In Pursuit of a Dream Deferred: 
Linking Housing and Education

April 22, 1995
Forum Report

Panel discussions were followed by the mayor's address, a question and answer session, and afternoon workshops. The forum concluded with the address by Dr. Clark.

• Desegregation, Resegregation, and Education Gary Orfield
• Equality and Educational Excellence: Legal Challenges in the 1990s Theodore M. Shaw
• The Persistence of Segregation Nancy Denton
• Legal Strategies for Linking Housing and Education Michael Sussman
• Integrated Neighborhoods and Schools: Getting from Here to There john a. powell
• Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton
• Workshops The Legacy of Milliken v. Bradley
• Introduction to the Keynote Address Dr. Josie Johnson
• Beyond Brown v. Board of Education: Housing and Education in the Year 2000 Dr. Kenneth B. Clark
• Excerpts from question and answer session with panelists
• Summary

Introduction

Forty years after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation persists in our schools at all levels. The forum In Pursuit of a Dream Deferred: Linking Housing and Education turned a critical eye toward this continuing problem, and its relationship to housing segregation in this country. This discussion comes at a critical juncture in American history, as policy makers and school officials increasingly talk about the value of colorblind policies, vouchers, and neighborhood schools. The implication of such approaches has been, and will continue to be, school resegregation. The Institute seeks to stimulate dialogue on innovative strategies that promote enhanced life opportunities and educational achievement in the context of a renewed commitment to social justice. Linking housing and schools continues to be the critical element for achieving these ends.

The forum brought together the research on housing segregation of Nancy Denton, the education research of Gary Orfield, and the legal perspectives of Theodore Shaw, Michael Sussman, and myself. Panel discussions were followed by afternoon focus groups, led by the speakers, local experts, and activists. This multi-disciplinary assessment of where we stand and what we must do in relation to housing, education, and equality, concluded with an address by Dr. Kenneth Clark. Dr. Clark's research has, in so many instances, succeeded in naming and clarifying some of our society's most urgent problems, and their solutions. His perspective as a social psychologist illuminates the central issue: our society's failure to come to terms with our history, and with the necessity of addressing these issues now and in the future.

Additionally, as a society, we have had, and continue to have, a very polarized and bifurcated set of policy initiatives and debates about race on the one hand, and poverty on the other. Often, however, race and poverty interact in ways that exacerbate the problems of each, and are difficult to address without consideration of both factors. Further, it's not enough to say that race and poverty interact. There are many different ethnic and racial groups across the country. There are many different forms of poverty across the country--urban, rural, suburban. There are communities here in Minnesota that have special language and cultural needs. In looking at these intersections of race and poverty, one must be specific. Moreover, we must work with both isolated communities and the larger society to ensure that the doors of opportunity in our society are open to all.

The purpose of the Institute on Race and Poverty is to focus on issues in which there is an interrelationship between race and poverty, to conduct strategic research and initiatives, and to organize events such as this, to advance, open, and inform dialogues on these critical issues. I hope all of us will seek opportunities to interact, to deepen our understanding of some of these issues, and to learn from each other's experience. I hope that dialogue will also inform our actions, our everyday lives, and our commitments.

Dr. Clark reminds us of the distance we have come, and of the continuing need for the struggle. His work is a legacy that we can, and must, build upon. He also reminds us that we're not just struggling for the children. We're not just struggling for the schools. We are struggling for ourselves: we're struggling for our country and our own humanity. It's a struggle we can't afford to lose.

john a. powell
Executive Director, Institute on Race and Poverty

Salutation

The purpose of this forum is to open discussion on the persistence of poverty and segregation and the link between affordable housing and quality education--subjects which traditionally have been considered separately, but which may have to be considered together, if we are to find solutions to either. The program is designed to inform the audience of national initiatives and strategies for housing and education, and to examine those strategies in light of Twin Cities concerns.

Minnesota is at a crossroads now. The decisions we make about education, housing, desegregation, and neighborhoods will affect our children, and our children's children. It is important that we make informed choices. It is in that spirit that we offer this forum.

Georgina Stephens
Forum Moderator
President, Minnesota State Board of Education

Desegregation, Resegregation, and Education
Gary Orfield
Professor of Education and Social Policy
Harvard University

Minneapolis has been given an opportunity to witness the fate of older, segregated cities, and to avoid the policy mistakes that caused racial segregation and extreme poverty, but does not seem to have learned from this advance look. Rather, by making the same policy mistakes in housing and education, Minneapolis is currently traveling down the path forged by cities such as Detroit and Chicago. The problem of segregated schools is particularly egregious in the midwestern United States. This has to do with the structure of school governance and the geographical boundaries of school districts.

We have segregation by both race and poverty in American schools. The kids who are attending high poverty schools in the United States are basically minority young people. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans are attending highly impoverished schools, 47 percent of Latinos, 26 percent of Native Americans, and only 9 percent of whites. This is especially true in metropolitan America. Three quarters of Americans live in metropolitan areas, and they are intensely segregated by both race and poverty. The segregation by poverty, particularly, is becoming more extreme.

It is this poverty that is underlying the racial differences in achievement, of course. If you look achievement in the Chicago public schools, the ten schools with the lowest free lunches had the highest scores. The ten schools with the highest free lunches had the lowest scores. There is an extremely powerful set of relationships that works out on many dimensions.

Segregation by poverty and race is especially pronounced in the metropolitan areas that are divided into many separate school districts. In the South, where there are county-wide school districts, there are metropolitan areas that haven't had any segregated schools for a generation. Raleigh, North Carolina is one of them. It's totally integrated, it's gaining students, white and black, and its share of whites is growing. It's the most attractive area in the country for economic development, according to Fortune magazine.

Segregation was incredible in the South in the 1950's. This is the effect of the Brown decision. We went from total apartheid to substantial integration. In 1970, the South became the most integrated region of the United States. The Supreme Court didn't really say anything about our northern cities for twenty years after the Brown decision. The very year after it said they must desegregate, it said that they could not cross city and suburban boundary lines except under certain circumstances. By that time, most of our cities were already predominantly minority, and the rest were changing fast.

There was a study done to show the relationship between going to college and completing college and the racial composition of a student's high school. It controlled for social and economic status and for test scores. In each category of student body and of student, those who went to integrated high schools did much better in terms of completing college. This is because college is a competitive, middle-class, academically-oriented environment. Seven out of eight black students go to predominantly white colleges. Almost all Latino students go to predominantly white colleges. If there is a relationship of this sort, what happens when you go back to neighborhood schools?

Nor are neighborhood schools a deterrent to white flight. Norfolk, Virginia, dissolved part of its desegregation plan (the first city permitted to do that by federal court) on the assumption that they would get whites back, which proved not to be true. Extreme poverty concentration was the immediate result--up to 100 percent poverty in some schools. A number of them turned out to be totally dominated by housing projects, which had been located in segregated places by the public housing authority. So, resegregation produces an intensification of the relationship between race and poverty. In contrast to Norfolk's strategy, St. Louis put in a desegregation plan that emphasized city-suburban transfers and magnet schools in the central city. The enrollment for the next twelve years was almost completely stable in racial proportions in the central city. It didn't reverse, but it stopped, the transformation of the central city schools.

Segregated schools are not equal schools. They are segregated by both race and poverty. No one has equalized segregated, impoverished schools on a large scale anywhere in the country. Desegregation is a viable strategy. There are techniques that work, that can reverse or can control some of these trends.

There is an intensely powerful relationship between housing and school segregation. One of the reasons is that black families are much more likely to be in subsidized housing and rental housing, so housing policy determines much more where they're likely to live. If we look at where the non-whites are concentrated, it's where the job growth that produces a gain in real income is not concentrated. It's also where the schools that really function well are not concentrated; and of course, it's where the discrimination takes place in the lending market and so forth. Until very recently, however, under Secretary Cisneros' leadership, we have been basically vesting our public resources in policies which intensify rather than alleviate that relationship.

