Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits

By Ansley T. Erickson

In a radically unequal United States, schools are often key sites in which injustice grows. Ansley T. Erickson’s Making the Unequal Metropolis presents a broad, detailed, and damning argument about the inextricable interrelatedness of school policies and the persistence of metropolitan-scale inequality. While many accounts of education in urban and metropolitan contexts describe schools as the victims of forces beyond their control, Erickson shows the many ways that schools have been intertwined with these forces and have in fact—via land-use decisions, curricula, and other tools—helped sustain inequality.

Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities’ resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226025391

Book preview

Making the Unequal Metropolis

Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda Seligman

James R. Grossman, editor emeritus

Also in the series:

MAKING THE MISSION: PLANNING AND ETHNICITY IN SAN FRANCISCO by Ocean Howell

CONFEDERATE CITIES: THE URBAN SOUTH DURING THE CIVIL WAR ERA edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers

THE CYCLING CITY: BICYCLES AND URBAN AMERICA IN THE 1890S by Evan Friss

A NATION OF NEIGHBORHOODS: IMAGINING CITIES, COMMUNITIES, AND DEMOCRACY IN POSTWAR AMERICA by Benjamin Looker

WORLD OF HOMEOWNERS: AMERICAN POWER AND THE POLITICS OF HOUSING AID by Nancy H. Kwak

DEMOLITION MEANS PROGRESS: FLINT, MICHIGAN, AND THE FATE OF THE AMERICAN METROPOLIS by Andrew R. Highsmith

METROPOLITAN JEWS: POLITICS, RACE, AND RELIGION IN POSTWAR DETROIT by Lila Corwin Berman

BLOOD RUNS GREEN: THE MURDER THAT TRANSFIXED GILDED AGE CHICAGO by Gillian O’Brien

A CITY FOR CHILDREN: WOMEN, ARCHITECTURE, AND THE CHARITABLE LANDSCAPES OF OAKLAND, 1850–1950 by Marta Gutman

A WORLD MORE CONCRETE: REAL ESTATE AND THE REMAKING OF JIM CROW SOUTH FLORIDA by N. D. B. Connolly

URBAN APPETITES: FOOD AND CULTURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK by Cindy R. Lobel

CRUCIBLES OF BLACK EMPOWERMENT: CHICAGO’S NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS FROM THE NEW DEAL TO HAROLD WASHINGTON by Jeffrey Helgeson

THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO: POLICING AND THE CREATION OF A COSMOPOLITAN LIBERAL POLITICS, 1950–1972 by Christopher Lowen Agee

HARLEM: THE UNMAKING OF A GHETTO by Camilo José Vergara

PLANNING THE HOME FRONT: BUILDING BOMBERS AND COMMUNITIES AT WILLOW RUN by Sarah Jo Peterson

PURGING THE POOREST: PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE DESIGN POLITICS OF TWICE-CLEARED COMMUNITIES by Lawrence J. Vale

BROWN IN THE WINDY CITY: MEXICANS AND PUERTO RICANS IN POSTWAR CHICAGO by Lilia Fernández

BUILDING A MARKET: THE RISE OF THE HOME IMPROVEMENT INDUSTRY, 1914–1960 by Richard Harris

SEGREGATION: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF DIVIDED CITIES by Carl H. Nightingale

SUNDAYS AT SINAI: A JEWISH CONGREGATION IN CHICAGO by Tobias Brinkmann

IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT: LIFE IN THE NOCTURNAL CITY, 1820–1930 by Peter C. Baldwin

MISS CUTLER AND THE CASE OF THE RESURRECTED HORSE: SOCIAL WORK AND THE STORY OF POVERTY IN AMERICA, AUSTRALIA, AND BRITAIN by Mark Peel

THE TRANSATLANTIC COLLAPSE OF URBAN RENEWAL: POSTWAR URBANISM FROM NEW YORK TO BERLIN by Christopher Klemek

I’VE GOT TO MAKE MY LIVIN’: BLACK WOMEN’S SEX WORK IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY CHICAGO by Cynthia M. Blair

PUERTO RICAN CITIZEN: HISTORY AND POLITICAL IDENTITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY by Lorrin Thomas

STAYING ITALIAN: URBAN CHANGE AND ETHNIC LIFE IN POSTWAR TORONTO AND PHILADELPHIA by Jordan Stanger-Ross

NEW YORK UNDERCOVER: PRIVATE SURVEILLANCE IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA by Jennifer Fronc

AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN HISTORY SINCE WORLD WAR II edited by Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter

BLUEPRINT FOR DISASTER: THE UNRAVELING OF CHICAGO PUBLIC HOUSING by D. Bradford Hunt

ALIEN NEIGHBORS, FOREIGN FRIENDS: ASIAN AMERICANS, HOUSING, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN CALIFORNIA by Charlotte Brooks

