White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kruse Kevin M

Author:Kruse, Kevin M. [Kruse, Kevin M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Ideologies, Social Science, Modern, Conservatism & Liberalism, Politics, Sociology, State & Local, 20th Century, United States, Urban, History, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Minority Studies, Political Science
ISBN: 9780691133867
Google: F2WYDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0691133867
Goodreads: 1328762
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2005-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

A similar pattern developed that year at Kirkwood Elementary. Although Atlanta’s elementary schools had yet to be desegregated, a group of black parents showed up at the still-white school in August 1964, hoping to register their children there. All the nearby black schools, they noted, were horribly overcrowded. Whitefoord Avenue Elementary, for instance, had been converted to black use just a fewyears before, but it was already dangerously full. Students there, like some 5,400 other black elementary students in the city, were taught in half-day “double sessions.”

The Fight for “Freedom of Association” • 169

Classes convened in hallways, the teacher’s lounge, a clinic room, and even the janitor’s washroom. As enrollment at the black school surged to nearly 650 students over capacity, still-white Kirkwood remained 750

under capacity. When the black parents were turned away, they staged pickets at the white school and launched a boycott of the black ones.

Under pressure, the school board announced in December 1964 that black children would be allowed to attend Kirkwood Elementary after the holidays. White students, however, would again be offered a way out.

“Pupils enrolled at Kirkwood may remain,” Superintendent Letson wrote parents, “or may request transfers to other schools. Transfer applications will be honored up to the capacity of the school requested.” As an added insult, white teachers were allowed to flee as well. The results were dramatic. On the Friday before the black children were to arrive, there were still 470 white boys and girls enrolled at Kirkwood Elementary, plus a full slate of white teachers and staff. When the black students showed up the following Monday, they found only 7 white children in the building, with just the white principal. By the start of the next school year, Kirkwood Elementary had become exactly what black parents hoped to avoid—yet another overcrowded, all-black school.14

Thus, desegregation unfolded in public schools much as it had in other public spaces. Once city officials were confronted with court orders, they carefully orchestrated desegregation, minimizing the number of blacks involved and maximizing the amount of public relations hype. And though the actual scope of desegregation was limited in every way possible—in the number of students and schools involved, in the grades and neighborhoods affected—the vast majority of white Atlantans found it to be too much. As they fled from the schools in record numbers and at record speed, yet another desegregated public space passed from segregation to resegregation, with barely any time spent on true “integration” at all. From there, whites completed the familiar pattern as they had so often before, recoiling from desegregated public spaces and retreating to still-segregated private spaces instead.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS: SEGREGATION ACADEMIES AND RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS

As whites abandoned public schools, private schools surfaced as an attractive alternative. In truth, white Atlantans’ movement toward private education had been underway for a decade, ever since the creation of Talmadge’s “private-school plan.” But at the end of the 1950s, when it seemed increasingly likely that conflict between the state’s massive-resistance legislation and federal court orders would force all of Atlanta’s public schools to close, this interest in private schools surged.

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