We've had some efforts in subsidized housing to break up that pattern. The Gautreaux program in Chicago is an example of the benefits of attending schools in more economically stable school districts. This program gives residents in public housing projects the opportunity to move to affordable housing in the outer suburbs. The children who moved to the suburbs were four times less likely to drop out of school, much more likely to be in a pre-collegiate track, and more than twice as likely to attend college. They were much more likely to be employed during high school, and to have a decent wage and job skill, and benefits. All of those things that begin to connect a young person to opportunity were systematically different for these kids, who were all from single-parent African-American households that were either in the Chicago Housing Authority or on the waiting list.

Americans, contrary to what our politicians say, care a lot about desegregation. Eighty-seven percent of Americans in a Gallup poll done last year for USA Today and CNN think that the Brown v. Board of Education decision is correct. Fifty-six percent think that there is more to be done to integrate schools. Blacks by 84 percent said that they wanted more to be done. Sixty-five percent of Americans say integration has improved the quality of education. An increasing number said it has increased the quality of education for whites, which of course is the truth, because our society is becoming multiracial. Part of education in this society must be preparation to live in the kind of society we're becoming.

Very few multiracial societies succeed in this world, and if we don't try to make ours succeed, it probably won't. Most Americans are deeply divided over how to do it. They are not divided about whether to do it. In a national poll that the Boston Globe did about a year and a half ago, 80 percent of Americans said they believe racial integration is the right goal for our schools. It also says that they are very closely divided about whether or not they would be willing to have their own children bused, but most say they would, if it were the only way to achieve desegregation. Most people would rather there be some other way.

There are ways to produce much different outcomes, and it's very, very important to explore them. It's not just a theoretical issue now; it's much too late for theory alone. Minneapolis hasn't done anything up until now. There hasn't been any real leadership, on school issues, particularly, since the early 1970's. If Minneapolis is going to preserve its record of being different from other big cities in the country, there is a desperate need for leadership at this point. t

Equality and Educational Excellence: Legal Challenges in the 1990s
Theodore M. Shaw
Associate Director Counsel
NAACP Legal & Educational Defense Fund, Inc.

I was in the Supreme Court on Wednesday when two of the most important Civil Rights cases in decades were argued: Hayes v. Louisiana and Johnson v. Georgia. These two cases involve the question of whether state legislatures, pursuant to the Voting Rights Act, can draw majority minority districts. The Justice Department was involved in these cases, but the plaintiffs were white voters in the state who challenged that the creation of these districts deprived them of a constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

These districts are among the most integrated districts in the South and in the country. Indeed, the district under challenge in Louisiana is 55 percent black. The district under challenge in the Texas case is 47 percent black, not even literally a majority. The district under challenge in North Carolina is 53 percent black and the district in Georgia, 60 percent black. Clearly there is an integrated electorate, and the politicians cannot ignore the significant white vote in those districts.

Those who are opposed to these districts are appropriating the language of the Civil Rights Movement, saying that what they want is a colorblind society; but they're ignoring racially polarized voting. For example, in Louisiana, no black person has been elected to a state-wide office in this century, no black person has been elected from a majority white district to the state legislature, no black person has been elected from a majority white district to Congress. In her opinion a few years ago (Shaw v. Reno), Justice O'Connor talked about how these districts ran against the constitutional command to weld together the various ethnic, racial and religious groups in this country. These districts were balkanizing, they were divisive, according to her. In fact, she likened them to political apartheid.

Now, this hypocritical discussion exists here, at least in some quarters. It is said that if the State Board of Education adopts rules that would promote desegregation, or allow it, Minnesota would take another giant step away from the colorblind society envisioned by Brown v. Board of Education and Dr. Martin Luther King, who advocated judging human beings by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Desegregation is not being driven by efforts to avoid all-black institutions. I think that in a multicultural society, there are some real advantages to all of us in being educated in a desegregated environment; but we're not talking about all-black institutions as being inherently inferior. What's driving school desegregation is that there is something inherently wrong with black institutions, created and maintained by a predominately white power structure, that do not have adequate resources. What we're talking about is structural realities within the society.

After the Kansas City School District became majority black, while the city and the electorate were still majority white, it became impossible for the Kansas City School District to get the kind of support it needed. Not a tax levy, not a bond issue passed from the moment the school district became majority black. As a consequence, those schools literally crumbled, and the quality of education began to decline. So you had separate and unequal education in Kansas City. We fought an interdistrict law suit, and the Court ruled against us. The evidence that we put before that court was as powerful and compelling as has been put before any court, and I think and I say, the Court was wrong.

As a consequence of the remedy that we got at Kansas City, however, we changed and turned that school district around. I remember going in to schools, and looking at the ceiling of a classroom and seeing the sky. Nobody was doing anything about it because the legislature didn't have the will. I am unapologetic about the fact that the state has spent, along with the Kansas City School District, 1.3 billion dollars to help turn that around. I often think, when people talk about how much money that is, that it is probably the cost of a couple of B-1 bombers; but that is a political point, not a legal one. So the Kansas City School District has made significant changes, and test scores among younger students have been improving.

The issue that was argued before the Supreme Court in January was one that was manufactured by the state. The District Court had said in passing, that in order to get out from underneath its remedial obligation, the state had to show that it had turned around the educational harms that had flowed from the segregation violation. The state hadn't shown that it had done all it could do, and cited in some off the cuff language that test scores still showed this disparity. This was then transformed into: "The District Court is requiring us to equalize test scores between black and white students. There is no constitutional command to do that." The sub-text was: "The Bell Curve, can't do it."

The Supreme Court took that case because there were some conservative justices on the Court who were interested in the Kansas City remedy and thought it had gone too far. I'm not going to predict what they're going to do with it, but the issue is not the issue that was presented. The real question is whether test scores can be a measure, among many other measures, of what is being achieved in the Kansas City School District to eliminate the effects of segregation. States buy into test scores. They use them to measure whether students are learning what they ought to learn. So they ought to be used as a measure of whether the educational quality is what it ought to be--unless you happen to believe in The Bell Curve thesis, in which case we don't need to have a long discourse here.

The reality is that the school desegregation cases have worked imperfectly; but the standard that people apply to these school cases is one that's applied to few other fields of human endeavor. We lost a case before a Connecticut state court judge just last week, Sheff v. O'Neil. We were trying to litigate the question of how race and poverty affect the educational opportunities of children in the Hartford School District, one of the most segregated school districts in the country. We put the evidence before the district court that the state constitution mandates not only equal educational opportunity, but also minimally adequate education. There's an anti-segregation

clause in the state constitution which has nothing in it indicating that it only speaks to intentional segregation. The opinion the judge wrote is incomprehensible and convoluted. It is legally a mess. It reflects a simple failure of will which has happened time and again.

Here in Minneapolis, there is an opportunity now to do something that requires a conscious exercise of will to go down another road. If you don't, these problems will continue to snowball. They will continue to grow, and as we move further away from the point at which they were initiated, it will be harder to address them, because the compounding effects of race and poverty mutually reinforce and become more intractable as time passes.

Racial residential segregation in this country is a consequence of years, and decades, indeed a century, or centuries, of social policy and governmental policy on the local, state, and federal level, combined with private actions. It is not fortuitous; it is a consequence of social engineering. If we do not give these problems attention, we cannot wish them away, they will not go away. We will not sustain ourselves as a country, or as a community, if the disparities between the rich and the poor continue to grow as they have grown over the last twenty years. People will not buy into the social compact. So while I may not be as optimistic about where we are on race in this country as some others are today, I know that we have to continue the struggle. I'm reminded of a wonderful African poem, a proverb:

Life has meaning only in a struggle.
Victory and defeat are in the hands of the Gods.
So let us celebrate the struggle.