THE PROBLEM OF JOBS: LIBERALISM, RACE, AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION IN PHILADELPHIA by Guian A. McKee

CHICAGO MADE: FACTORY NETWORKS IN THE INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS by Robert Lewis

THE FLASH PRESS: SPORTING MALE WEEKLIES IN 1840S NEW YORK by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in association with the American Antiquarian Society

SLUMMING: SEXUAL AND RACIAL ENCOUNTERS IN AMERICAN NIGHTLIFE, 1885–1940 by Chad Heap

COLORED PROPERTY: STATE POLICY AND WHITE RACIAL POLITICS IN SUBURBAN AMERICA by David M. P. Freund

SELLING THE RACE: CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND BLACK CHICAGO, 1940–1955 by Adam Green

THE NEW SUBURBAN HISTORY edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue

MILLENNIUM PARK: CREATING A CHICAGO LANDMARK by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

CITY OF AMERICAN DREAMS: A HISTORY OF HOME OWNERSHIP AND HOUSING REFORM IN CHICAGO, 1871–1919 by Margaret Garb

CHICAGOLAND: CITY AND SUBURBS IN THE RAILROAD AGE by Ann Durkin Keating

THE ELUSIVE IDEAL: EQUAL EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY AND THE FEDERAL ROLE IN BOSTON’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, 1950–1985 by Adam R. Nelson

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DOWNTOWN AMERICA: A HISTORY OF THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE WHO MADE IT by Alison Isenberg

PLACES OF THEIR OWN: AFRICAN AMERICAN SUBURBANIZATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Andrew Wiese

BUILDING THE SOUTH SIDE: URBAN SPACE AND CIVIC CULTURE IN CHICAGO, 1890–1919 by Robin F. Bachin

IN THE SHADOW OF SLAVERY: AFRICAN AMERICANS IN NEW YORK CITY, 1626–1863 by Leslie M. Harris

MY BLUE HEAVEN: LIFE AND POLITICS IN THE WORKING-CLASS SUBURBS OF LOS ANGELES, 1920–1965 by Becky M. Nicolaides

BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN: BLACKS, JEWS, AND THE CHANGING FACE OF THE GHETTO by Wendell Pritchett

THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF MANHATTAN, 1900–1940 by Max Page

STREETS, RAILROADS, AND THE GREAT STRIKE OF 1877 by David O. Stowell

FACES ALONG THE BAR: LORE AND ORDER IN THE WORKINGMAN’S SALOON, 1870–1920 by Madelon Powers

MAKING THE SECOND GHETTO: RACE AND HOUSING IN CHICAGO, 1940–1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch

SMOLDERING CITY: CHICAGOANS AND THE GREAT FIRE, 1871–1874 by Karen Sawislak

MODERN HOUSING FOR AMERICA: POLICY STRUGGLES IN THE NEW DEAL ERA by Gail Radford

PARISH BOUNDARIES: THE CATHOLIC ENCOUNTER WITH RACE IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY URBAN NORTH by John T. McGreevy

Making the Unequal Metropolis

School Desegregation and Its Limits

Ansley T. Erickson

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Ansley T. Erickson is assistant professor of history and education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02525-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02539-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025391.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Erickson, Ansley T., author.

Making The Unequal Metropolis : School Desegregation and Its Limits / Ansley T. Erickson.

Pages : Maps ; Cm. — (Historical studies of urban America)

ISBN 978-0-226-02525-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-02539-1 (e-book) 1. School integration—Tennessee—Nashville—History— 20th century. 2. Segregation in education—Tennessee—Nashville— History—20th century. 3. Educational equalization—Tennessee–Nashville–History–20th century. 4. Busing for school integration—Tennessee— Nashville—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

LC214.23.N37E75 2016

379.2′630976855—dc23

2015029148

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Daniel

and

for our hopes for our daughters

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I: Making Inequality, 1945–1968

1 / Metropolitan Visions of Segregation and Growth

2 / Desegregation from Tokenism to Moderation

3 / The Curricular Organization of Segregated Schooling

4 / The Spatial Organization of Schooling and Urban Renewal

Part II: Remaking Inequality, 1968–1998

5 / The Road to Busing

6 / Busing Resisted and Transformed

7 / Busing Lived and Imagined

8 / Busing Renegotiated

9 / The Long Road to the End of Desegregation

Conclusion

List of Oral History and Interview Participants

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures

Map of Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee: 1950 Census Tracts

Map of Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee: 1970 Census Tracts

Map of Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee: 1990 Census Tracts

