No Place to Hide

"A nauseating mixture of vacuous sociological theories," wrote the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

"Harsh, acrimonious, sometimes arrogant," complained its afternoon counterpart, the News Leader.

"I want my rights back," said the placard carried by a woman picketing the city's courthouse.

What caused all this anger--and may cause a lot more throughout the U.S.--was a landmark decision by U.S. District Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr., who last week ordered Virginia state officials to consolidate the increasingly black (now 69%) school system of Richmond with two surrounding suburban districts that are 91% white. It was the first time a federal court had brushed aside metropolitan boundary lines to bring about racial integration, and it set an unofficial precedent for the merging of other largely black cities with white suburbs. Rulings on similar cases are expected shortly in Detroit, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids and Wilmington, Del.

Whites' Flight. The Richmond case runs back through more than a decade of controversy. During the late 1950s, while some Virginia schools were closing in protest against Federal orders to integrate, the State Pupil Placement Board kept integration within narrow limits. In Richmond, where the school board chairman was Lewis F. Powell Jr., now a Supreme Court Justice, the first blacks entered white schools in 1960, but only two of them. The following year, the NAACP filed a suit on behalf of eleven black youngsters aged eleven to 14, which led to court-ordered busing across the city. Even then, though, the blacks did not achieve real integration because the whites were already fleeing to suburbia.

While the percentage of whites attending Richmond schools dropped from 57% in 1954 to 31% in 1971, the number of white students in the two neighboring suburban counties jumped from 23,000 to nearly 60,000.

After receiving encouragement from Judge Merhige himself, the Richmond school board last year finally joined the original eleven plaintiffs and sought a merger with Henrico and Chesterfield counties (see map). In ruling for that merger, the judge declared that the state has an "affirmative duty" to eliminate all vestiges of segregation; it cannot shrug off this duty by pleading for local control of schools or by insisting on traditional boundary lines.

According to Merhige's plan, the new superdistrict will start operation next fall. It will bus 78,000 of the 101,000 students up to 55 minutes each way to achieve a racial mix with a 40% black maximum in all schools. The system may be expensive, Merhige wrote, but such integration "is essential to equality of education, and the failure to provide it is violative of the Constitution of the U.S." As for popular sentiment against the consolidation plan, he dismissed that by saying, "Community resistance to change affords no legal basis for the perpetuation of racial segregation."

No Guinea Pig. There were ample signs of such resistance, however. Some parents talked of private school or of further flight beyond the suburbs to outlying farm land, and William S. Manner, president of the Henrico County P.T.A., has vowed that his children would not go to Richmond schools: "I won't make my child a guinea pig. I'll use every devious trick I can to keep my kids right here." Nor were such protests limited to Virginia. Said Phillip Lee, chairman of a Save Our Children committee in a suburb of Detroit: "We are peaceful people, but if they think they're going to apply the Richmond decision here, there's going to be big trouble."

If Judge Merhige is upheld by the higher courts (and he has been reversed on remarkably few of his rulings), then, as the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot puts it, "he may go down in history as the Southern judge who pushed desegregation into the North." Actually, the parallels between Richmond and the northern cities are not so clear. Merhige based his ruling on the thesis that the state once enforced segregation laws and now is under Supreme Court order to cancel the effects of those laws. In the north, where the proportion of Negroes in all-black schools is even higher than in the south (11.2% to 9.2%), de facto segregation derives from segregated housing, and it has been difficult to prove that anv state sanctioned the condition or has a legal obligation to change it.

As for the eleven children who originally filed suit, they have all long since finished with the Richmond schools and gone their separate ways. One is at Harvard Medical School, one is a bus driver, one is unemployed, one has disappeared, two married each other. "When I think about the fighting and everything, I'm sorry I did it," muses Phyllis Johnson Richardson, 24, now a housewife with a son aged two. "But it was worth it for the kids in there now."

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