Equality

By Jack E. White/Topeka

"It was," Linda Brown Smith observed, "almost like Dad was still here, and I was reliving his days in court." Back in 1951, when she was a chubby third- grader in an all-black school, her father, Oliver Brown, was the name plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, the epochal case that rang down the curtain on legally segregated schools in the U.S. Thirty-five years later, the 43-year-old grandmother was about to take the witness stand as an intervening plaintiff in the very same case, charging that the public schools of Topeka had still not purged themselves of segregation despite the Supreme Court's ringing 1954 decree: "In the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."

Smith's dramatic day in court last October superficially seemed like a replay of history. Examined more closely, it was a measure of how far the nation has progressed toward racial equality since 1954 -- and the difficult distance it still has to travel. While the constitutional battle fought by Oliver Brown raised the stark issue of legalized segregation, the concerns addressed by his daughter involved the ambiguous notion of "racial balance" in mixed schools and the lagging performance of some black pupils. Confronting this complex problem, both blacks and whites are split on whether more racial balance will help poor black students who are no longer separate but remain sadly unequal academically.

Compared with most Northern cities, as Smith concedes, Topeka has made huge strides toward integration of its schools since she was forced to walk five blocks to a pickup point, from which she was bused to all-black Monroe Elementary School, although all-white Sumner School was located just two blocks from her home. And unlike cities in the Deep South, where whites began a generation of resistance to desegregation, Topeka did not even wait for the court to rule before taking steps to amalgamate its black and white elementary schools.

Before the Brown ruling, Kansas drew a haphazard color line between its schools, prohibiting segregation of all but elementary schools in most cities. By the time the court handed down its decision, Smith had enrolled in a junior high school in which blacks and whites had attended mixed classes for more than a decade. Says she: "I basically had the same experiences I would have had if the decision had not been handed down."

Other blacks, however, were quick to reap the benefits of the ruling. By the 1955-56 school year, more than half of all black grade-school children and two-thirds of whites were enrolled in mixed classes. By 1968 Linda's alma mater, Monroe Elementary, had a 25%-white student body. By the 1986-87 school year, not a single Topeka school had a student body less than 6.2% or more than 62% black. Twice during the 1970s, the Federal Government surveyed Topeka's schools and found them in compliance with desegregation policies. Still more striking were steady gains by blacks in the city's school administration. By last year two of the seven members of Topeka's school board were black, as were the school superintendent, the principals of two of the city's three high schools and the leader of the local teachers' association.

For all those reasons many Topeka whites were bemused, even annoyed, at Smith's resurrection of an embarrassing era that they regarded as long since closed. Few had any idea that no court had ever specifically ruled that the city's schools were in fact desegregated. Among Topeka's 11,000 blacks, there was bitter disagreement about the merits of returning the case to court. Says Marvin Edwards, who became Topeka's first black superintendent in 1985: "You almost wonder what the big issue is. There has been tremendous progress toward integration since 1954."

The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, architect of the original Brown case, declined to participate when Smith and the parents of 15 other black Topeka schoolchildren intervened in 1979. The chapter's combative president, Kenneth Hill, charged that the black lawyers who recruited Smith and her fellow plaintiffs "were not fighting for the kids in the schools at all. They were fighting for the leadership of blacks and all the empty honors they can get." The plaintiffs turned to the American Civil Liberties Union for legal assistance. It took seven years for the case to come to trial. By then Smith's children, Charles and Kimberly, had graduated.

Nevertheless, Smith took the stand to give an emotional account of the experiences that led her father, a soft-spoken welder at the Santa Fe railroad yards and assistant pastor of St. John's African Methodist Episcopal Church, to join the N.A.A.C.P.'s legal struggle against segregation. She described the "feelings of inferiority" suffered by her children because they attended schools that were considered "black" though large numbers of white children attended them. Her lawyers contended that many of Topeka's schools remain "racially identifiable" because of a preponderance of black or white students. They argued that schools with the largest proportion of black students have "substantially inferior" facilities and teaching, contributing to the poorer scores that lower-class blacks tend to get on achievement tests. In order to bring each of Topeka's schools close to the overall system average of 18% black students, they urged system-wide busing -- an ironic stance as Smith's father had gone to court three decades earlier to win the right to enroll her in a neighborhood school.

That irony is not lost on Smith. As she explains, "I have bad feelings about busing for me, having to get up early and walk in all kinds of weather. Those thoughts and those days come back when I think about children being bused. But if that is a solution for more racial balance, then I advocate busing."

Answering Smith's testimony in court, the school board argued that racial imbalances resulted from factors over which it had no control, such as residential patterns and the location of federally funded housing projects and highways. The board contends that the remnants of racism remaining in the city -- like the Topeka Country Club, which has no black or Jewish members -- have nothing to do with school policies. The lagging performance of many black students, Superintendent Edwards maintains, is due to the handicaps of poverty and unstable family background. "These children bring these problems to school, and it's our job to try to compensate for them," he says.

Black workers in particular suffered during the recession of the 1970s, when several factories laid off their employees. More affluent blacks moved out of neighborhoods in eastern and central Topeka to exclusive sections on the western side of the city, leaving the rest behind in pockets of poverty that have become miniature versions of the isolated underclass ghettos in larger cities. Even Richard Jones, a black attorney for Smith, agrees that the courts by themselves can do little to improve the substandard academic levels of black students who come from poor and unstable families. "The courts are limited in their social engineering," says Jones. "They can't tell the parents to start reading to the kids at night."

In April, U.S. District Court Judge Richard D. Rogers ruled against the heirs of Oliver Brown. In a strongly worded opinion, Rogers wrote that while some racial imbalance persists in Topeka's schools, he was "convinced after reviewing a multitude of factors that the vestiges of past segregation in the district have been dissolved by time, demographic change and the district's steady course of race-neutral and integrative action." But the judge's hope that his ruling would provide an "appropriate denouement" in the Brown case will not be realized. The attorneys for Smith, whose six-year-old grandson Donnell will enter a Topeka first-grade class this September, have appealed Rogers' decision. It is possible that when Donnell's seventh-grade social- studies class begins its study of the Brown decision, the case that bears his great-grandfather's name will still be before the courts.