Map of High Schools and Selected Elementary and Junior High Schools: Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee

I.1. Nashville Board of Education hearing on desegregation, March 1956

1.1. Clarence Perry’s design for a neighborhood unit

1.2. Planning units in Nashville, Tennessee, 1959

1.3. Mayor Ben West and Coordinators Committee for Urban Renewal and Redevelopment, 1957

1.4. Capitol Hill before redevelopment, including outdoor privies

1.5. Clarke and Rapuano planning model for Capitol Hill redevelopment, 1952

1.6. The brochure cover for a 1959 urban renewal exhibition in Nashville

1.7. Maps of East Nashville urban renewal area, population by race, and school location

1.8. Beverly Briley at his 1963 mayoral inauguration

2.1. Grace McKinley walks her daughter Linda and Rita Buchanan to school at Fehr Elementary, September 9, 1957

2.2. Iridell Groves leads her son Erroll to Buena Vista Elementary School, September 1957

2.3. In a Nashville school hallway, c. 1954

2.4. A. Z. Kelley, Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, Thurgood Marshall, and Z. Alexander Looby

2.5. Segregationist activist John Kasper, September 1957

4.1. Representation of a school site in an attractive environment

4.2. Aerial view of McGavock Comprehensive High School

4.3. Map of School Construction, 1960–1989, and 1970 Black and White Population

4.4. Map of Urban Renewal Areas

4.5. Mayor Beverly Briley and Nashville Housing Authority head Gerald Gimre

5.1. Avon Williams, 1979

5.2. Map illustrating segregative school zone lines

5.3. Percy Priest Elementary School students board a school bus

5.4. Map illustrating Metropolitan Planning Commission display of population change

5.5. Map of 1970 School-Age Population: Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee

5.6. Map of School Closures, 1960–1980, and 1970 Black and White Population: Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee

6.1. Anti-busing protest at Rosebank Elementary, September 1971

7.1. Students in conversation at Percy Priest Elementary, 1979

7.2. McGavock High School basketball players, c. 1975

7.3. Buses line up to take Glencliff High School students home, 1979

7.4. Two teenage girls talk at Glencliff High School, 1979

7.5. Students at suburban Percy Priest Elementary during the 1976 bicentennial celebration

7.6. Students at Glencliff High School, 1979

7.7. Vocational education, McGavock High School, 1976

7.8. Vocational education, McGavock High School, 1975

8.1. Members of the Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education on a school bus, c. 1980

9.1. Nashville principal and student, 1983

9.2. Percentage of Black Students in 90–100% Minority Schools

9.3. Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County Population and School District Enrollment by Race, 1950–2010

Tables

5.1. Student Enrollment for Seven Nashville Schools with Contiguous Zones, 1970

5.2. Nashville School-Age Population, 1950, 1960, and 1970

7.1. Nashville School-Age Population, 1970 and 1980

9.1. Academic Achievement in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, 2012

Acknowledgments

My debts extend back in time to long before I began to think of Nashville as the place to answer persistent questions, and they stretch well beyond this work of history. I am awed by and deeply grateful for the wisdom and the kindness so many have shared along the way.

At Brown, Ted Sizer and Nancy Sizer helped me see schools as institutions and as human places. They guided my naive enthusiasm and inchoate interest patiently toward the questions that really mattered. Ted’s early vote of confidence in me as a student and colleague was the key turning point in my imagining an intellectual life.

I took many lessons from three years of teaching in public schools in Harlem and the South Bronx. Most important by far was how deeply intelligent and capable my students were. Their insistent hope, their ability to navigate and thrive, and their sharp eye to the injustices and hypocrisies of the world around them humbled me and have motivated me since. We have no excuse if we do not make schools that merit them. We have no excuse for denying our collective selves the benefit of their spirits and their minds fully realized.

Before this project became a writing endeavor, it started with interviews for a documentary video project. Markie Hancock’s and Kathryn Gregorio’s kind mentorship, and a small grant from the Maxine Greene Foundation, helped support that first phase of work and thus made much of what followed possible.

Dozens of Nashville residents took the time to talk with me or to participate in oral history interviews. I have been honored by their insights, by their stories and their deep hopes for their city. Small moments during some of those interviews—a 2004 conversation with a then high school junior who described how it felt to travel each morning from his city neighborhood to his suburban school; a veteran teacher who recalled what it meant to be in bricklaying classes at his school—lodged themselves in my mind and grew into the central themes of this project. These Nashville residents I spoke to were alive to the contradictions, the possibilities, and the frustrations of their schools and their city, and I strive to be so as well.

