Free Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby Page B

anything named after Booker T. Washington. A 1970 report found that out of 321 former black schools “integrated” in the South, 188 had their names changed, usually from something symbolic of community pride to something plain and generic, like Central or East Side. The black school, as a historical cultural institution, was practically made extinct.
    With their own schools shuttered, black students were uprooted from familiar environments and distributed as necessary; they would provide the statistical proof of significant progress. Having lived their whole lives with the same kids in the same neighborhood, black children found themselves divvied up and bused off in opposite directions. They lost their clubs, their teams, their student groups. “At the age of fourteen, it was like someone took a knife and cut off everyone you ever knew,” said one young black student from Texas. And because of white flight and defections to private schools, the number of white students in these systems was plummeting with each passing year. So to meet the needs of racial balance, black students had to be shuffled around every fall, seemingly at random. At the most extreme, a black student might attend four different schools in four years.
    The fears of black teachers proved justified as well. In an integrated system, their credentials mattered little to white administrators; those who weren’t fired outright were generally demoted or marginalized. In nine states across the South, the number of black principals fell from 1,424 to 225. The National Education Association estimates that by 1970 more than 5,000 black teachers and administrators had lost their jobs. In Louisiana, one black principal was transferred to a white elementary school and restricted to teaching one fourth-grade class per day, after which he was made to perform all of the school’s janitorial duties.
    Whatever black America thought the civil rights revolution was going to bring, this wasn’t it. And when King’s path to the Promised Land left black America seemingly stranded in the wilderness, lofty sentiments lost out. Survival instincts took over. After decades of protesting to get in, now many were clamoring to get out. In 1968, black families in Hyde County, North Carolina, protested the closing of two historically black schools by pulling their children out of the system for an entire year, echoing the same method of massive resistance used by whites in years before. In April of 1969, students and parents from Atlanta’s Hamilton High marched on the Dekalb County Courthouse to protest the loss of their school. But the all-white school board would not reverse its decision. Hamilton was shut down, its students split up and bused off as a means of desegregating four different white schools. Resentful alumni would later lament that Hamilton wasn’t just closed, “it was drawn and quartered.”
    Any integration that treated black principals as janitors was an integration blacks wanted no part of. They’d taken care of themselves before, and they’d do it again. In 1972, a Gallup poll found that nearly 90 percent of whites were against school busing—but nearly 50 percent of blacks were against it, too. That same year, an NAACP field secretary working in Natchitoches, Louisiana, reported with some despair that, in surveying the parish’s black community, “you won’t find twelve people in favor of integrated schools.” And three years after that, in 1975, James Coleman, author of the influential 1966 report that fast-tracked school desegregation to begin with, conducted a second study of what the intervening decade had produced. He didn’t come back with good news. “Programsof desegregation have acted to further separate blacks and whites rather than bring them together,” he concluded. “Busing does not work.”

    For decades now, everyone from the media to the federal government has been relying on this metric of racial balance to tell us if racism