Respondents to Gary Orfield and Theodore Shaw:

Donald Fraser, former mayor of Minneapolis

Kit Hadley, Commissioner, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency

Carlos Mariani, State Representative, Minnesota House of Representatives

The Persistence of Segregation
Nancy Denton
Professor of Sociology
State University of New York, Albany

Segregation has persisted. In fact, current segregation in urban African-American neighborhoods has created an unprecedented level of isolation, which Douglas Massey and I have described as "hypersegregation." Large numbers of African Americans live this way, especially in large urban centers. Hypersegregation is defined by five dimensions: evenness, exposure, clustering, concentration, and centralization along racial lines in housing patterns. In 1980, we measured these dimensions, and identified a list of metropolitan areas we classified as being hypersegregated. Fourteen of the original sixteen major metropolitan regions studied in 1980 remained hypersegregated in 1990. Additionally, fifteen others are now classified as hypersegregated.

There is a pattern of extreme residential segregation in large cities of the northeast and midwest which have large African-American populations. In general, African-American segregation is almost twice that of Latino and Asian Americans, neither of which can be characterized as hypersegregated in any city in the country. In some places in the 1980's, hypersegregation did decline; but in key cities, which are home to at least a third of the African-American population, we have incredible racial segregation.

Segregation has become part of our social structure. We think, in this country, that the spatial pattern of segregation that we have, residentially in our cities, is normal. It is invisible to us. It's the way things always have been, and as a group, particularly whites, we like to ignore its power. We like to ignore the power that is has, over time, to feed back and change the definitions of people's dreams, the definitions of their achievement, the definitions of freedom that people have.

Segregation has very powerful effects: starting from very different circumstances, people from segregated communities, putting in a large amount of work, can wind up in very different places from people in non-segregated communities. The fact that they put in all this hard work and don't get anywhere is beyond, in most cases, their individual ability to control. It is useful to look at a comparison between African Americans leaving the South for northern cities and southern European immigrants who arrived in those same cities with little education, almost no money, and little English. There are many parallels between these migrations, and there are many important distinctions. The significant difference is segregation. Although the wave of southern European immigrants clustered together as they arrived, in order to help one another, African Americans were forced into segregated communities created by people who wanted to keep blacks separate.

People have commented that "American apartheid" is an overstatement as a title for a book. They don't know American history. Throughout this century, African Americans have been segregated by residential apartheid laws (overturned on legal challenges by the NAACP), by violence, by restrictive covenants (also deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), and increasingly, by the federal government. After World War II, the federal government financed the move to the suburbs. It built highways, it gave loans. It would not, however, give loans in center cities. No blacks were allowed to live in the suburbs, and no blacks were allowed to get mortgages in the cities. So, not only did the cities decline, but the African-American population was concentrated in these cities; and this was a deliberate thing.

By 1950, blacks were about as segregated in U.S. cities as they could get, and they stayed that way from then on. Chicago went from having a segregation index of 90 in 1950 to 87 in 1990, even though it has one of the most active groups in the country trying to combat this. These policies have effectively provided a model for building a self-fulfilling prophecy: to create an "underclass," select an identifiably "different" group, segregate them in a contiguous area, and impose barriers to mobility. Poverty-related social problems, such as crime, dramatically increase with the concentration of poverty.

Living in this world that was highly segregated, that people said was normal, and tried to call voluntary, we tried to desegregate our schools; but not our neighborhoods. And so we created a situation that is extremely difficult. Some causes for hope do exist. Many more multi-ethnic neighborhoods have formed since 1970, and this increase is happening in all cities across the country. Also, there are now very, very few all-white neighborhoods, and white flight has diminished very significantly. In Philadelphia, from 1970 to 1990, the number of all-white neighborhoods (which are defined as having fewer than one hundred non-whites) declined from 576 to 356. Other people came in, but the whites remained. What we're not seeing is rapid change. That pattern that we have in our minds, that the whites will leave, is not happening to the same degree, at the same speed as we have thought it was.

By 1990 in Los Angeles, for example, 41 percent of the neighborhoods in the city, and 44 percent of the neighborhoods in the suburbs, had residents of all four of the major ethnic/racial groups in the area. The low numbers of African Americans in many of these neighborhoods can lead to their dismissal as mere tokenism. Though this is true, they do give us a chance to get to know one another. They also have the potential to serve as examples of what we would like the society to be in the future.

The argument that the segregation that we see is voluntary--that it is formed by the preferences of blacks and whites, is fundamentally flawed. It assumes a segregated housing market. It assumes that black and white preference is the only thing governing who picks what neighborhood. Most blacks pick 50/50 as their desired goal for integration. Almost no black in the country lives in a neighborhood like that. What happens to black neighborhoods is that they are either highly black or they are almost all white. The average black population in a black person's neighborhood in this country is about 45%, but nobody lives there: it's the average of these two extremes.

We will have a chance to make progress on this if whites start paying more attention to the issue. I don't mean to diminish the role of African Americans in their own future, but this is a problem that is driven by the private housing market. It is a problem that is essentially driven by the fundamental hypocrisy of whites, who really want to hold two values: They want to hold the value that everyone has a right to live wherever they want to and can afford to, and they simultaneously want to hold the value that blacks want to live with blacks.

While I am sympathetic to the movement to enhance all-black schools, and to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods, I find it very scary for two reasons. One, it says to me that whites have won: that they have finally persuaded an intelligent, articulate group of people that what they should want is to be only with people of their own color, not with people who might have similar interests with them. The second reason is that it allows people to say, "Well, we don't really have to face the challenges of racism in this society, because this group doesn't really want to integrate with us." So it feeds back into this cycle, while, in fact, no group in this society has ever managed to succeed in this separatist mode. The widespread segregation that persists can, and must, be remedied by affirmative policies.

Legal Strategies for Linking Housing and Education
Michael Sussman
Attorney
Sussman & Attorneys

The law does not exist in a vacuum. The legal system is a reflection of the politics and social values in the United States. Reference was made earlier to the defeat in Sheff recently in Connecticut, and to the intellectual confusion of that decision. That decision mostly reflects the court's perception that very few people care. If one looks in the last fifteen or twenty years at the American political landscape, one will see that politicians of every race have stopped linking our national future with racial integration. That may be hard for us to hear, it may be hard for us to acknowledge across racial lines, but it is true. There is an imperative that is unfulfilled in the country. That imperative is the gap between the nation's ideals and the reality of segregation.

Racial segregation is about the deprivation of opportunity. Every statistic you have seen today, and the professors could have gone on for hours, demonstrates that by maintaining a highly racially segregated society volitionally, we are depriving people of an equal educational opportunity, and moreover, an opportunity to participate in the economic and entrepreneurial fabric of our society. That is predictable from the data we all know. By letting it continue, we consign them in the future to the same status as their parents.

So this is the national imperative. It has been the imperative of this country, as de Tocqueville noted, for hundreds of years; and it is still unfulfilled. It is unfulfilled because we lack the national will to commit the resources morally, financially, and spiritually to the battle.

The legal system is a part of the broader culture. It does not operate apart from the culture. Furthermore, the decisions made by judges are often sporadic, so we can't think of the legal system itself as a synthetic or unitary piece. It is highly inconsistent; but one of the things it reacts to, is the perception that the matter before it matters to someone, and matters deeply to someone. The Yonkers case was not won by me or any other lawyer. It was won by the perception the court had, that there had been a great deal of disquietude amongst African-American and Hispanic people in Yonkers about continuing inequalities which the political system had otherwise ignored. The legal system understood that the evidence presented in the case was of a forty year social struggle by human beings, who were trying, fruitlessly, to change their condition. The courts were a matter of last resort.

In regard to legal strategies linking schools and housing: the central principle of simultaneity links not only schools and housing, but every other form of social life in any given community as well. The same mindset that creates the social fabric operates across all areas of the culture, within the same community, at the same time. What does that mean legally? It means that the epistemology of the law has to change. Our understanding of what evidence is has to be broadened.

In Yonkers, when we linked housing and schools, what we were able to show the court was that the mayor, who wanted to maintain segregated housing conditions in Yonkers, saw, as integral to that, the perpetuation of racial segregation in the schools. We showed that he saw, as integral to that, the maintenance of minorities in only the lowest and most menial forms of municipal employment, so that they could not get incomes, which would allow them to move to white neighborhoods. In other words, the very fabric of social life, if one looks at it this way, is consistently interwoven with the same themes. To divide them, from the doctrinal point of view, into these spheres, is wholly artificial, and doesn't present the court with an understanding of the dynamics of that community in whatever time frame is being discussed.

