BY JON HILLSON
MINNEAPOLIS - The Minneapolis NAACP renewed a long- standing effort to defend desegregated schools here, filing suit against the government of Minnesota for violating provisions of the state constitution guaranteeing equal protection under the law and the right to an adequate public education.
The September 19 suit names more than 20 top state officials, including Governor Arne Carlson, the attorney general, and the president of the state Board of Education. It was announced by Minneapolis NAACP chapter president Bill Davis at a news conference on the steps of the Minnesota Judicial Center. The story drew front-page banner headlines in the Twin Cities's main daily newspapers.
Davis explained, "Students in the Minneapolis public schools are receiving an education that is both inadequate as a matter of law because it is segregated and therefore unequal, and inadequate as a matter of fact because it is substandard by any reasonably objective measure."
"We are creating an American apartheid right here in Minneapolis," NAACP chairman Matthew Little added.
A spokesman for the governor termed the suit "counterproductive," and stated the government would "vigorously defend" its record.
The NAACP legal action in Hennepin County District Court was joined by seven pubic school students, four Black and three white, from pre-school to junior high school levels.
Two days later, the St. Paul NAACP announced it may sue that city's school system in response to a discriminatory pattern of low test scores, high drop-out rates, and disciplinary action against Black students.
Davis told the Minneapolis news conference that the main elements of a favorable court decision would include a desegregation remedy involving school districts in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The Minneapolis school system is currently 62 percent Black, Latino, Asian, and American Indian, while the suburban schools are overwhelmingly white.
The NAACP also stressed continued use of busing, plans for improved student achievement, and increased access to integrated housing throughout the area.
Government pushes school vouchers
These goals come in the midst of mounting bipartisan
efforts to abort the current Minneapolis desegregation plan,
and a full-court press by Governor Carlson to win approval
for a "school voucher" plan that would devastate the public
schools.
Such attacks cap a more than two-decade tug-of-war between partisans and foes of equal education in the public schools here.
In 1972, the NAACP sued the city of Minneapolis for segregating the public schools. Under pressure from recent civil rights victories nationally, Federal District Court Judge Earl Larson mandated school desegregation.
In 1973, the State Board of Education adopted a plan for Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth, Minnesota's three largest cities. Larson considered the case closed in 1983. But by 1989, the board began reconsidering its proposal.
In June of this year, in an effort spearheaded by Minneapolis mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, a liberal Democrat, the Minneapolis Board of Education voted to gut the 22-year- old desegregation plan in favor of "community schools" - the mayor's cosmetic term for the segregationist code of "neighborhood schools."
The new plan, set to take effect in 1997, eliminates all busing except for students who choose "magnet" schools. Given the pattern of segregated neighborhoods, public education would inevitably revert to a dual school system, one predominantly white and another predominantly Black, Latino, Asian, and Indian.
The historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court held that such systems were "inherently unequal" because of racial discrimination.
"There are going to be people who think we're trying to undermine decisions of the past," stated Sayles Belton, who is Black. "but we've got to take risks."
While willing to take the "risk" of ensuring segregated schools for Black and other minority students by ending the already inadequate plan currently in force, the mayor and her backers have yet to explain how affordable, integrated housing in predominantly white neighborhoods for tens of thousands of Black, Latino, Asian, and Indian families will be built to sustain nonexistent, desegregated "community schools."
The State Board of Education has yet to rule on the Minneapolis decision. But recent inaction by the board on formal reports of growing numbers of schools out of compliance with its own desegregation guidelines - schools that have become increasingly resegregated - indicate its likely course.
At the same time, led by Governor Carlson, the big- business media continues a public relations campaign for "school vouchers."
This scheme would offer parents public moneys to choose private or religious schools for their children, in the name of "choice," violating the constitutional separation of church and state.
The aim of the voucher gimmick is to slash funding for the public schools, leaving them underutilized, understaffed, and in disrepair. The schools would become prisons for remaining students whose working-class parents, despite "stipends," would be unable to afford the rising cost of increasingly privatized education.
A new poll here, announced in the wake of the NAACP suit, found that 75 percent of respondents favored "neighborhood" schools, and 57 percent backed the "voucher" system.
By demanding the government live up to the letter and spirit of the law, the NAACP's Davis said, "We are swimming against the tide."
Earlier this year, the Connecticut Supreme Court upheld the legality of the massively segregated Hartford public school system, in an NAACP lawsuit filed along similar lines as the newly launched legal challenge here.
In July, the state of Missouri and the Kansas City school board ended court-ordered state funding for busing, despite proof that the result would be resegregated schools.
In Boston, opponents of an affirmative action plan at the prestigious Boston Latin public high school launched a campaign in August to overturn an admissions policy that grew directly out of the 1974-76 desegregation battle.
Most recently, on September 12, Federal District Judge Richard Matsch ruled in favor of a decision by elected officials in Denver to end busing to achieve desegregation and return to a "neighborhood school" system.
"Having neighborhood schools back helps us to rebuild the neighborhoods," stated Denver's Democratic mayor Wellington Webb, who is Black.
"Black neighborhoods were also shattered by busing," asserted Donna Good, Webb's educational assistant.
"We want to see integrated neighborhoods before [neighborhood schools] occur," Davis of the Minneapolis NAACP said in response to Twin Cities proponents of an end to desegregation.
`Neighborhood schools'
"If their neighborhood schools were inadequate," Davis
stated, "they would be the first ones to say `I would like
my child to be taken wherever necessary to get a good
education."
In the recent Minneapolis school board primary election, Socialist Workers candidate Michael Pennock, a chemical worker at 3M in suburban Cottage Grove and a member of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 6-418, stood out among 23 candidates as the only one who defended desegregation and opposed voucher-based attacks on the public schools.
"I grew up in the `old South,' and I heard the rhetoric of `neighborhood schools,' " Pennock said at several meetings and candidates debates. "They were advocated by segregationist bigots like [Alabama governor] George Wallace and [Georgia governor] Lester Maddox. Now we may have a mayor who is Black, but the result will be the same - segregated schools and working people divided by the bosses' government.
"There needs to be a fight," Pennock stressed, "to explain why equality in education is in the interests of all working people. The same forces who want to `voucher' public education to death start by attacking desegregation. And working people won't be able to stop the Democrats and Republicans from privatizing public education unless we unite to defend desegregation."
Pennock told the Militant he "fully supports the Minneapolis NAACP's suit against the government of Minnesota."
Jon Hillson is a member of United Steelworkers of America Local 9198 in Roseville, Minnesota.