I also benefited tremendously from the stories and suggestions of longtime participants in this history. John Egerton, a keen observer of his city and its people, never stopped making sense of it and trying to goad it to be better. Hon. Richard Dinkins and Rev. Sonnye Dixon both went out of their way, time and again, to support and help and remember. Hubert Dixon III reflected on his own experience with remarkable insight and eloquence, and graciously connected me to his father and his niece as well. I am immensely grateful to them, and to the many others who participated in oral history interviews or shared stories. I hope I have captured at least pieces of their truths. I appreciate as well the generosity of Claire Smrekar, Ellen Goldring, and Richard Pride in offering their observations at an early stage. And as the endnotes show, I also learned much from the work of Nashville journalists who documented their city’s story as it was unfolding.

Librarians and archivists at Columbia and beyond opened many doors and managed countless queries. Jerry Breeze at Columbia first put me on to the Kelley papers, without which this project would not exist. Mary Evelyn Tomlin at the National Archives–Southeast Regional Branch patiently helped as I came back, and back, and back again to them. At the Nashville Public Library Special Collections, Andrea Blackman, Kathy Bennett, Linda Barnickle, Beth Odle, Tracy Howerton, and their colleagues all fielded myriad inquiries over years with patience and great knowledge, as did Ken Fieth and Drew Mahan at the Metropolitan Archives of Nashville/Davidson County and Darla Brock and Vince McGrath at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. Teresa Gray, Kathy Smith, and Molly Dohrmann were a great help at the Vanderbilt Special Collections and University Archives, as was Josie Bass at the MPC Library. In their special efforts to make unprocessed materials from the Avon Williams papers available, I am deeply grateful to Fletcher Moon, Murle Kenerson, Sharon Hull Smith, Loretta Divens, and Yldiz Binkley at Tennessee State University Library and Special Collections.

In the Columbia Department of History, Professor Elizabeth Blackmar helped shape my interest in educational inequality and Nashville into a dissertation, and has since been a model of an academic mentor. As her students know well, Betsy finds the perfect balance between generous intellectual enthusiasm and sharp questions, with an abiding decency and sense of reason. Barbara Fields’s model of intellectual rigor, care, and persistence, and Eric Foner’s visible enjoyment of and deep respect for the work of history both inspire me as well. I am happy that I connected with Ira Katznelson and Samuel Roberts at the dissertation phase, and have benefited from their insights since.

Also at Columbia, the Mellon/ISERP Interdisciplinary Graduate Program under William McAllister’s leadership provided an important physical and intellectual home. Jeremiah Trinidad, Eric Glass, and his colleagues at Columbia’s Digital Social Sciences group provided countless hours of help as I learned and relearned the very basics of GIS and census research. Mary Marshall Clark helped introduce me to oral history and kindly encouraged my work along the way.

Jonathan Zimmerman sets a standard for intellectual generosity and commitment to scholarly mentorship well beyond the reach of mere mortals. He has always managed to find time among his myriad other responsibilities to provide excellent advice and encouragement. The history of education writing group Jon convenes sustains, encourages, and challenges, and our field (and this work) is the stronger for it. Over the years I have appreciated helpful comments from writing group members Zoe Burkholder, James Fraser, Joan Malczewski, and Harold Wechsler.

I was fortunate to start my faculty life at Syracuse University, where the Cultural Foundations of Education Department proved a warm and rigorous environment. I will always value Sari Biklen’s and Doug Biklen’s models of collegial care and scholarly engagement.

Teachers College, Columbia University, has been a rich and dynamic place from which to refine and complete this work. The combined forces of the institution’s powerful history and the urgency many of its students bring to understanding and bettering the educational landscape are strong motivators. I am grateful for all the varied ways that Tom James, Cally Waite, Ernest Morrell, and Jeff Henig have made it a supportive, generative place to be. Jeff, along with Amy Stuart Wells, kindly took time to read and discuss parts of this work. I thank Ruth Vinz and Bill Gaudelli for their leadership of our department and their support for new faculty members, and Rachel Rizzo for her steady help in our office.

Our students in the Program in History and Education and in my classes remind me of the energy and the hope that accompany new projects. Their questions and interests resonated with this work in progress and clarified what was at stake. Antonia Smith and Lauren Fox helped with key research tasks, and Viola Huang deserves many thanks for navigating the rights-and-permissions thicket. I appreciate and learn from ongoing conversations with Barry Goldenberg and Nick Juravich.

Long conversations with generous colleagues have helped shape this work. Jack Dougherty, Matt Lassiter, and John Rury have listened well and shared good ideas and questions at many stages along the way, and have opened the way for new opportunities. Working with Mike Rose and Michael Katz on a different writing project helped my thinking here. I also appreciate feedback from James Anderson, Barbara Beatty, Kevin Kruse, William Reese, Bruce Schulman, and Tom Sugrue, in responding to pieces of this work presented at various conferences and seminars over the years. I am grateful for Nancy Beadie’s early and continued enthusiasm for thinking anew about schools and cities.