That was the insight that in 1980 some of us in the Justice Department, implicitly, at least, shared. We began to look at Rochester, New York, and Yonkers, New York, with the help of Drew Days and some others, and started to say, "How is it that this level of racial segregation in the schools functions? Is housing independent of that?" If you looked at cases up until then, housing patterns were being used to excuse school segregation. What that forgot was that, from a constitutional point of view, housing practices--engaged in by municipal housing authorities, by City Councils, by planning boards--are a function of state power, which falls within the Fourteenth Amendment proscription of racial segregation and discrimination. By enacting racial segregation in those ways, these public institutions have reified and reaffirmed racial segregation in schools. Therefore, they must be held responsible constitutionally for that consequence of their action.

School districts, faced with that, had a constitutional imperative to treat people without reference to race, but the plate they were given was already one which was highly segregated. Their choice, then, was to run neighborhood schools which carried that segregation forward in time, or to change that. In Yonkers, however, the school board was appointed by the mayor, who was the same person who was appointing the members of the municipal housing authority, who were choosing the segregated sites. So there was a nexus, or connection in power, and an influence. It was that connection which the court understood as creating the segregation in these spheres.

The creation of legal strategies first and foremost requires individuals who have social goals and objectives of their own. What do you want in society? How do you want it structured? How are you acting on your own to make that happen in your local communities, before your local school boards, before your planning authorities? What affordable housing proposals are you promoting which are now being rejected by bigoted communities? If that happens, the evidence will be there for any lawyer who chooses to represent you.

Legal strategies begin at the grassroots level. What we have been bereft of in recent years is the energy to act concertedly for social objectives which have value. Once we begin that activity, if frustrated, we can call upon the legal system to vindicate the values which we have formulated as human beings.

One thing we cannot lose sight of in this historical epoch is that the vocabulary of the battle we face is being framed by others. These others are not directly, generally, attacking our programs and our values. To some extent, they are; but very frequently, they are arguing about the imperative of deficit reduction. They're arguing about hard choices that are driven by economic factors. They're not telling us that they really want to retreat with respect to this or that social policy because it's ineffective or they have moral reservations about it. Rather, they argue about these things as if, as Professor Denton said earlier, they were natural.

We have to take the initiative and frame the discussion. It doesn't matter if we think today we are not in a majority. The only possibility we have is to articulate, in the most clear manner, and in the most grounded manner, and the most whole manner that can appeal to people, our priorities. What are our priorities? Our priorities must be expending more resources on inner-city issues, more resources on housing, where we now again have almost no national resources being spent.

The rule of law is elevated by many in our country. We have to understand, however, that when the results don't go the way our opponents like, they try to change the rules. The rule of law is nothing that is so solid that its own underpinnings can't at any moment be taken from us. So we have to understand the legal system for what it is: It is as strong as our advocacy for values allows.

Integrated Neighborhoods and Schools: Getting from Here to There
john a. powell
Executive Director
Institute on Race and Poverty

Integration in the 1990's has become a bad word, a pejorative term. We have to reclaim and redefine integration, and make it a good word again. Integration in the sixties, at least as conceived of by some, was the notion of assimilation. Assimilation, in relationship to African Amercians and other people of color in this country, is not possible or desirable. It's really a form of white supremacy. Integration can mean something much richer and more possible. It can and should be a very substantial part of our building a multiracial and multicultural society. It doesn't mean that we have to become each other, it means that we have to respect each other.

"Colorblind" got its legal meaning from Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that ushered in the "separate but equal" doctrine in 1896. Unfortunately, many people didn't understand, or haven't read, Justice Harlan's dissent. It says that the law is colorblind; but it also says, in the context of calling for a colorblind constitution, that the superiority of whites and the subordination of blacks is true, and will always be true. Justice Harlan understood that the concept of colorblindness, in our racially stratified society, would not disturb that stratification; that colorblindness, in some ways, would support that racial stratification.

Colorblind assumes that the major problem in our society, if we have a problem along racial lines, is race itself. So, if I don't see race, then I don't see a problem; but race is not the problem. It's racism; and one judges that, not just by what people say, but by the institutional arrangements and practices in society. Those institutional arrangements continue to reflect a very strong sentiment for white superiority. That's why we can have a country that is incredibly ambivalent and, at times, hypocritical; a country that embraces some notion of equality on one hand, yet embraces at the same time, practices that demonstrate an incredible antipathy toward meaningful racial equality.

John Dewey, one of the great American philosophers, and a great American pragmatist, understood education not to be a way to raise test scores, or, necessarily, to get a better job. He thought the primary and fundamental purpose of education was to build a democratic society. We seem to have lost the vision of that. Even if we could raise test scores in a society that was heavily segregated, the question would remain: In a society in which, during our lifetime, there will be no racial majority, how will we teach our children to live together?

As Gary Orfield said earlier today, the South is the most integrated part of the United States today. They weren't asked, "Do you want voluntary integration?" The answer was, "We don't want voluntary or mandatory." We sent in federal troops to force integration. It's interesting. The civil rights movement as we know it today came to an end when it came north. The northerners thought, "This is something good for the South, but not for the North." So, it's not surprising today that the most segregated housing and schools are in the North, and that Minneapolis ranks up there with a number of other northern cities.

All of us know about Brown v. Board of Education. What most of us don't know, is that Linda Brown's daughter goes to a segregated school in Topeka, Kansas. What we've seen is massive resistance from white society, and, to a large extent, Court complicity. In Brown II, when the Court said "all deliberate speed," for those of you who are not lawyers, what they meant was, "take your time." Brown III is now pending in the courts, trying still to integrate the Kansas schools.

We have some history behind us. That history can teach us and inform what we should do in the future. We now have a number of metropolitan-wide school districts: Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, Tampa, Indianapolis. Without exception, those school districts have a

more stable student population and higher test scores than districts that are segregated. We also know what happens when schools districts go back to neighborhood schools without paying attention to the issue of segregation. In Chicago, if you know nothing else about a student than that the student is black or Latino, you can guess, with 92 percent accuracy, that the student is also poor. We know that when we segregate by race, we segregate by income.

In Gautreaux, the housing segregation remedy in Chicago that Gary Orfield mentioned earlier, public housing residents were given a choice of moving to an outer suburb, or to other housing in the city. Ninety percent of them simply took the first available unit. So there were two identical groups of people in terms of single-headed households, AFDC recipients, and educational achievement. We know now, twenty years later, what happened to those families, thousands of families. Those whose names came up for housing in the suburbs have done considerably better on virtually every indicator. The difference is overwhelming.

In the Twin Cities metropolitan area, 20 percent of the students attend schools in Minneapolis or St. Paul. Yet these two school systems have 51 percent of the low-income students in the region. Seventy-five percent of the African American students in the region are in these two school districts, and 60 percent of the students of color. This all has happened in the last twenty-plus years. When Minneapolis started talking about desegregation in the late 1960's, it had a student of color population of 12 percent. It now has a student of color population of over 60 percent, and the projection is that next year it will be over 70 percent. The majority of students are on free lunch programs. Subsidized housing in the Twin Cities is concentrated most heavily in the center cities. There is some in the suburbs, but only the inner-ring suburbs. Our housing policies, once again, have exacerbated our problems.

In 1938, in the middle of the depression, the federal government introduced mortgage insurance. At the same time, they introduced the concept of redlining, mandating that neighborhoods had to be "racially homogeneous" to be eligible for underwriting.

We are still living with that legacy today. The housing patterns and much of the black/white wealth gap that we see today are a direct result of government policies. Whites have wealth at a rate of eleven to one, compared to blacks; and the major wealth that people have is wealth in their homes. We've looked at white flight often, but seldom have we paid attention to capital flight. It's capital flight that makes the possibility of building strong, segregated black communities very hard to do.

