Are school desegregation proponents more likely to succeed in local
political arenas in the South than in federal courtrooms? To raise that
question on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of
Education may seem absurd. Had local politics in the South been
receptive to desegregation efforts, there would presumably have been
scant need for the litigation leading to that landmark case. However,
the legal environment, national political climate, and political
situation in southern school districts have changed considerably in
fifty years—in ways that make the question relevant. Today, we
suggest, the answer may frequently be yes.
The pursuit of desegregation in federal venues—despite
education's being primarily a local responsibility—was a
classic example of broadening the scope of conflict through venue
shifting.1
In the civil
rights era, the strategy achieved important successes in the South.
However, federal court rulings were often the linchpin of desegregation
efforts, which reflected a tension between liberalism's pursuit of
rights and democracy's concern for popular sovereignty.
2 Using two case studies, we argue that local venues are more receptive
to desegregation efforts than they were a generation ago. Our argument
hinges on two assertions about the consequences of federalism for the
politics of school desegregation: first, that multiple venues created
by the U.S. constitutional system are no longer tightly linked (venue
coupling); and second, that local political arenas now provide
disadvantaged groups, in this case African Americans, with better
opportunities to redress grievances than they did 50 years ago (venue
receptivity). We consider these claims with respect to the scholarly
understanding of single-member districts, descriptive and substantive
representation, political incorporation, urban regime theory, and the
Madisonian perspective on the advantages of large jurisdictions.
Venue Coupling and School Desegregation
As Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones note, a punctuated
equilibrium model illuminates many aspects of policy change.3
They argue that when policy venues are relatively
tightly coupled and feedback is positive among them, more rapid and
larger-scale policy change is possible than when the coupling is loose
and negative feedback predominates.
4 Generally, Baumgartner and Jones (1993) point out, politics is “governed by
laws characterized by negative feedback” in which “a system
moves away from its equilibrium for a time, but then returns to the
status quo ante.” Occasionally, however, “small inputs can
cascade into major effects as they work their ways through a complex
system.” This cascade represents positive feedback and makes for
“quick and dramatic change” (p. 16).
Widespread,
rapid desegregation of southern schools after a decade of successful
post-
Brown resistance illustrates this point. By the
mid-1960s, all three branches of the federal government were on the
same school desegregation page. The 1964 Civil Rights Act facilitated
the development and enforcement of tough desegregation guidelines by
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. These guidelines
contributed to the Supreme Court's reasoning in
Green v.
County School Board and
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board
of Education. In addition to the positive feedback in federal
venues, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary
Education Act together tightened the relationship between federal and
local venues by giving the federal government the carrot of increased
aid to local schools and the stick of withholding such aid, which
school districts were increasingly coming to rely on, if desegregation
did not proceed satisfactorily.
Currently there is little support for school desegregation at the
federal level, and many recent court decisions have gone against
desegregation proponents. There is also, however, less positive
feedback for resegregation efforts among the three branches today than
there was positive feedback for desegregation efforts in the civil
rights era. More important, on desegregation-related issues, the
coupling between federal and local levels has loosened. In the civil
rights era, the federal government promoted desegregation, and
recalcitrant southern districts could lose federal aid. Today the
federal government may be hostile to desegregation efforts, but a
district undertaking such efforts runs little risk of losing federal
aid.
Venue Receptivity and School Desegregation
Our second assertion brings together two
perspectives—associated with the work of Clarence Stone and Paul
Peterson, respectively—that are frequently considered
diametrically opposed.5
Like Stone, we study variations in local
political arrangements that affect a locality's congeniality to
the needs of the disadvantaged, in this case blacks' demands for
school desegregation.
6 However, as
Peterson's claims about federalism suggest, it is primarily because of
national-level developments rooted in the civil rights era that local
venues in our case studies are more responsive now to desegregation
efforts than they were a generation ago.
Civil rights era initiatives provoked a backlash that severely
weakened the national-level political coalition that facilitated those
initiatives. One result of that backlash was the election of Republican
presidents whose appointments made federal courts increasingly hostile
to desegregation. This judicial hostility is, of course, one reason
that local venues are now at least relatively more congenial to
desegregation efforts than they were a generation ago. Independent of
judicial hostility, our case studies call attention to how civil rights
era initiatives, especially the Voting Rights Act, eventually
transformed two school districts' politics by facilitating the
registration of African Americans and their representation on elected
bodies. Thus while the national environment has changed since the
1960s, the politics of these districts continue to bear the stamp of
civil rights era initiatives in ways that facilitate desegregation.