I have been lucky to share the early stages of faculty life with a cohort of talented scholars and good friends. Conversations at writing groups, conferences, and more have been both sustaining and immensely valuable in my work. I take joy in talking ideas and challenges with Jonna Perrillo, Russell Rickford, and Bethany Rogers, and while running with Molly Tambor and Julie Crawford. I am glad that Andrew Highsmith and I share questions in common, and it has been a pleasure and a good challenge to try to answer them together. Nathan Connolly, Leah Gordon, Sarah Manekin, Hilary Moss, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Michelle Purdy, and Tracy Steffes offered invaluable feedback and new ways of thinking about various drafts in progress.

I thank the Spencer Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship and an NAE/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for creating the spaces in which many of these friendships grew, and for providing crucial time to write and think. I benefited from support from the Richard Hofstadter Fellowship at Columbia and the Eisenhower Institute/Clifford Roberts Dissertation Fellowship, and research funding from the Tennessee Historical Society, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and Columbia’s Buell Center for Architecture and Urbanism. Columbia’s Bancroft Dissertation Prize, awarded for this project in 2011, provided a generous supplement for publication.

For the University of Chicago Press, Harvey Kantor and Daniel Perlstein offered tremendous insight and engagement with this manuscript, making it better in too many ways to count. Becky Nicolaides’s support and smart editorial guidance helped at several stages. Robert Devens wisely guided the book to contract, and Timothy Mennel, Nora Devlin, and Johanna Rosenbohm were a pleasure to work with in bringing it to print. This university-press and peer-review team definitely made a better result than I could have alone. The errors that remain, despite the wealth of good help and intelligence around me, are mine alone.

The debts I incurred in doing archival research in Nashville from a home base in New York go on forever. I could not have done it without Debbie Davies, who in trip after trip provided food and shelter and good conversation at the end of long, quiet days in the archives. My mother, Brenda Erickson, kindly hosted granddaughter visits week after week, and Lily and Tessa showed flexibility and patience beyond their years in adjusting to new routine after new routine. Carrie Ferguson Weir and I met courtesy of our then-tiny daughters, and her friendship and laughter and intricate knowledge of the local scene have leavened every stage of this project. I appreciate her grace in not pointing out how much longer it took me to write this than it would have taken a creditable journalist. One happy serendipity, also thanks to Carrie, was connecting with Nancy Rhoda, who so generously helped locate and think through the images she took in Nashville schools in the 1970s.

My extended family—Judy Seltz, Mike Seltz and Gillie Campbell, Jennifer Seltz and Niall O’Murchu, and Steven Seltz and Cybele Maylone—have done it just right: valuing history and writing deeply, and treading lightly on questions of deadlines and completion. I wish Keefer Erickson and Seth Erickson and their families were closer to hand, but I watch with pride as they take on their own long-term projects, and I feel a comradeship across the miles. We are all in our own ways builders, as our parents in their own ways always have been.

Part of my motivation in studying education must come from the contradiction between the opportunities that good schooling has made for me and my own firsthand knowledge of schools that continue to deny such opportunities to the students who invest their time, energy, and good faith in them. My mother’s fierce insistence that my and my brothers’ education would be strong and encouraging and our hard work rewarded has opened even more doors for us than she may have imagined, and for this I am always grateful. I am also grateful for my father Danny Erickson’s love of history, and for the hope I find in the sibling-family he has reconstituted. His story ensures I do not mistake the capriciousness of birth for virtue, or for fault.

My daughters are the counterbalance and the touchstone. Lily, who was born in Nashville, is a writer and a thinker of the first order. She has warmed my heart by celebrating each step toward publication on my behalf, and as she does I see her imagining a future in words for herself. I hope she knows that whatever pride she feels for this work, I celebrate tenfold what she creates. Tessa has a wisdom and a steadiness that most adults I know, myself included, can only aspire to. I delight in seeing how her mind works, taking in machines and the natural world voraciously. I learn from her every day, and her laughter often keeps me afloat.

Then there is Daniel. How do you thank someone who has made everything possible? I borrow my confidence as a scholar, thinker, and writer from him, a natural at all of these. He took me to Nashville first, but has been happy to be dragged back in research trips and in countless bits of arcana since. I treasure his patience and steady support for a project that has seemed nearly done, but not quite, for so long. We have made a family that has space for both of us and our intellectual lives while holding our children at the center. There is no one else I would want to walk this path with.