No one can be against neighborhood schools. Neighborhood schools are fine if the neighborhoods are fine. The neighborhoods we live in today are not fine. They are segregated by race and by income. When the concentration of poverty gets over 40 percent, it becomes very difficult to build a strong community or a strong school. In the Twin Cities area, a number of government policies continue to support this, such as exclusionary zoning. Once the high correlation between race and poverty is clear, it's not surprising that if only high-income housing can be built in an area, a large proportion of people of color are excluded.

We know there needs to be more affordable housing located near the best jobs and schools, so the housing market can be made to subsidize itself. Each municipality can be required to build its fair share of low-income housing. We also have to pay attention to redlining and market forces. Cities cannot work if the market is abandoning them. Government subsidies alone will not work. Redlining affects that in a very profound way.

The Brown decision ushered in formal equality, which is important. Spatial isolation, however, if unaddressed, can undermine substantive equality to the degree that formal equality is rendered meaningless. Langston Hughes wrote a number of years ago, "What happens to a dream deferred?" Hopefully, we can answer that the dream hasn't been deferred, that we're still pursuing it.

Respondent to Nancy Denton, Michael Sussman, and john powell:

Yusef Mgeni, The Urban Coalition

When I first heard about this forum, I thought that people would be here today because of a personal or perhaps a professional commitment to a just and humane society. However, I want to suggest that even our best efforts can be frustrated by racism, and as well by the issue of segregation. In the past year, I've asked the spiritual leaders of our community to help us address the moral dimensions of racism by participating in what they have called "The Year of Harmony," sponsored by the Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism. We are trying to facilitate dialogues to address this important issue and to revitalize our city's commitment to racial justice.

Today we're discussing not just the moral issues, but the public policy issues and implications as well. The landscape of this issue really has shifted over the years. Despite our efforts over the past twenty-five years to desegregate our schools and provide a quality education for all children, we have indeed failed children of color. More than half of the Minneapolis public schools seventh to twelfth graders who are dropouts are children of color. Since 1990, the performance gap between our children of color and our white students has increased about a point a year. To me, it's clear that the results of our failure to properly educate our children of color are devastating and pervasive. It is also clear to me that the intellectual development of our children cannot be separated from the economic circumstances that their families face.

My goal is to facilitate the creation of supportive, familiar community schools that are naturally integrated, and that are fully accessible to children and their parents, not just during the day, but at night as well; full-service organizations that are designed to help families be strong and successful. This would also make it possible for the children's academic efforts to be supported not only by their families, but as well by the community. One of the models for this type of approach, though it is not just a neighborhood school, is Richard Green Central Park. It is a math-science magnet, and is attached to a Neighborhood Early Learning Center (NELC), which has a day care and a health clinic. That's the kind of new vision that I think we need to be creating, and that a community school model can give us.

How has it really happened that we have failed our children? One of the most important reasons is that we have not dismantled our pattern of segregated housing in the metropolitan area, nor have we done it in the city of Minneapolis. The city of Minneapolis was recently involved in a lawsuit called the Hollman lawsuit. In that case, the NAACP and public housing residents sued the city and charged that our housing policies restricted poor minority people, people of color, to specific areas of the city of Minneapolis, creating racially segregated concentrations of poverty. This is not a new discussion for the city of Minneapolis. There was a similar suit about twenty-seven years ago. The City wants to work with the plaintiffs and with HUD in this context with the hope of some new and different things happening.

An objective of the settlement is to demolish 770 units of public housing currently in the city of Minneapolis and replace them with single family homes or townhouses that are located in Minneapolis and the broader metropolitan area. There is an obligation in the settlement to create new low-income housing in the city of Minneapolis, not just in the suburbs. HUD will issue new Section 8 certificates, and will provide funds to help families understand their housing options and address some of the other challenges that they might have.

It's a good settlement, and helps us work with our friends in the suburbs, so that they can help us meet our obligation to not concentrate poverty in the city, or anywhere, for that matter, in the metropolitan area. It helps us develop a context for discussing these issues and solving these problems. We cannot have a reasonable discussion about addressing the issue of segregated housing in the metropolitan area or the city of Minneapolis without talking about human services, transportation, and jobs; and we want to make sure that that discussion occurs.

As far as the Hollman site, we're looking at ways to attract working and middle-class families back into that neighborhood. That happens to be a neighborhood where there's a high concentration of poverty, and if we're trying to balance schools and housing, racially and economically, this is an opportunity for us to do that.

We don't have any authority over the decisions of the Board of Education, but we do have authority over housing issues. We have two goals we are trying to achieve in the context of establishing a housing policy in the city of Minneapolis that deals with the issue of segregation. Our first goal is to dissolve concentrations of poverty that are developing in the core area. There are things that we often do that strangle our neighborhoods and make it impossible for residents to have access to jobs, schools, day care, health care, grocery stores, and other things that make a neighborhood desirable. Addressing the issue of the concentration of poverty, expanding the buying power of the people who live in those neighborhoods, and creating some markets will help to change that.

Another goal of ours is to create life cycle housing in all areas of the city at all income levels, to make sure that people have access, choice, and freedom to move. We don't have that in the city of Minneapolis, and for that reason many people are not able to choose to have hope. We will continue to struggle with the issues of segregation in neighborhood schools, and the difficulties of busing, unless we deal with these housing issues. We have to begin to have the dialogue to develop the long term strategies to solve these problems.

We've got to weave together housing, economic development, transportation, and the educational strands that help make up our social fabric. I just want to underscore for all of you who believe in the metro model, that we have to be participants with those counties and broader metro area agencies, but we've got to realize it's not going to be easy. We have got to mobilize the community, pulling together all ethnic groups to put together the real vision that we want to have for our community around this issue and others. t

Workshops: The Legacy of Milliken v. Bradley

Forum participants worked in small groups on specific issues related to linking education and housing in the Twin Cities. The workshops were led by community leaders in the fields of law, social science, and policy: Gary Orfield, Tom Triplett, Lindsay Jones, Barbara Bearman, Anna Barker, Matt Little, and Kathleen Graham. The following are summaries of reports from these groups.

Workshop #1 Lindsay Jones

Building the Quality of Schools in Low-Income Communities: Redistribution of Funds from Rich to Poor Districts, Administrative Reform, Neighborhood Schools, and Other Strategies

The difference in allocation of resources between rich districts and poor districts may be a red herring. Though there was no consensus, a number of workshop participants suggested that the focus should be on addressing the different needs of the children, and the achievement of equal educational attainment. There was some discussion of the current proposals to stop using property taxes as the basis for school funding, with the state funding all districts equally, but again, there was strong support for the idea that students should be funded according to their needs in relation to a goal of educational equity.

Workshop #2 Gary Orfield

Achieving Integration Through Metropolitan-Wide Busing and Housing Plans

We discussed many dimensions of possible leverage on the situation of school and housing desegregation in the metropolitan area. One point that hadn't been raised earlier was the obvious importance in any kind of desegregation effort, that not just students, but also faculty, be involved. That would create some new opportunities for educators in this metropolitan region.

People talked about neighborhoods and the trade-offs involved in multi-service strategies in high-poverty neighborhoods, whether that might concentrate interacting agencies, yet still not solve the underlying educational problems.

There were a lot of efforts to think through how this would actually work, and to create a vision that people could understand in the broader community. Engaging other forces, such as the communities of faith, was also suggested.

Workshop #3 Barbara Bearman

Improving Education Through Creation of Integrated Communities

School desegregation may be an incentive for city dwellers to move to the suburbs, where the opportunity structure is better, and it may also work the other way around; the city may also become more desirable. Affordability of housing, availability of employment, transportation, and access (as in use of Section 8 vouchers) often determine housing choices, when there are choices. How can we use this knowledge to further integration?

We need to do a lot of organizing and build grassroots support just to accomplish what is on the books now, in terms of desegregating housing and education. A lack of political will is what is holding us back. If the legislature simply mandated an elimination of the concentration of poverty, that would force school and housing officials to work together in a concerted way to solve these problems.

