back at it again
Tuscaloosa, with 83,000 residents, is an hour's drive west of Birmingham. During court-ordered desegregation its schools roughly reflected the school system's racial makeup, and there were no all-black schools.
But in recent years the board has carved the district into three zones, each with a new high school. One cluster of schools lies in the east of the city; its high school is 73 percent black.
Another cluster on Tuscaloosa's gritty west side now amounts to an all-black minidistrict; its five schools have 2,330 students, and only 19 are white. Its high school is 99 percent black.
In contrast, a cluster of schools that draw white students from an affluent enclave of mansions and lake homes in the north, as well as some blacks bused into the area, now includes two majority-white elementary schools. Its high school, Northridge, is 56 percent black.
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But in recent years the board has carved the district into three zones, each with a new high school. One cluster of schools lies in the east of the city; its high school is 73 percent black.
Another cluster on Tuscaloosa's gritty west side now amounts to an all-black minidistrict; its five schools have 2,330 students, and only 19 are white. Its high school is 99 percent black.
In contrast, a cluster of schools that draw white students from an affluent enclave of mansions and lake homes in the north, as well as some blacks bused into the area, now includes two majority-white elementary schools. Its high school, Northridge, is 56 percent black.
link
posted by Jesse at 5:55 AM
4 Comments:
As someone from Alabama and who attended high school at one of those 56% black schools (not in Tuscaloosa) I would like to put out the fire that people may want to make over "those racist Southerners."
In the South in general, you will find very small towns (~1.5k or fewer people) that are more or less all-white, and you will find bigger cities like Birmingham, Atlanta, Jackson, Jacksonville, etc. where there are substantial suburbs. Both of them tend to segregate out, the smaller towns because there just aren't any black people, and the suburbs because that's the way people choose to live in the US - just like there are Chinatowns, Little Italies, etc. In the towns in the middle, like the one where I come from, there is generally a mixed high school due to size and zoning conventions.
Tuscaloosa is a little larger than my hometown of Gadsden, but it does have the University of Alabama there which provides for more of a dense-core mitigated by a series of suburbs and communities. Whether we can just say the authorities gerrymandered the districts racially or not may not be so easy to say, because after all, people can live where they want to and in a town like Tuscaloosa it's not about the "wrong side of the tracks" anymore. It's just where people choose to live, and they tend to sort themselves out.
There are tons of problems sure, but I would venture to say that those of us who go to those mixed high schools - of which there are so many - we turn out to be some of the least racist people, hard or soft, the US has to offer. For those of you from outside Dixie in North America - how many of you went to a 56% black high school?
3:46 PM
"The nation's six most segregated metro areas in a Detroit News analysis of 2000 census data all sit on the Great Lakes: Detroit; Gary, Ind.; Milwaukee; Chicago; Cleveland; and Buffalo."
http://www.detnews.com/specialreports/2002/segregation/b03-390169.htm
4:19 PM
With my quote from above I'm just saying that segregation isn't only a southern US occurance.
5:59 PM
I think that the point of this article is to stick it to the 5 Supreme Court justices that effectively ended desegregation in public schools in their last term. The big quote that came out of that case was from Chief Justice Roberts ("the best way to stop discriminating on the basis of race...is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.")
Many liberals (especially the NYTimes editorial board) assailed him for turning a blind eye for the effects of racism that still exist in America.
It's a shame as a result of the Supreme Court decision that more people like Preston won't have the opportunity to go to racially-mixed schools because, as he attests, they tend to be "some of the least racist people...the US has to offer."
10:32 PM
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