DESEGREGATE THE MONEY ITSELF !
Knowing what you want before you start is paramount . If not, you may end up worse than you were to start. The case of public school desegregation is an example. What the civil rights organizations really wanted was an end to "Jim Crow."
That phenomenon of segregation by race, by law, affected everything almost in America. The NAACP had chosen public schools as the arena in which to do legal battle over its legitimacy. In doing so, they were the proud beneficiaries of the legal strategies, battle plan, prepared by the late Charles Hamilton Houston, who was former dean of Howard U. Law School, former Counsel of the NAACP, who had graduated from Amherst and Harvard Law School.
Unfortunately, Charles Hamilton Houston died in 1950 before the coterie of "Brown cases" from different states and the District of Columbia had reached the Supreme Court by the route plotted by Houston, 20 years earlier in the 1930s; and tried by him and others, like George Hayes, Spottswood Robinson, Robert Lee Carter, and most famously, Thurgood Marshall, all of Howard Law.
Houston's death was like losing the commander in the midst of a fight.
Marshall, Houston's top student at Howard Law School ('33) stepped up to fill the void. Marshall, a graduate of Lincoln U. (Penn), was at Howard Law School, because he was rejected from his hometown's law school, University of Maryland. He was hurt because of his racial rejection. But Marshall received a measure of vengeance when he won a case involving "Murray," the first black man to be admitted in.
These reflections rushed forward as I was reading William T. Coleman's (with Donald T. Bliss') facts in the book chapter "With All Deliberate Speed," COUNSEL FOR THE SITUATION SHAPING THE LAW TO REALIZE AMERICA'S PROMISE (2010). It says:
"There was much debate among the Marshall team about what position we should take on remedy. Having dedicated more than twenty years of his life fighting for the result in 'Brown,' Marshall's instincts were to take a hard-line position, demanding immediate desegregation across the board. Spottswood Robinson and our principal expert, psychologist Kenneth Clark, supported this approach. Marshall also recognized, however, that the Court was expecting the NAACP to take a more 'practical' view. In September Marshall sent out a memo to the team requesting recommendations on the position we should take in response to the court order....
"It has now been more than fifty years since the Supreme Court's decision , and many schools in the South and the North are still mostly segregated. Whether my twelve-year gradual transition plan, or some other more detailed instructions on remedy, would have accelerated the process is hard to say."
P. 157-158, 159.
In 1984, as a friend of the court, I filed a brief on remedy in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri in the "Jenkins" case, a brief which was averse to the remedies proposed by the parties' attorneys and of NAACP, SCLC and National Urban League.
My amicus curiae brief called for the community control of Kansas City's public schools, recognition being given to historical housing patterns and cultural antecedents. My brief was not for massive busing for desegregation heedless of the rendition of quality education. My brief also called for community control, desegregation of the tax money, the dollars, that were used to educate the students, which is what the dispute was about anyway: differences in respect to the deployment of public funds such that white schools received more money per capita than the black schools. I went for the money. They went for sociology and psychology.
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
DESEGREGATE THE MONEY
DESEGREGATE THE MONEY ITSELF !
Knowing what you want before you start is paramount . If not, you may end up worse than you were to start. The case of public school desegregation is an example. What the civil rights organizations really wanted was an end to "Jim Crow."
That phenomenon of segregation by race, by law, affected everything almost in America. The NAACP had chosen public schools as the arena in which to do legal battle over its legitimacy. In doing so, they were the proud beneficiaries of the legal strategies, battle plan, prepared by the late Charles Hamilton Houston, who was former dean of Howard U. Law School, former Counsel of the NAACP, who had graduated from Amherst and Harvard Law School.
Unfortunately, Charles Hamilton Houston died in 1950 before the coterie of "Brown cases" from different states and the District of Columbia had reached the Supreme Court by the route plotted by Houston, 20 years earlier in the 1930s; and tried by him and others, like George Hayes, Spottswood Robinson, Robert Lee Carter, and most famously, Thurgood Marshall, all of Howard Law.
Houston's death was like losing the commander in the midst of a fight.
Marshall, Houston's top student at Howard Law School ('33) stepped up to fill the void. Marshall, a graduate of Lincoln U. (Penn), was at Howard Law School, because he was rejected from his hometown's law school, University of Maryland. He was hurt because of his racial rejection. But Marshall received a measure of vengeance when he won a case involving "Murray," the first black man to be admitted in.
These reflections rushed forward as I was reading William T. Coleman's (with Donald T. Bliss') facts in the book chapter "With All Deliberate Speed," COUNSEL FOR THE SITUATION SHAPING THE LAW TO REALIZE AMERICA'S PROMISE (2010). It says:
"There was much debate among the Marshall team about what position we should take on remedy. Having dedicated more than twenty years of his life fighting for the result in 'Brown,' Marshall's instincts were to take a hard-line position, demanding immediate desegregation across the board. Spottswood Robinson and our principal expert, psychologist Kenneth Clark, supported this approach. Marshall also recognized, however, that the Court was expecting the NAACP to take a more 'practical' view. In September Marshall sent out a memo to the team requesting recommendations on the position we should take in response to the court order....
"It has now been more than fifty years since the Supreme Court's decision , and many schools in the South and the North are still mostly segregated. Whether my twelve-year gradual transition plan, or some other more detailed instructions on remedy, would have accelerated the process is hard to say."
P. 157-158, 159.
In 1984, as a friend of the court, I filed a brief on remedy in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri in the "Jenkins" case, a brief which was averse to the remedies proposed by the parties' attorneys and of NAACP, SCLC and National Urban League.
My amicus curiae brief called for the community control of Kansas City's public schools, recognition being given to historical housing patterns and cultural antecedents. My brief was not for massive busing for desegregation heedless of the rendition of quality education. My brief also called for community control, desegregation of the tax money, the dollars, that were used to educate the students, which is what the dispute was about anyway: differences in respect to the deployment of public funds such that white schools received more money per capita than the black schools. I went for the money. They went for sociology and psychology.