New York, New York

February 2015

Abbreviations

This map shows the City of Nashville and Davidson County, which consolidated as Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County in 1963. Only some portions of the county had been divided into census tracts by 1950. Source: US Census, via Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Pre-release Version 0.1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004, http://www.nhgis.org. Map by James W. Quinn.

Source: US Census, via Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Pre-release Version 0.1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004, http://www.nhgis.org. Map by James W. Quinn.

Source: US Census, via Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Pre-release Version 0.1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004, http://www.nhgis.org. Map by James W. Quinn.

Map by James W. Quinn.

Introduction

Shifting Inequalities

Hubert Dixon Jr. grew up just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. He began first grade at segregated Haynes Consolidated Negro School in 1939, and graduated from its high school division in 1951. His son, Hubert Dixon III, began kindergarten not far away, at Ford Greene Elementary inside the city boundary, in 1969. Across these two generations, and across the metropolitan landscape, the Dixon family tells the story of segregation, desegregation, and educational inequality.

When the elder Dixon attended school, he faced a muscularly enforced segregation and blunt inequality. Hubert Dixon Jr. recalled the modest wood-frame structure that, in his elementary years, served all grades of black students in Davidson County outside Nashville. He could picture how he watched buses carry fellow black students past white residences and schools on their way to segregated black schools. He remembered as well how he first chose to become a teacher, having found no other avenues for employment where a young black man could deploy the college diploma he had earned.¹

When the younger Dixon first arrived at Ford Greene, the school remained a segregated institution, like the vast majority of schools in late-1960s America. Nashville schools began to desegregate a dozen years earlier, in 1957, but the school board, administrators, and attorneys who designed the local desegregation plan and won court approval for it ensured only the most meager and gradual change.² Starting kindergarten, Hubert Dixon III encountered a solidly constructed brick building where a well-qualified and nearly all-black teaching faculty served exclusively black students. Yet inequality still trailed segregation there, as it did in most American schools. The school board continued to assign Ford Greene fewer resources for its teachers and students, and its community had less political power than Nashville’s growing white suburbs to secure more.³

Unlike the vast majority of American school districts that reflected the fragmentation of city from suburb, Nashville’s school district extended, after 1963, across all of Davidson County’s more than five hundred square miles, with its urban, suburban, and even rural stretches. A new federal court order in 1971 moved students across urban and suburban neighborhood lines and radically expanded the reach of desegregation in Nashville. As the younger Dixon started second grade that year, he began riding school buses out of his neighborhood to the first of five more schools before his high school graduation. While Dixon rode the bus across town, on trips of up to ten miles and forty-five minutes along newly completed interstate highways, his school district shuttered schools close to his home and in other majority-black neighborhoods. Dixon recalled, decades after he attended Nashville’s schools, that he had thought of himself as a federal agent whose job it was to desegregate schools throughout Nashville. And in many ways, he was—much more so than his white peers, who often remained in schools close to home for nine or ten of their years in school, rather than the typical black student’s two or three.⁴ Busing made all of Dixon’s schools statistically desegregated, with the number of black and white students in attendance roughly aligned with the district’s overall demographic composition.

Nashville was one of desegregation’s best-case scenarios. In 1970, almost all Nashville schools had more than 90 percent white students or more than 90 percent black students—one measure used by desegregation scholars to indicate highly concentrated black or white student populations. By 1990, after nearly two decades of court-ordered busing, almost none of the district’s schools were so highly concentrated, black or white. (The city had very few students of Latino or Asian descent at that time). Nashville’s statistical desegregation was a striking achievement against the national backdrop: in 1990, nearly a third of all black students in the US attended schools that had 90 percent or more African American students, while segregation among white students remained high as well. The average white US suburban student’s school, as of 1996, included only 6.8 percent African American peers.⁵ Through Hubert Dixon’s efforts, and hundreds of thousands of Nashville students alongside him, the district became one of the most statistically desegregated school systems in the country over the twenty-seven-year span of busing there.⁶

Busing brought the younger Hubert greater access to educational resources, both material and human. Hubert Dixon III enjoyed previously unavailable social contact with white students, which he felt shaped the course of his life in positive ways. He made lasting friendships in football and debate, where having a job to do and people . . . counting on you provided an encouraging context for new relationships. But like many black students attending previously segregated white schools, Hubert also witnessed white teachers applying racist stereotypes, sorting him and other students in their classes based on skin color rather than demonstrated ability. Inequalities in the practice of desegregation took multiple forms, in Nashville as in cities like Chicago, Syracuse, Louisville, Austin, and Milwaukee. There, black students—and particularly black urban-dwelling students—bore disproportionately the burdens of desegregation in travel time, dislocation, and closures of local schools—burdens that gradually eroded support for the idea of desegregation even among many of its historic advocates. Once at school, black students experienced second-generation segregation, or tracking into lower-opportunity classes or courses of study, remaking unequal opportunity within statistically desegregated schools.⁷ It was always very clear, Dixon remembered, that you were in the minority. It was never really a sense of being integrated. Recent national studies of students who experienced busing and local studies of cities beyond Nashville underline that Hubert Dixon’s story is one example of the experience of millions of students, of the paired benefits and costs of desegregation, of the less tangible but still persistent forces of educational inequality.⁸