A Brief Tale of Two Districts
Litigation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) led to the 1971
Supreme Court Swann ruling, which allowed intradistrict
mandatory busing for desegregation. The school district's
desegregation experience was among the nation's most
successful.7
For a fuller discussion of
CMS, see Smith 2004. In 1998–99, CMS
enrolled approximately 100,000 students, 42 percent of whom were black
and 51 percent non-Hispanic whites.
However, CMS'
desegregation policies eventually provoked a legal challenge, the
reopening of
Swann, and a 1999 trial before U.S. District
Court Judge Robert Potter, a Reagan appointee active in the 1960s
antibusing movement. At the trial, CMS defended its desegregation
efforts, and it appealed Potter's adverse ruling. During the
two-year appeal process, and despite the affirmation of the most
important part of Potter's decision, a 5–4 majority of the
school board fought a determined uphill battle to develop a pupil
assignment plan that would facilitate racial balance without violating
court orders. The board majority waged this fight against the wishes of
the superintendent, the business elite, and many angry citizens.
Despite the school system's electorate being 75 percent white, the
five-person majority survived high-profile challenges in the two
elections (1999 and 2001) following the trial.
As a narrow board majority attempted to salvage CMS'
desegregation commitment, a comfortable, 5–2, majority in a
Charlotte suburb—Rock Hill, South Carolina—expanded that
district's similar, albeit less famous, commitment.8
For additional information on RHSD and Rock
Hill, see Smith, Kedrowski, and Ellis 2002,
and Wheeland 2004. In 2001–2, RHSD
enrolled approximately 15,000 students, 35 percent of whom were black
and 60 percent of whom were non-Hispanic white.
In 2001 the
Rock Hill School District (RHSD) revamped the elementary school
assignment plan to enhance racial and socioeconomic balance at two
schools whose percentages of black and low-income children exceeded
district guidelines. The reassignment triggered the formation of an
opposition group, Neighborhoods United, bitter pupil assignment
hearings, and a lawsuit against the board. A settlement allowed
reassignment to proceed, but limited RHSD's future ability to
pursue racial balance. While the settlement was a partial victory for
the board's majority, the election following adoption of the
assignment plan was a total victory, even though RHSD's electorate
is 77 percent white. Two of the reassignment plan's prominent
white supporters were reelected. The third seat on the ballot was held
by an opponent of the plan. When he decided against running (for
personal reasons), the open seat was won by the field's most
racially liberal candidate, a white who distanced himself from
Neighborhoods United and defeated one of its members.
None of these elections in RHSD and CMS was a referendum on
desegregation. Nonetheless, in both districts, it was desegregation
opponents who moved the conflict from the local arena to the federal
judiciary. And in both districts, the workings of local electoral
politics proved more receptive to desegregation than did the federal
judiciary. Little in the conventional wisdom about school desegregation
politics anticipates this greater local receptivity.
Desgregation politics
The workings of electoral politics proved congenial to desegregation
proponents for several reasons. The first is loosely coupled venues and
incremental change with relatively low stakes. As our first claim about
the consequences of federalism indicates, the tight coupling of venues
and positive feedback among them in the civil rights era facilitated
desegregation in the South; now loose coupling facilitates it.
Furthermore, sweeping change was not on the agenda in our case studies.
On the one hand, the great changes in attitudes about race relations
that have occurred since the 1960s preclude public discussion of a
return to state-mandated segregation even though pupil assignment can
be contentious. On the other hand, although loose coupling facilitated
the desegregation efforts of both boards' majorities, it also
precluded, given local political opposition, those efforts being
large-scale. Thus CMS' black board members made no attempt to
reverse a 15-year drift toward resegregation. Rather, they sought only
to minimize the greater resegregation augured by Potter's order.
In RHSD the stakes were also small. Prior to reassignment, only two of
fourteen elementary schools were racially imbalanced, and the two
schools' total enrollment was less than 4 percent of RHSD's
total.
