheme encompassing the entire metropolitan area, about 80 per cent white, could establish a truly desegregated school system.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and ordered the city and the suburbs to "metropolitanize," to bus children from the city into the suburbs and vice-versa. The suburban school boards have appealed the decision. They contend that the federal government cannot require that their school children be bused, since the localities have not been guilty of intentionally segregating black from white students. The 84 suburban school districts surrounding Detroit claim a metropolitan busing order, in the absence of a demonstrated intent to segregate, is an unwarranted intrusion into their local government's legitimate authority.

So this case is to be presented before the Supreme Court. Twenty years after the court (in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka) declared segregation by law to be unconstitutional, the court is again faced with a decision that touches at the foundations of American society. Is a desegregated system within the city limits enough or must the entire metropolitan area be included if otherwise the city proper would remain identifiably black?

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TO UNDERSTAND the real issues involved, the Brown decision must be reexamined. In that case Chief Justice Earl Warren, in a decision for a unanimous court, wrote.

"Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does."

In one of the court's most famous passages, Warren added that

"To separate [some children] from others of similar age and qualification solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

In 1954 the court recognized that the mere fact of separation causes blacks to feel inferior, depriving them of their constitutional right to equal educational opportunity. But the court's final judgment stipulated that such segregation is unconstitutional only if it is "pursuant to State laws permitting or requiring such segregation." De jure segregation is a violation of the law, but de facto segregation does not come within the court's jurisdiction, although it also causes blacks to feel inferior and deprives them of equal educational opportunity.

Whatever may have been the distinction's validity in 1954, when police men (Sgt. Pepper?) stood in the school doorways to bar black children, it is almost meaningless today. To the black youth isolated in the center of the doughnut, what difference does it make whether his position results from law or social fact? As Alexander Bickel writes in The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress,

"if a Negro child perceives his separation as discriminatory and invidious, he is not, in a society a hundred years removed from slavery, going to make fine distinctions about the source of a particular separation.

Even the elimination of the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation is not enough. In a society of increasing polarization and escalating inner hostility, the meaning of equal educational opportunity must change. The Warren Court's judgement, maintained to this day, that segregation leads to inferior education for blacks alone, is paternalistic; that black children can receive a proper education only when exposed to whites is unpalatable.

White children, as well as black, are deprived of educational opportunity when they learn in a totally homogeneous environment. Archibald Cox, in a lecture delivered last May, said:

"because the motivation and perhaps the capacity of a child depends upon the background and environment from which he come each day, a concentration of children from poor and black inner city neighborhoods is likely to provide less mutual stimulation in the schoolroom than classes made up of children from varied backgrounds."

Cox's perception is stated in appropriate terms, but its scope is unfortunately restricted. A concentration of children from wealthy, white suburban schools will also give them less "mutual stimulation" than will classmates with mixed backgrounds. De facto segregation deprives white children of their equal educational opportunity--the opportunity for exposure to different life styles and attitudes.

THE DETROIT CASE illustrates the meaninglessness of the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation. The city is a doughnut by fact, not by law. But it is the mere fact of its doughnutness that deprives the children of both the inner city and the suburbs of an equal education. The court should declare the de facto situation in Detroit unconstitutional and order a metropolitan solution for it and all urban centers with similar racial patterns. Only such a decision, with effects as far-reaching as Brown's, will ensure that both races become educated in the broadest sense.

The court will do nothing of the sort. At most it will declare city boundaries an unnecessary obstruction to a desegregated school system. Such a judgment would remedy many of the inequalities in the American educational system. Yet it would be nothing more than a short step on the long road to eradicating the blight that plagues our cities.