Across generations in the Dixon family, inequality had shifted form. Hubert Dixon III drew on strong supports within his own family to finish high school as well as to graduate from college. Yet he saw around him the patterns of uneven educational achievement documented in lower average test scores and graduation rates for black students. Even as Nashville’s schools became exceptional for their statistical desegregation, they remained unexceptional in the patterns of unequal educational opportunity they demonstrated. In the desegregation years, Nashville’s educational outcomes generally followed national patterns—they both improved, and remained starkly unequal. From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, in the US overall and particularly in the South (which saw the highest levels of statistical desegregation), the gap between black and white students’ levels of academic achievement closed significantly.⁹ Although the available local data is imperfect, what remains suggests that Nashville saw similar progress in student achievement over the years of desegregation via busing. Test-score gaps shrank by as much as half, but remained significant. Educational attainment—how many people finished high school, for example—also improved, although a large gap continued. In 1960, only 21 percent of black Nashvillians over the age of 25 had completed high school or beyond; by 1990, 67 percent had. By then, the figure was 80 percent among white residents. Nationally in the same years, levels of attainment for black and white students rose strikingly, particularly before the mid-1970s, when the growth rate slowed. These educational gaps form one crucial part of a broader pattern of lower levels of income, employment, and weaker life chances for African Americans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.¹⁰

The complicated, at times paradoxical, story of school desegregation matters in its own right. But it is also a point of entry from which to understand how, over the late twentieth century, inequality shifted form in American education.¹¹ The causal roots of educational inequality, in eras of segregation and desegregation, can be found in the interactions between schools and the basic political and economic structures of the city and the metropolis. Segregation and desegregation depended on hundreds of small choices made by local, state, and federal officials, at times in response to legal and other pressures from community advocates. Who would go to school with whom? Which communities would have schools, in what portion of the metropolitan landscape? What would schools teach? Each of these matters became a venue in which schooling interacted with a broad range of municipal policy areas, from city planning practice, housing development, and urban renewal plans to local and state economic development efforts and growth boosterism. In the local roots of inequality and its long branches into the policy, practice, and public discussion of schooling, Nashville is a place like so many others. Inequality has been at once deeply embedded and difficult to fully identify. Making visible its full scope and the broad range of those invested in it is, even today, the first step to challenge it.

Why Nashville? Desegregation and the Growth Metropolis

Nashville’s success at statistical desegregation—like that of other southern metropolitan school districts, including Charlotte and Tampa, Louisville and Raleigh—stemmed in significant part from the scope of its municipal government. Nashville and its surrounding suburbs inside Davidson County became a single, consolidated government and school system in 1963: Metropolitan Nashville–Davidson County. The majority of Nashville’s suburbs could be found within the county into the early 1970s. Therefore, the same jurisdiction encompassed some rural spaces, suburban areas dominated by white families, growing black suburbs, and city neighborhoods with significant black and white populations.¹²

Metropolitan consolidation was not motivated by desegregation; in fact, it may have been enabled by an elite confidence that segregation in schools and housing remained secure even without a city line. Consolidation facilitated desegregation by dampening the impact of white departures from urban areas and public schools. The district did experience losses of white students typical of many urban and desegregating school systems. Private school attendance in Nashville boomed at each point at which desegregation expanded, as in many other districts; white migration to exurban communities beyond the county line also increased markedly. White withdrawal, alongside the falling birthrates of the late-1960s and 1970s, took the school district from over 90,000 students in 1970 to a low of under 56,000 in 1985, when enrollment began to increase again. Enrollment changes altered the experience of schooling and the reality in which school district leaders worked. Yet in Nashville, the phenomenon of white withdrawal was less pronounced when compared to metropolitan areas divided into dozens of separate municipalities and school districts. Nashville’s schools served a large majority of white students before desegregation began, and even once it did, the extensive geographic scope of the single metropolitan district made departures to other school districts more onerous than in other settings (although private schooling remained an option for those with financial means). Other desegregating city-only districts quickly became nearly or all black, surrounded by white suburbs, while via the metropolitan structure, Nashville schools continued to serve black and white students both.¹³

