The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama's Schools by Joseph Bagley

Author:Joseph Bagley [Bagley, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Science, Civil Rights, Social Science, Discrimination, History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780820354187
Google: jKR5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 39816256
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nixon and Alexander

During the spring of 1969, Frank Johnson’s administration of Lee v. Macon occupied as much as half of the judge’s time. Each system had its own problems and had to be dealt with individually, through both negotiations and additional proceedings. At the same time, the CRD and Fred Gray’s office were preparing motions that would actually broaden Lee v. Macon’s scope. Sol Seay filed a motion in February on behalf of the Alabama State Teachers Association, the black teachers’ organization that was in the process of a court-ordered merger with its white counterpart. Black teachers and administrators were supposed to be transferred to similar positions at other schools when black schools were ordered closed. Instead, school boards were still dismissing, demoting, or arbitrarily reassigning them.33

Black principals almost always became assistant principals at white schools, often with a reduced salary and sometimes with teaching duties. Black assistant principals became teachers. Black teachers were asked to teach vocational classes. Gray and Seay asked the court to order Ernest Stone to compile and submit a list of all black teachers and administrators who had been aff ected by the 1968 order. The court granted the motion and tasked the Plaintiffs’ attorneys with analyzing the information once Stone’s office had produced it. Seay took the responsibility of working directly with very reluctant, often obdurate school boards, trying to prevent future discrimination and bringing motions for further relief before Judge Johnson and the court.34

Two months after Gray and Seay filed to protect ASTA, the CRD filed a motion for further relief, seeking the desegregation of the state’s trade schools and junior colleges. The March 1967 statewide decree had called for this, but the state had done nothing to effect it. The State Board of Education operated twenty-seven trade schools (twenty-one white and six black) and fifteen junior colleges (thirteen white and two black). Each school had an attendance zone it served, and the white and black zones overlapped. There were also significant disparities in funding between the black and white institutions, and the white ones had much more diverse course offerings. The CRD asked the court to order the state to design and adopt a desegregation plan specific to these schools.35

The court was wary of proceeding in this area on the same basis as with elementary and secondary schools. Johnson himself had just served on a panel that had determined that Green v. New Kent did not apply to institutions of higher education. When the state had begun financing the four-year satellite of Auburn University in nearby Montgomery (AUM), Gray had filed suit to block the bond issue. Gray argued that the aim was to ensure that the city’s four-year institution for African Americans, Alabama State, remained all-black, and that AUM would remain at least mostly white. The court decided that opening new colleges involved “a wide range of educational policy decisions in which courts should not become involved” and declined to interfere beyond ensuring that the new school did not discriminate in admission.

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