Workshop #4 Anna Barker

Current Alternatives: Vouchers, Magnet Schools, and Charter Schools

We looked at alternatives that work with public schools to integrate and desegregate for all learners and the community. We think of these alternatives as fitting on a continuum: public schools, magnet schools, tribal schools, race-specific schools (voluntary), charter schools, vouchers.

The alternatives should integrate whole-community resources, as in learning centers that incorporate social services and are open 24 hours a day. We recommend a smorgasbord of assessment approaches. How do we know when something works, when we have integration?

Introduction to the Keynote Address
Dr. Josie Johnson
Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs and Associate Provost, University of Minnesota
Co-Chair, 1995 NAACP National Convention

Dr. Clark was born in Panama. His mother thought that the quality of education and opportunity might be greater in the United States, so the family moved to Harlem. There, Dr. Clark spent a great deal of time in the public library, where Dr. Schomburg talked with the young, eager scholar, showing him around the library, and giving him guidance.

I had the opportunity to do part of my dissertation work on the research for Brown v. Board of Education, and it seems a very long time ago that this nation was involved in such a critical question. It seems a very long time ago that the society and the law said that it was unconstitutional to segregate children in education; yet here we are in 1995 with basically the same construct. We have segregated education, even here in Minnesota. The question before the courts had to do with the impact of racism and prejudice on children, and its meaning, relative to quality education. Dr. Clark produced an instrument that would create, for the courts and others, an understanding of the impact on self-esteem and commitment to learning of a society's teaching children that one race, one color, is better than another.

A question was asked earlier about children sitting in the classroom with non-minority children, and that the question should be greater than that. The issues have always been greater than that. That's never been the purpose of Dr. Clark and others in the search for understanding what has happened. What Dr. Clark has done is to help us all in our understanding of the human side of this. At the time that we all needed to understand about the effect of prejudice, he wrote about Prejudice and Your Child. He talked about the Dark Ghetto, all of the social issues we need to be sensitive to as we move toward an understanding of quality desegregated, integrated education. t

Beyond Brown v. Board of Education: Housing and Education in the Year 2000

Dr. Kenneth B. Clark
President, Kenneth B. Clark Associates, Inc.
Distinguished Professor of Psychology Emeritus
City University of New York

In pursuit of a dream deferred: It's a title which disturbed me, because it seemed to say something that had been bothering me for quite a while. In 1954, the Brown decision held out hope. It was a dream, and the statement of a dream, and I believed then that America was not going to defer that dream. The United States Supreme Court was succinct; made very clear that we should not and could not and must not disturb human beings; that our dreams of democracy and equality could not and should not be deferred. I said to myself, "The dream has been deferred, but we should not permit it to continue to be deferred."

I spoke and I wrote buoyantly, confident that in the future, there would be a positive approach to making democracy a reality, and not a dream. I knew then, or believed, that the de facto patterns of segregation that existed in a few states were not really part of the American system. I thought in 1954 that segregation was essentially a southern position. I worked with the lawyers of the NAACP, including Thurgood Marshall, believing that if we did something about the South, if we could take our problems of racism to the South, and if we got the law and lawyers and the courts to change the South, that that would help us in making racism in America a thing of the past.

In 1954, as a social psychologist, teaching my students at a college in the city of New York, which was considered one of the most liberal institutions of higher education in our nation, I believed, or did not know, or did not take into account, the fact that segregation, of which segregated schools were merely one of the manifestations, was a large center of American racism. I believed that segregated schools could be eliminated. I also, interestingly, believed that our churches and religions were instruments in eliminating segregation and racially segregated institutions, including institutions of higher learning. I also thought that segregated housing could be addressed by taking important steps in modifying racial housing patterns. I did not understand that the maintenance of segregated housing was not only an excuse for the persisting pattern of segregated schools and segregation in general, but that segregated housing was itself a form of deeply embedded, highly resistant racism--ironically, particularly in the North.

This afternoon, a student took my colleague and me through ghettos in your city. I was fascinated by the fact that there was nothing that he was showing me that I had not written in my book Dark Ghetto. I thought that Dark Ghetto was peculiar to Harlem. I should have known better. When I saw the ghettos of your communities, I couldn't ask any questions, I couldn't make any comments, because I had written this: I had written about how deep American racism was, how deeply the racism had infected our schools, our communities; that it had made ghettos inevitable, really.

I'm sorry to say to say this in a law school, but law in itself has done very little to change the corroding, disturbing problems of racism in our society. I was reluctant to accept the invitation to address you, because I didn't want to come to you and talk about American racism. American racism now is something so disturbing to me that I see no answer; other than the answer of changing our society toward humanity and decency beyond color.

We have tried, and are trying busing, which we hoped would help us increase human sensitivity beyond color. I knew that busing was not going to work in itself. I knew that, to help busing, we didn't need busing. We needed society, we needed schools, communities, we needed other human beings to know that you can't segregate children in buses and expect that this would help segregated schools. Every time I saw buses, I saw them or interpreted them, as segregated busing; because what was happening was that the black children were being put in the buses and sent somewhere.

As I reflect on the early stages following the Brown decision, I see more clearly the curious way that optimism prevented our anticipating how racial progress would result in a form of backlash. I tended to highlight the gains in our society, such as the civil rights gains, affirmative action, and increasing numbers of elected black political officials. There is no question that these developments were important. However, I tended to underestimate the significance of the staunch hold of racism on the American people. For example, we are now confronted with the belief that affirmative action has been a form of rejection of white American males. This argument conceals the fact that affirmative action was to be a remedy for the past rejection, prejudice, and exclusion of minorities, particularly blacks.

It is difficult to understand that these attempts, busing, affirmative action, or devices, or words, or approaches, are used to disguise the continuation of American racism, racial segregation. Segregated schools, segregated housing persist. They are not being discussed as manifestations in attempts to resolve former and persistent forms of American injustice. When I repeat to you my deep belief that our efforts have not worked, I do not want you to believe that now I have been identified with the social scientists, who, from the very beginning, were telling us that racism should not be opposed.

What has happened is something that we did not take into account when I worked with Thurgood Marshall. The racial segregation was so deep that American society was not seriously ready to seek to eliminate it. We talked about the schools, and we talked about the words. I wrote chapters in a couple of books about how we could eliminate segregation; but segregation is deeply embedded in the American culture, deeply a part of white Americans seeing themselves as having higher status by imposing inferior status upon black Americans.

The fire of the black separatist movement is a manifestation of the form of segregation in which whites use blacks as examples of why segregation should continue. They are saying to us that blacks want to be segregated. I have said to them, "The reason you tell me that blacks want to be segregated is because you have started segregating them when they were in elementary schools, and by the time they get to high school and college, you know they want to be segregated, because you have taught them to want to be segregated."

I often wonder how Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter would present their case before the present Supreme Court. Would the Court today write a clear, clean Brown decision, as they did in 1954? As one of the many social scientists who worked with them across the Brown decision cases, I would now argue that segregation of schools should be abolished, of course, not only in Clarendon County, but also in New York City, in the Twin Cities, and in America at large; because it is a damaging problem which cannot be dealt with piecemeal.

It is clear to me that the failure to desegregate our schools at all levels--the elementary, high school, and college levels--after our awareness of the harm inflicted by segregation on all the children, has demoralized our society. It has weakened our social fabric. The dream so long deferred should be reexamined with a tough-minded, hard-hitting approach; but not because the premises of the Brown decision have changed. Let me read to you what the Supreme Court said in that terrific decision:

We consider that in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.... To separate them from others of similar age and qualification solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.

Those were their words in 1954. Those are their words today, except today they are presented as though they were part of a dream, rather than reality. In the years since that statement was made, we have had copious examples of the harm inflicted upon our children, and our society: for segregation not only damages black children, but also interferes with the growth and development of white children.

