On June 7, a panel of judges from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond, Virginia, heard arguments in the appeal by Black parents and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board of a September 1999 federal judge's order to end school desegregation efforts. More than 100 people turned out for the hearing, including 25 who took the five-hour ride overnight on a bus organized by the Charlotte NAACP.

"I think a lot of people thought this was only about busing. It's far from that," said Terry Belk, one of the Black parents challenging Judge Robert Potter's ruling, which bans consideration of race in school assignments. "We need to have the court [desegregation] order to stay in place so we can have some assurance of a quality education for all our kids."

The case is of national importance. In recent years school desegregation programs have been ended by court order in many cities, including Nashville, Tennessee; Wilmington, Delaware; Denver; and Cleveland. Last year the superintendent of the Boston public schools pointed to such rulings to justify dismantling the remnants of school desegregation efforts in that city.  
 
Long fight against racist segregation
Schools throughout North Carolina were legally segregated--with grossly inferior conditions in the Black schools--from the defeat of Radical Reconstruction in the early 1880s until 1954. In that year, under the pressure of rising anticolonial movements around the world and the smoldering fight for Black rights in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that supposedly "separate but equal" school systems were unconstitutional.

Officials in Charlotte and surrounding Mecklenburg County barely made token steps toward desegregation. Of 63 requests by Black students to transfer to all-white schools in 1957 and 1958, only seven were approved.

In 1965 Black residents Vera and Darius Swann sued the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, and four years later won a court order that the district be desegregated through mandatory busing. The Supreme Court upheld this decision in Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971, in a landmark ruling that gave a boost to the fight to desegregate schools throughout the country.

Between 1970 and 1992, desegregation was carried out through crosstown busing and "paired schools," with children from predominantly Black neighborhoods assigned to schools in white neighborhoods for half of elementary school, and white students attending schools that had been overwhelmingly Black for the other half. Nearly 40 percent of the more than 100,000 students in the school system today are Black.  
 
Disparity grows in 1990s
Since the early 1990s, however, the schools here have become more segregated. In 1992 the school board dropped the system of paired schools, and instead launched a handful of "magnet schools" with special programs such as languages and advanced courses that students throughout the county can apply to. A lottery system that included race has kept the proportion of Black and white students steady in the magnet schools, but racial disparities have grown in dozens of regular schools throughout the district.

Today a quarter of the students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg attend "racially identifiable schools." And the conditions in these schools are far from equal.

"The school system didn't follow through," said Donald Reid, a member of the Steelworkers union who supports the fight for desegregation. "They said schools would be built where they would have a mixture of kids, and unfortunately that hasn't happened."

Over the last decades new schools with modern equipment have been built in the outer reaches of the Mecklenburg County suburbs, in defiance of court instructions to locate new schools where they will facilitate desegregation.

Meanwhile schools in the more working-class areas of central Charlotte, where many Black residents live, are crumbling. According to school officials, 19 of the 23 schools where students are predominantly Black are in need of serious renovation or replacement.

With the end of the paired schools, patterns of busing have changed as well. About 13,000 of the 16,000 students who are now bused a substantial distance are Black.

In 1997, Bill Capacchione sued the school system, charging that his daughter was denied entry into a magnet school because she is not Black. Six other white parents joined the suit, challenging the entire desegregation effort. Last September District Judge Potter issued a sweeping order barring the school district from using race as a criteria in school assignments. As a young attorney, Potter had filed a brief in the original Swann case opposing desegregation.

The plaintiffs from the Swann case, joined by other Black parents, appealed Potter's ruling. A majority of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board also decided to appeal, arguing that the school system had not fulfilled the earlier mandate to completely desegregate the schools.

At the same time, the board began debating a school assignment plan without desegregation measures for the 2001-02 school year, in the event Potter's ruling stands. After several months of wrangling, the board adopted a plan June 1, by a 6-3 vote, based on a combination of neighborhood "home schools," "choice zones" in which students can request a different school, and district-wide magnet schools. This assignment plan was opposed by three members of the board who have opposed the desegregation program. They objected to moving some of the more rigorous academic magnets from suburban schools closer to the inner city.

During the debate over the plan, mayors of towns in Mecklenburg County threatened to pull out of the unified school district.

Lawyers for the Black parents and the school board said they seemed to get a better hearing from the appeals panel than in Potter's courtroom. The appeals court is expected to take months to decide whether to uphold, overturn, or modify Potter's ruling. Any decision will almost certainly be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lauren Hart is a textile worker.  
 
 
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