Beverly Logan lived through a race riot the first year Charlotte used busing for desegregation. Outside her high school classroom in a mobile trailer, Logan, then a junior, could hear the mob of students, white and black, screaming and fighting. The teacher's expression was pure horror. Logan frantically glanced around her classroom and saw that black and white students all looked equally terrified. Through a window, she watched the police try to restore calm. School closed that day. Students were brought back gradually, by grade level.

"When we came back, we held a love-in," recalls Logan, who is black. "We held hands, sang songs. Different students had positive messages (in speeches). That started the healing process." Thirty years later, Logan's daughter Victoria attends an integrated school in the same district. And Logan feels divided about the school desegregation lawsuit her community is now facing—the latest shot in a battle that has been fought off and on for more than 30 years, and that mirrors desegregation disputes across the nation.

For Martha Abernethy, a kindergarten teacher at a Charlotte public school, the case has stirred similar misgivings, though her early days of desegregation weren't nearly so frightening. Abernethy, who is white, was just entering middle school when Charlotte began using busing to integrate. Her bus ride lasted an hour each way—and she loved it. "It gave us time to socialize we didn't always have at school," she says.

She did notice, though, that private schools serving affluent whites were established around the time that busing for integration started—a trend that made her uncomfortable. She also observed the youngest black children typically had to ride farthest to school. A generation later, the black community still has to bear more of the burden of integration, she says. In the black neighborhood where Abernethy's school, Barringer Academic Center, is located, there are currently no neighborhood schools. All are magnets.

Abernethy's son Tommy, 12, and daughter Jessi, 11, have been educated at public magnet schools. Jessi graduated in June from Barringer, a school with two magnet programs, including a "learning immersion" track for kindergarten through second grade, and a program just for gifted students in grades 3 to 5.

Magnets And Equity
Today, magnet schools are the desegregation tool of choice in Charlotte, which uses a race-based lottery for magnet school assignments. That lottery—and whether the school system offers equal opportunities for everyone, without the need for race-based remedies—are at issue in the lawsuit.

Charlotte holds a special place in the troubled history of U.S. school desegregation efforts. The landmark 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, opened the way for busing nationwide. Ever since, Charlotte officials have been under court order to consider race when making student assignments.

In 1997, a white parent filed a lawsuit, arguing his daughter was denied entrance to a magnet school because she is not black. Six other parents joined the case a year later. They maintain that Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools (CMS) are fully desegregated, and that race inappropriately influences where students are assigned and schools are built.

The suing didn't end there. Several local African-American families filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of black children. They say the system has not fully desegregated and should not be released from the court order. The two lawsuits have since been combined.

The case, which has produced two contradictory legal decisions so far, is currently being heard by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. No matter the outcome, the losing side will likely appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Public Applauds Goal, Divided Over Method
Similar lawsuits are happening all over the country, many involving magnet school policies. So far the rulings have been inconsistent, with no clear consensus, according to Gary Orfield, Ph.D., director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation at Harvard University. But Charlotte's historic role gives it special prominence in the debate.

Many Charlotte residents, like Logan and Abernethy, have mixed emotions about the complex issues involved. In a March survey of 1,210 voters conducted by the independent Charlotte-Mecklenburg Education Foundation, 78% of respondents said it's very important to ensure equity of facilities and resources among schools. Only 17% said they thought Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is doing a very good job at this. But how would they improve matters? That's where opinions differed:

• Nearly two-thirds support ensuring that low-income and minority students are not concentrated in a few schools.
• At the same time, about 58% said they support neighborhood schools, even if they concentrate low-income and minority children in a few schools.
• Just 27% of respondents strongly support busing to achieve racial balance and economic balance. Responses showed a deep racial division. Only 15% of whites strongly support busing, while 62% of African-Americans do.

"There is some contradiction there, and therein lies the rub," says Foundation President Tom Bradbury. "No matter where the school board comes down on these questions, there will be a substantial portion of the community against them. People value, to the extent possible, avoiding concentrations of poor kids. They also value neighborhood schools. The school board is struggling to balance these things."

Beverly Logan exemplifies the challenges. Logan not only supports the public schools, she works for them as drop-out prevention coordinator. But her ten-year-old daughter does not attend her assigned school, which would require a long bus ride. Instead, she goes to a school close to her parents' jobs—a move made possible through a workplace transfer program. That allows Logan and her husband, Larry, to be involved in school activities more easily. If Victoria hadn't enrolled at this school, she would have attended two different elementary schools to date due to changing boundary lines.

It's just that kind of instability that motivated Karen Bentley to join the lawsuit against the system. Bentley, mother of an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, says her youngest child could likely endure two or even three re-assignments during her school career. "My main stake was to bring stability to an unstable system," says Bentley, who is white.

Bentley says that while she advocates neighborhood schools, she believes greater resources should be allocated to schools that need them—so a school with many children below grade-level would receive additional funding for smaller classrooms and other assistance. She doesn't believe, after all Charlotte has been through, the community would permit disproportionate resources for white schools.

That's an overly optimistic view, according to Terry Belk, one of the black parents on the opposing side of the lawsuit. "Neighborhood schools would be possible if they all had good resources long-term—which is not the case, and really never has been the case. There's no political will to ensure resources and quality teachers will stay at certain schools," he says. He also accuses some neighborhood advocates of insensitivity. "A lot of (them) have not suffered the way black, poor, and underprivileged kids have suffered because of injustices in the past. The only way to ensure these kids get a good education is to have desegregation."

While the court mulls over these arguments, CMS Superintendent Eric Smith is haggling with the school board over yet another new student-assignment plan. He favors dividing the city into "choice zones" and allowing parents to choose from their neighborhood school, other schools in their choice zone, or magnet schools. Carrying out a new plan for fall 2002 could cost the county as much as $17.6 million, including publicizing the plan and purchasing hundreds more mobile classrooms for over-enrolled schools.

Martha Abernethy worries the proposed choice plan will re-segregate students by income. "You can give us all the same amount of paper, the same textbooks, but the parental support and PTA money will never be equal," says Abernethy. At her school, "PTA money provides the extras of the classroom - cultural arts, extra reading books, computer software. If you took away all our PTA stuff, we'd look bad."

But she says the more familiar tools of integration—busing and magnet schools using race-based lotteries—also have drawbacks. Some parents can't volunteer at school, join their child for lunch, or fully participate in their children's education because they live and work far from school.

No matter how the lawsuit turns out, Charlotte will need strong leadership on its school board to reach a statesmanlike compromise, says Mike Elliott, a white parent of three who serves on a schools advisory committee. "If this were simple, it would be done already...The board needs to make compromises on both sides so we can get on with the business of educating kids."

Andrea Cooper writes for Newsweek, The New York Times, and other national magazines. Her honors include an Outstanding Article Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Home page image courtesy of The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room. Charlotte Observer Negative Collection.