One of the things that has disturbed me most, as a member of the Board of Regents of the state of New York, is that we have had many educators who have worked with lawyers, and continued the deferring of the dream. They told us that it was impractical to desegregate. I kept thinking, "Would it be impractical to protect children from diseases?" We look at delinquency, we look at pathology, products of our segregated housing, and we blame the products, not the society. Our society is in desperate need of rejuvenating itself, in need of resistance, of positive and constructive social policies. Our schools, our neighborhoods, our society as a whole must be mobilized. We cannot be apologetic about freeing ourselves from this damage which is being done to our children and to the very fabric of our society.

If we look at our higher education institutions, our schools, colleges, our churches, and the institutions that tell us that they are concerned with human and ethical goals, we will see that, in general, they have been part of the rationalizations for the maintaining of segregation. They tell me that I'm impractical; that society cannot afford to talk with liberals about desegregation. I was thinking as I flew here, that maybe these issues and goals should be started in law schools. Maybe the law schools should say, "Look, we can't do this to human beings. That's what we're about."

My judgment is that if I were an Episcopal minister, the way my mother wanted me to be, that's what I would preach about: how the Episcopal Church should lead in the approach to desegregating, because human beings need to be helped. Well, the Church is not going to do it. I have seen the schools and the cathedrals that they have built, and you can't build tremendous cathedrals, and at the same time, permit your children to be segregated. You can't build these terrific cathedrals and leave these children floundering and worrying about their worth. t

Biographies of forum speakers

Kenneth B. Clark has served as a consultant to a number of private corporations, foundations and educational institutions including the NAACP Legal & Educational Defense Fund, the United States Department of State, and the IBM Corporation. Dr. Clark received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Columbia University. He is the author of countless articles and several books, including Prejudice and Your Child (1955), the prize-winning Dark Ghetto (1965), and Pathos of Power (1975). Dr. Clark's research on the effects of racial segregation on children was cited by the United States Supreme Court in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Among the numerous honors and awards he has received are the Springarn Medal, The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award: Freedom of Speech (1985), and the Medal of Liberty Award (1986).

Nancy A. Denton received her Ph.D. in Demography in 1984 from the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds an M.A. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in Sociology from Fordham University. Her major research interests are race and residential segregation, and she is the author of more than a dozen articles on the topic. Her collaboration with Douglas S. Massey, spanning the last decade, culminated in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, winner of the 1994 Otis Dudley Duncan award from the Sociology of Population section of the American Sociological Association and the 1995 American Sociological Association Distinguished Publication Award. Her current research focuses on the actual process of neighborhood change in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the United States.

Gary Orfield is currently Professor of Education and Social Policy at Harvard University. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1991 after teaching at the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois. He has been on the staff of the Brookings Institution in Washington, and served as Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Professor Orfield has established himself as a leading expert in the fields of civil rights, education, and public policy through his work with a variety of organizations including the Justice Department, HUD, the National Institute of Education, the Chicago city government, and the Minnesota State Board of Education. He has testified in numerous congressional and legislative hearings, including four Supreme Court confirmation hearings. He has also been an expert witness in twenty-one civil rights cases on school and housing discrimination, higher education, and testing issues.

john a. powell earned a B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor powell has taught at Columbia University School of Law, Harvard Law School, the University of Miami School of Law, and the University of San Francisco School of Law. In 1987, he became the National Legal Director for the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1993, Professor powell joined the University of Minnesota Law School faculty, where he teaches civil rights, property law, and legal theory. A nationally recognized expert on issues relating to race, poverty, and the law, he is the founder and Executive Director of the Institute on Race and Poverty.

Theodore M. Shaw is currently Associate Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal & Educational Defense Fund where he supervises the litigation program. On leave from his position as Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Professor Shaw is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School, from which he received his J.D. in 1979. Before joining the Michigan faculty, Mr. Shaw held the position of Western Regional Counsel for the NAACP Legal & Educational Defense Fund. After graduating from law school, he worked for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, from which he resigned in 1982 in protest of the Reagan Administration's civil rights policies. A native of New York City, Mr. Shaw graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx before going on to Wesleyan University where he graduated with honors in 1976.

Michael Sussman has devoted his career to civil rights litigation after graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 1978. Mr. Sussman worked as a trial attorney in the education and housing section of the Department of Justice where he was responsible for several major school desegregation cases throughout the country. He served as the Assistant General Counsel at the National Office of the NAACP Legal & Educational Defense Fund for five years, where he functioned as the lead attorney in the landmark Yonkers case. In January 1986, he opened his own law firm dedicated to civil rights. Over the course of his career, Mr. Sussman has argued over 80 cases in federal appellate courts in addition to writing and lecturing widely on civil rights issues. Mr. Sussman formed the Center for Social Justice to train inexperienced lawyers and law students in civil rights litigation.

Excerpts from question and answer session with panelists

Don Fraser: Gary, you indicated that Minneapolis needs to be careful it doesn't follow in the footsteps of other districts that haven't turned out so well. It wasn't clear from what you said, though, what exactly you think we should be doing.

Gary Orfield: It's clear that Minneapolis and St. Paul, and soon some of the inner suburbs, are going to be facing fairly rapid racial and economic transition in their schools; they're already in the midst of it. There should be a variety of efforts to stop that and to reverse it, and to change the focus of the policy solutions from the city to a broader geographic area, and broader part of the social structure of the metropolitan area. That could include things like stabilizing integrated neighborhoods in the city, and helping them redevelop and reinvest. That could include housing policies for choices, housing location policies, and metropolitan transfer policies, like the ones that stabilized the St. Louis school enrollment inside the central city. It could certainly include a much broader school desegregation policy, if it were possible to obtain it.

The best school desegregation policy is one that encompasses the housing market. Those are by far the most stable and successful in almost every respect. It's clear that not only are things going in the wrong direction, and the direction that doesn't work, but that they will continue to go that way. This is really a question about the future viability of the city. Some communities have recognized this and taken pretty drastic action. For example, Chattanooga, just last November, voted to merge with its suburban school system. Durham, North Carolina did that within the last year. Raleigh, North Carolina, a very healthy area, did that back in the 1970's. Charlotte did it before that. A lot of the most healthy communities in the country in terms of education and investment have made really big structural changes. If you can get something like that, that's the best. If you can't get it, you have to move all the levers you can. Of course that doesn't say you don't move on educational improvement, community services, and housing redevelopment at the same time.

The important thing is that the community has to recognize that it has to be done, that lots of different policies have to be coordinated on this as a priority, at least for this time; and that you don't really have the luxury of thinking it will work out if you don't do those things.

John Hillson: One of the cities that wasn't up on the list of all the segregated cities in the North was Boston. Its desegregation order was the most comprehensive in the country. It included a huge component of affirmative action hiring, and a dual seniority list, so that if there were layoffs, they would be proportional. It also included a big new component--bilingual education.

Judge Garrity in Boston was a Nixon appointee. He wrote that decision because of the organized insistence of the black community and its supporters. What we have to do in the Twin Cities, if there's going to be any measure of justice, is to organize from the grassroots up. There has to be explanation of why desegregation is in the interest of everybody, not as some moral duty, but as an imperative to make us better functioning human beings, who are not divided by racism.

Because of the Boston desegregation order, different communities that had been walled off from each other, saw each other. Today in South Boston High School, a black, Latino, Asian, and white high school, with a multilingual, multicultural student newspaper, and changing body presidents every year, the kids know what the world looks like, not just what Southie looks like. That's the big gain, and I think we have to learn to explain that, and not just hope that a beneficent judge gives us part of an order.

Michael Sussman: We have acted throughout the assault by Gingrich et. al. as if the programmatic advances that have been made, and the data that Orfield put on the board from desegregated schools didn't exist. I get calls from Jacksonville from the newspaper every day. "Tell me one place this has worked. Tell me one place achievement scores have increased." I tell them, because I know the places, the literature. It's a total mystery to them. They can't believe it. They think I'm making it all up, or that he's making it all up. The message has clearly not gone out that there has been any payoff whatsoever.