Increased black voter registration
Consistent with our second claim about federalism's
consequences, local politics reflects the increase in black
registration triggered by the civil rights era. The long-term effects
of this increase are illustrated by a comparison between CMS' 1999
and 1970 board elections. Both took place following pivotal trials. The
1999 election occurred shortly after Potter ordered CMS to abandon
desegregation; the 1970 election, after the 1969 trial mandating
desegregation. In both elections, black incumbents running at large
faced challenges from white advocates of neighborhood schools. In 1970,
blacks comprised approximately 24 percent of the population but only 14
percent of registered voters, and the white challengers were
successful. In 1999, blacks comprised 27 percent of the population and
24 percent of the electorate, and the white challengers were defeated.
Increased black registration helps to explain the different
outcomes.9
Had blacks constituted 24
percent of the electorate in 1970, we estimate (based on newspaper
accounts and analyses of homogenous precincts) that at least 3,300 more
blacks would have voted. Had only 75 percent voted for the black
incumbent, he would have won. Conversely, had blacks constituted only
14 percent of the electorate in 1999, we estimate that approximately
10,000 fewer blacks would have voted. That difference would likely have
led to the victory of one of the white challengers since he lost by
2,125 votes.
It is difficult to discuss changes in the electorate in RHSD as
precisely as in CMS because the former's boundaries have changed,
and some precincts cross RHSD boundary lines. Suffice it to say that
RHSD resembles South Carolina in that black registration soared
following passage of the Voting Rights Act.
The importance of electoral structures
In addition to increasing black registration, civil rights era
initiatives, especially the Voting Rights Act and its amendments, have
affected school desegregation politics by facilitating racial
redistricting to increase black representation on school boards.
Although the literature on racial redistricting is large, contested,
and evolving rapidly, considerable evidence links district (as opposed
to at-large) representation on school boards to increased descriptive
representation for blacks. Fewer attempts have been made to link
district representation to increased substantive representation;
studies that do so generally focus on the hiring of black school system
personnel and some measures of racially identifiable tracking.10
Our case studies are consistent with the claim that district
elections to school boards facilitate increases in black descriptive
representation. Our work also indicates how this increased descriptive
representation translated into increased substantive representation by
facilitating desegregation efforts. Because the relationship between
single-member districts, increased black descriptive representation,
and desegregation has received virtually no scholarly attention, we
provide additional data on this topic.
Rock Hill School District.
Under Justice Department pressure, in 2000 the electoral structure
changed from seven members elected at large to two elected at large and
five elected from single-member districts, two of which were
majority-minority. Consequently, in the November 2000 election, the
previously all-white board acquired three new members. Two of the new
members were black, and all three were from single-member districts
located on Rock Hill's south side, which is generally less
affluent than the north side and has historically had less
representation on the board.
The policy consequences are illustrated by Mildred Douglas, one of
the newly elected black members. In 1996, during a previous
reassignment debate, she addressed the board, lamenting a projected
increase in racial imbalance.11
Because
of an incomplete reading of a newspaper article, Smith, Kedrowski, and Ellis 2002 inadvertently
misrepresented Douglas's views on the 1996 assignment. We have
subsequently reread that news story, reviewed board minutes, and
interviewed Ms. Douglas.
Her concern, shared by the NAACP,
went unheeded. In 2001, when the board again discussed reassignment,
Douglas was a member and made desegregation a high priority, as did
Elizabeth “Ann” Reid, the other African American. Since
several white board members also viewed racial balance as important, it
became the board's top priority for the new assignment plan.
One of the votes against reassignment came from the newly elected
white member, whose south-side district included many supporters of
Neighborhoods United. However, on another high-profile issue involving
desegregation—the location of a new high school—this white
member voted with the board's black members. That vote further
indicates how single-member districts affected policy. The three board
members from the south side wanted a site there; they secured a fourth
board member's support, and the school is under construction on
the southern site, despite the preferences of the superintendent, the
board's chair, and many affluent citizens who advocated a northern
site. Since RHSD plans to achieve racial and socioeconomic balance at
all high schools, the southern site will require generally shorter
transportation times for black and white working-class students than a
northern site would have. This is a significant departure from past
practice because when RHSD previously sought balance in pupil
assignment, it typically paid more attention to the preferences of
affluent white families for shorter transportation times than to the
similar wishes of other families.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
In CMS, the 1995 switch from exclusively at-large representation to a
system in which six board members are elected from single-member
districts and three are elected at large also affected the board's
racial composition and its policies. In the previous twenty years, CMS
typically had two black board members, but that number jumped to three
in 1995 and to four by the start of the 1999 trial. The 5–4
majority that prevailed on crucial desegregation issues consisted of
the four African Americans and a white liberal, Louise Woods, whose
electoral success can be attributed to single-member districts.
