The Transition by Daniel Kiel

Author:Daniel Kiel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

PUTTING THE GENIE BACK IN THE BOTTLE

In Kansas City, Missouri, residents would have readily related to Justice Marshall’s admonition in Milliken about administrative “fences to separate the races.” Troost Avenue was just such a fence. A boulevard stretching south from the city’s central business district, Troost served as the de facto barrier between Black and white students in Kansas City. Echoing Marshall’s language, the road became known locally as the Troost Wall.1

Troost was one of a variety of walls dividing metropolitan Kansas City. In addition to the avenue within the city limits, the metropolitan area—like Detroit—had many growing suburban municipalities as well as the state border between Kansas and Missouri. Discriminatory housing practices and school assignment policies organized around each of these fences ensured the perpetuation of racially identifiable neighborhoods and schools. In the two decades after Brown, over a dozen elementary schools east of Troost transitioned from entirely serving white students to serving a student population that was more than 90 percent Black; meanwhile, in a school district that had become nearly two-thirds African American, all but one of the elementary schools west of Troost served student populations that were less than one-quarter Black. As in Detroit, the increasing racial identifiability of the entire district—the schools had been 16 percent African American in 1954—reflected a racialized sorting within the broader metropolitan area.2

After being pushed by a growing coalition of African Americans within the city, the Kansas City Missouri School District (KCMSD) sued just about every governmental entity it could in May 1977 to seek assistance in breaking up the district’s increasing segregation. Among the defendants were the federal government, the states of Kansas and Missouri, and eighteen suburban school districts in both states. The case, Missouri v. Jenkins, would reach the Supreme Court on multiple occasions, including on either side of the 1991 transition from Justice Marshall to Justice Thomas. When the case reached the Court in 1995, Justice Thomas authored a concurrence that articulated his deep skepticism of government interventions, a philosophy born, like the case itself, during Thomas’s time in Missouri in the 1970s. In so doing, Thomas, who was sitting for the Missouri bar in 1974 while Marshall was dissenting in Milliken, would help complete the work (begun by Nixon’s appointees in Milliken) of reining in the power of federal judges in desegregation cases.3

ACCEPTING CONSERVATISM

While Clarence Thomas was a law student at Yale, someone gave him a copy of the book Black Education: Myths and Tragedies by Thomas Sowell. Thomas “skimmed it angrily and threw it in the trash.”4 Like Thomas, Sowell was born into a rural southern family and had worked to earn admission into the most elite of American institutions. His family had left sharecropping in North Carolina when he was 8 as part of the Great Migration, and after a stint in the military, Sowell enrolled at Howard University before transferring to Harvard. From there, he went on to earn a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, studying with the conservative economist Milton Friedman.

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