Gary Orfield: Boston had the most explosive desegregation situation in the country. It had the largest loss of white students right after desegregation occurred, it had the most irresponsible, racially polarized political leadership. Boston had a discussion about going back to neighborhood schools about a year and a half ago, and it turned out, that only one quarter of the parents preferred their neighborhood school as their top choice. The structure of choices has changed radically as the experience of integration has developed.

Boston has been busing, on a voluntary basis, three to four thousand children out from the city for thirty years now in a program called METCO, which has had very few problems. There's a huge demand for it, and many suburban communities are participating. It can't meet nearly the demand, because the state won't fund it, and in fact the state is talking about cutting it out of this year's budget.

Audience: A few years ago, the Star Tribune did a survey of the schools in Minneapolis, showing that children of color were disproportionately placed in special ed., and disproportionately suspended. Now that children of color are a majority in the Minneapolis public school system, if this trend continues, can you imagine what's going to happen to the crime rate, unless we deal with this unfair treatment? Children can learn, but they're treated unfairly now.

Gary Orfield: That's absolutely right. It's a terribly important problem, and does need to be addressed. It also needs the kind of coordinated services outside the schools, as well as inside the schools, that the Mayor was talking about.

Yusef Mgeni: In Minneapolis, 25 percent of black males in the public school system are in special education programs, to confirm your point.

Nancy Denton: Your point raises two issues that have been coming up over and over again today: that is, how interconnected all of these things are. We can't just worry about desegregating the schools, if we don't worry about jobs and neighborhoods and communities at the same time. Secondly, the point is not whether these children can learn, the point is, do they feel any sense of hope, that by studying hard they will get somewhere in society?

Rev. Bill Smith: I want to thank the national experts for coming here and being really honest about what is going on here. There's another point I want to make, and that is that most of us are guilty of participating in a design that has robbed low-income people from being organized and self-directed, because they should be a part of this discussion, and they should also be a part of the answers out in the broader community, much as they were through parts of the sixties, when they were organized through OEO programs.

One question there's not enough talk about, is redlining. The second is the party line. The Republicans represent white supremacy, but the DFL doesn't seem to represent a dream of what we're committed to. Being here at the Humphrey Institute reminds me of the fact that Senator Humphrey put civil rights at the top of the agenda.

Michael Sussman: Redlining is just another way of understanding the problem with segregated schools over time. Public resources don't flow where you have that situation obtaining. Likewise, in the banking system, the imperative is to avoid those neighborhoods where risks are perceived to be high. Without super governmental regulation and monitoring, dollars don't flow. What's different, is that there are federal statutes which allegedly are in place to prevent redlining, to require community reinvestment, to require reporting of community reinvestment, to monitor that and to rate banks based on their performance. It's probably one of the two or three most under-enforced statutes in the United States. Community-level pressure generated and imposed on those local banking institutions could force them to comply, but it's another issue that sees silence pervade.

The point you make about the democratic party is entirely true. The democratic party has too few people of any color or gender who are out in front, arguing for a different agenda, whether its on welfare, crime fighting, housing dollars, education, or anything else.

Theodore Shaw: The Justice Department has been doing redlining cases under Deval Patrick's leadership, in the Civil Rights Division. They were involved in a case in which we, the Legal Defense Fund, were also involved, and the ACLU. We just settled a huge insurance redlining case in Milwaukee, with significant relief. We have another case that we're litigating now down in Alabama. It's an important area that does need more attention.

Politically, the whole country is polarized so badly when it comes to the issue of race, that we're in a worse position than I can remember.

Gary Orfield: When I worked at the Brookings Institution, during Senator Humphrey's last years, I would often get calls from his office late in the day or at night saying, "Senator Humphrey is concerned that President Nixon is trying to divide the country over the issue of school desegregation. Send over some information, the Senator wants to make a speech in the morning." And, in the morning, the Senator would make a very powerful speech. If you read the Haldeman diaries that came out last year, you can see that Nixon was constantly telling everybody on his staff to intentionally stir up racial fears on the issue of busing, and to press it as hard as they could. Senator Humphrey was exactly right. That kind of vision has been lost in our politics, and the courage that was behind it: daring to hope for the possibility of a successful interracial society, with fairness for everyone. It's the only vision that can possibly make our society work.

Summary

Housing segregation has been a persistent phenomenon of American life. The federal government's financing of the move of white Americans to the suburbs, and its redlining of neighborhoods, requiring racial homogeneity, laid the foundation of our current housing patterns. Today, exclusionary zoning in the suburbs, concentration of public housing in low-income, central city areas, and the increasing location of better jobs and schools in the suburbs, perpetuate this pattern of segregation. Segregated housing patterns have too often been ignored, and are even used to excuse the segregation in our schools. Our current pattern of segregated housing, a function of public and private policies and practices, limits the choices of racial minorities.

Racially segregated schools segregate by poverty as well, because of the high correlation between urban students of color and poverty. Students whose families are living in poverty are often at a disadvantage in school. Where these students are concentrated and segregated, the odds against them can be overwhelming, both for them and for their schools. As a society, we value education. We support public education. We have failed, however, to provide education adequately for all children.

Integrated schools offer better facilities, networking, and expectations, which increase the likelihood of a student's attending and completing college, and having successful, rewarding employment experiences. For low-income students of color, segregation is deprivation of opportunity. Integration is access to it. Integration should not be confused with assimilation. Integration is not about becoming each other: it is about respecting each other.

Educational opportunity itself has to be seen, not as a competition for scarce resources, but as the foundation of our democracy; as a way of sharing who we are, what we know, and where we are going. This is increasingly important, as our society becomes more and more polarized, racially and economically. In order for the society to succeed, we need to be aware of our differences as we build on our similarities. We must work together to solve our common problems. This work must be done with attention to race and poverty issues. Race has been one of the primary ways resources have been allocated in our society. This continuing injustice cannot be addressed through a colorblind approach. "Colorblind" too often means, "see no evil;" but the problems stemming from racism will only be perpetuated by refusal to see how race works in our society.

Metropolitan-wide school districts, which incorporate city and suburban schools into one pool of resources and students, are an effective means of avoiding the segregation of large city schools that results from the white and middle class shift to the suburbs. Fair share housing can help provide access to good jobs and schools for low-income people of color, while helping to decrease the dramatically negative effects of the concentration of poverty.

Mobility strategies, such as the Gautreaux remedy in Chicago, offer examples of the critical role played by access to opportunity in solving social problems. Too often these problems are portrayed as insoluble, and blamed on the very people suffering most from discrimination and poor policy choices. Gautreaux demonstrates the encouraging reality: when moved from segregated public housing to suburban housing and schools, randomly chosen, low-income, single-parent family, African-American students' achievement was significantly enhanced across virtually every indicator. Their parents' employment rates increased, and their own rates of employment and completion of college were overwhelmingly better than those of their segregated urban peers.

The lesson of Brown v. Board of Education, that separate is not equal, is as true today as it was forty years ago. While Brown focused on racial segregation, we are increasingly seeing racial and socio-economic segregation and isolation. Policies that contribute to the concentration of poverty, the segregation of communities by race, and the diminished hope that results from lack of choice and opportunity, must be replaced with a renewed commitment to equality and fairness in our society as a whole. The issues of school and housing segregation need to be linked and addressed on a national level; confidently, with a recognition of the solid successes of desegregation, and urgently, with the recognition that we have already deferred the dream too long. t

In Pursuit of a Dream Deferred: Linking Housing and Education was hosted by the Institute on Race and Poverty, in conjunction with the Minnesota State Board of Education and the University of St. Thomas. The forum took place at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs on April 22, 1995. This report was edited from transcripts of the proceedings, and produced by the Institute on Race and Poverty.

Support for the Institute on Race and Poverty and for this forum has been provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Otto Bremer Foundation, the Northwest Area Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the C.S. Mott Foundation.

In Pursuit of a Dream Deferred: Linking Housing and Education, a symposium including the forum speakers, was published in the April 1996 issue of the Minnesota Law Review. Copies may be obtained at a charge of $9.00 from:Minnesota Law Review/University of Minnesota Law School/229 19th Avenue South/Minneapolis MN 55455/(612) 625-9330