Unsuccessful running at large in 1990, Woods sought a district seat in
1995 and was the only winning candidate not supported by the daily
paper or business elite. However, a strong grassroots campaign
organization—easier to build in a district than
system-wide—overcame those disadvantages. In 2001, business elite
support for Woods's challenger helped him raise three times more
money than she did. But she won handily, with the same strong
grassroots organization and the benefit of six years of constituent
service.
Similar Situations Elsewhere?
Although CMS and RHSD are located in the same metropolitan area, they
embody a wider range of experience than their geographic proximity
might suggest. In addition to the organizational differences between a
suburban school district and a large urban system, Rock Hill and
Charlotte reflect the contrasting civil rights histories of their
states. North Carolina typifies southern moderation and a tempered
response to the civil rights movement. South Carolina, along with
Mississippi, had, as V. O. Key noted, a tradition of making “the
white-supremacy case most bitterly, most uncompromisingly,”12
and South Carolina responded to the civil rights movement
with violence. The 1961 Freedom Ride illustrates these differences. In
Charlotte, the most severe harassment was a single trespassing arrest,
and the case was dismissed the next day. However, as the freedom riders
entered South Carolina, they were, as Representative John Lewis
recalls, “in real trouble.” He was beaten, and Rock Hill
became the first place “blood was drawn on the Freedom
Ride.”
13 Ample opportunity exists across states and even within many states to
investigate the extent to which the relationships observed in our case
studies can be found in other school districts. For example, in South
Carolina alone, there is a wide variation in electoral arrangements
among the state's 85 school districts with approximately 45
percent electing members entirely from single-member districts, 28
percent entirely at large, and 18 percent from a combination of
at-large and single-member districts.14
Percentages do not add up to one hundred because some
districts use other selection methods (e.g., appointment). Data
obtained from South Carolina School Boards Association.
Desegregation levels also vary widely.
15 For example, of South Carolina's 73 districts with
more than one elementary school in the 2003–4 school year, the
index of dissimilarity at the elementary level for blacks and whites
ranged from 0.20 to 65, with a mean of 26 and a standard deviation of
15. (Computations by the authors from data provided by the South
Carolina State Department of Education. The index of dissimilarity is
frequently used to measure segregation. Its value ranges from 0
[full racial balance] to 100 [complete segregation]
and is an indication of the proportion of students who would have to
switch schools for the racial composition of all schools in a district
to be the same.)
The causal links we find among single-member districts, increased
black voting, increased black descriptive representation, and
desegregation are more likely to be found in other districts when, we
hypothesize, certain conditions are present. The first is that blacks
constitute less than 50 percent of student enrollment—a figure we
consider a good first approximation of a single demographic condition
conducive both to desegregation and to increasing black descriptive
representation by single-member districts.16
In North Carolina districts, Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor
(2003) find that desegregation tends to be
higher when nonwhites are less than 50 percent or greater than 70
percent of a district's enrollment. However, if black students
exceed 70 percent of a district's enrollment, it is more likely
that black adults will constitute a majority of the electorate. In such
situations, it is frequently hypothesized, single-member districts are
less likely to increase descriptive representation because blacks'
majority status allows them to win at-large elections.
This article equates black with nonwhite, an
oversimplification that is useful for developing hypotheses and less
troubling with reference to the Carolinas than it might be elsewhere
because the politics of color in most Carolina districts continue to
revolve largely around a black-white axis.
The second set of conditions involves black political activity,
especially mobilization and emphasis on desegregation by black leaders.
National survey data indicate differences between a new generation of
black elected officials and an older one that attended segregated
schools and lived through the civil rights era.17
All six
black board members in our two cases attended segregated southern
schools and strongly support traditional civil rights goals. Thus our
case studies and inferences from national data lead to the hypothesis
that the age of black board members affects the relationship between
descriptive representation and commitment to desegregation.
Black mobilization and support for desegregation are presumably the
sine qua non of single-member districts translating into successful
desegregation efforts. However, studies of political incorporation
indicate that when blacks constitute a numerical minority, their
ability to form coalitions with whites is also necessary for obtaining
“substantial influence over policy.”18
In both Rock Hill and Charlotte, the (overwhelmingly white)
business elite has sought, and often depended upon, black support to
secure the election of pro-growth municipal officials and the passage
of bonds for the development of infrastructure. The clout and
durability of what Carl Abbott calls a “biracial coalition around
economic growth”
19 have varied over the
years in both cities. In Charlotte, in the era of that coalition's
greatest political influence, business elite support for school
desegregation was highest. We hypothesize that the more important a
role such a coalition plays in local development politics, the more
successful pro-desegregation black school board officials are likely to
be in pursuing their agenda. This hypothesis stems from two tenets of
urban regime theory. First, support from the business elite is
important for activist governance. Second, governance is not an
issue-by-issue process; rather, preferences are shaped by available
opportunities, and “once formed, a relationship of cooperation
becomes something of value to be protected by all of the
participants.”
20 The importance of black-white coalitions also figures
prominently in discussion of policy implications, the most obvious of
which would be—if additional research yields findings similar to
ours—that desegregation proponents should mount legal and/or
political challenges to at-large electoral systems in racially
imbalanced school districts. There was both the necessity and
opportunity for legal challenges to at-large representation from the
mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. During those years, school desegregation
advocates suffered a series of devastating courtroom defeats, but 1982
amendments to the Voting Rights Act helped create a favorable legal
environment for challenges to at-large electoral systems.
However, a series of rulings since the mid-1990s have made federal
courts increasingly hostile to challenges to at-large representation.
Consequently, local political arenas may provide a promising
alternative to federal courtrooms for challenging at-large systems,
just as, we have suggested, they hold more promise for pursuing
desegregation. In RHSD, where African Americans sought and relied upon
Justice Department intervention under the Voting Rights Act to achieve
single-member districts, there was less need for white support than in
CMS where, in the absence of Justice Department involvement, alliances
with whites were crucial. Especially important was the support of a
Republican state legislator from an outlying, predominantly white area,
where residents felt ill-served by a school board whose white members
all resided in neighborhoods closer to downtown.
Additional research is needed to ascertain the conditions under which
black-white alliances to achieve single-member districts in other
school systems can have the positive effect on black substantive
representation that they had in CMS. Such research might also
illuminate the related question of the conditions that—once
single-member districts are adopted—could allow blacks on school
boards to form winning alliances on one issue with whites who represent
white working-class constituencies and on another with whites whose
constituencies are middle and upper class (as happened in RHSD with the
votes on the new high school and pupil assignment). Of special interest
is the question of whether these conditions are different for school
boards than they are for other elected bodies and, if so, why?
Are We All Madisonians Now?
Noting how opposing sides in the contentious literature on racial
redistricting have managed to find authority for their conflicting
positions in the writings of James Madison, David Canon has paraphrased
Richard Nixon's comment about Keynes: “[I]n the
area of voting rights and redistricting, apparently ‘we are all
Madisonians now.’”21
Whatever the conflicting
uses to which many of Madison's arguments may be put, there is
little ambiguity in the claim of Federalist No. 10 that larger, as
opposed to smaller, republics make it harder for a majority “to
invade the rights of other citizens.” For this claim, the
question of whether we are all Madisonians requires a nuanced answer
when it comes to school desegregation. Given that desegregation
proponents have historically had to pursue their goals in national
venues, much of school desegregation history jibes with Madison's
claim about the benefits of larger jurisdictions. However, variations
in time in addition to those in size and jurisdiction also must be
considered.
Tension between majority wishes and minority rights arises
frequently, including, as noted earlier, the era when desegregation
proponents pursued their goals in court because of the hostility of
white-dominated electoral venues. In our case studies, though, the
workings of electoral politics have led democracy's emphasis on
popular sovereignty to be consistent with liberalism's concern for
individual rights. That this consistency occurs in local politics is
not anticipated by either the conventional wisdom about school
desegregation or a perspective that focuses on spatial and
jurisdictional variations in venue receptivity without considering
temporal changes.
We doubt that many observers of 1960s school desegregation battles
would have anticipated that a generation later in southern districts
such as RHSD and CMS, desegregation opponents would move the conflict
to federal court and proponents would prevail in local elections. Thus
our observations illustrate Baumgartner and Jones's claim that
federalism “does not so much limit change as it makes such
changes less controllable by anyone. The numerous venues provided by
federalism make change far more unpredictable than in a unitary
system.”22
Such
unpredictability may not be exactly what Madison had in mind when he
touted the benefits of federalism and a large republic, but surely
there is something to be said for it.