Even as it aided statistical desegregation, metropolitan consolidation was no silver bullet for equality in education or other areas of metropolitan policy. Consolidation did allow much of the increasing property tax base created by suburban residential construction and urban and suburban commercial growth to remain within the metropolitan jurisdiction, rather than seeing it flow into separate suburban coffers. But when faced with questions of how to allocate resources—in the form of schools, fire stations, or sanitary sewers—the metropolitan political structure often tilted to the white suburban majority. Dividing lines between city and suburb, familiar across metropolitan areas fragmented by jurisdictional boundaries, emerged without official demarcations as well. Consolidation diluted black voting power when it merged a city population of 38 percent African American residents in 1960 to a county population that was less than 5 percent African American. In the resulting metropolitan government, black citizens made up less than a fifth of the voting population. Marshaling power through the ballot became more difficult than it had been within the separate city. The extensive powers of the mayor’s office, elected at-large, and of at-large representatives on the metropolitan council, reinforced the power of the white suburban majority.¹⁴ From the perspective of fragmented metropolises, scholars have often hoped metropolitan governance could offer a solution to segregation and inequality, in education as well as in other arenas.¹⁵ Metropolitan consolidation certainly enabled statistical desegregation, and its benefits, in Nashville. Yet the metropolitan structure alone could not guarantee against inequality in its many modes. Instead, new and powerful lines of division emerged in the metropolis and its schools.

Metropolitan consolidation drew much of its support from local business elites who thought rationalized governance across city and suburb would facilitate the economic growth they saw as the city’s greatest need and challenge. Like their counterparts in dynamic Sunbelt metropolises and struggling Rustbelt centers, these local leaders in business and politics wanted to attract new businesses, employ local citizens (and thus increase their purchasing power), expand the tax base (except when offering new businesses generous tax breaks), and spur both downtown and suburban real estate development. Doing so, their rhetoric claimed, promised benefits for citizens across the city. However, such efforts lacked the mechanisms to guarantee a broad distribution of growth’s benefits. In fact, boosterish growth rhetoric combined with white racism at times concentrated the burdens of the pursuit of growth in black communities. Municipal leaders shaped urban renewal and highway construction projects to displace black communities and expropriate black property in the name of development that overwhelmingly benefited white businesses and communities.¹⁶

And Nashville did enjoy significant growth in the second half of the twentieth century. The quiet small city in which Hubert Dixon’s father grew up held under 170,000 people in 1940, with a local economy dominated by regional banking and insurance and a mix of light and heavy manufacturing. Some of the seeds the growth-minded elite planted were slow to grow, but by the 1980s many of the city’s long-term economic drivers remained present while new ones took off in prime postindustrial sectors like health care and entertainment. Metropolitan Nashville’s gradual increase to a population of more than half a million by the end of the century was far from the rocketing growth of Atlanta or Phoenix, but the local effort to use government levers, including school policy, to encourage growth was as firm, energetic, and consequential to ongoing inequality as anywhere in the United States.¹⁷

As a growing and growth-focused metropolis, Nashville offers a clear contrast to cases—well represented in histories of education in cities—of schooling in the context of urban decline. A growing metropolis provokes new questions: In what ways, and through what policy choices or mechanisms, did growth agendas impact schools? How did they shape segregation and influence desegregation as experienced in general terms, and in the specific lives of students? And what consequences followed when the rhetoric of growth’s universal benefits proved hollow—as in years that brought both economic growth and increased poverty?¹⁸

The particular policy choices that shaped segregation and desegregation in Nashville at times depended on factors as varied as the city’s robust embrace of national city planning paradigms or its remarkably broad use of urban renewal. Similarly, the particular expertise and orientation of its civil rights advocates, and the interaction between local and state programs to promote economic growth, all became guiding forces as well. These particularities, however, help illuminate more general patterns of schooling embedded in metropolitan political economy. These patterns are neither Nashville’s alone, nor are they specific to Sunbelt metropolises. Understood in its full relationship with the urban and metropolitan political and economic landscape, desegregation emerges as a window into the basic processes of American inequality rooted in myriad uses of state power across different levels of government.

Educational Inequality and Political Economy

Making the Unequal Metropolis examines segregation, desegregation, and educational inequality as problems of political economy. It queries the interactions between schools, economic forces and agendas, and political power. In so doing, it departs from previous views of desegregation in three key ways. It shifts attention from popular white resistance to policy choices that gave desegregation its form; it situates schooling as a force in the making of the city and metropolis rather than as solely a recipient of urban dynamics; and it recasts previous views of government power in educational inequality.

The most familiar images of busing, in both history writing and popular memory, emphasize white protest and withdrawal. White resistance produced violent and visceral responses in Nashville as elsewhere, and helped galvanize a major conservative realignment in the late 1960s—one that ultimately challenged policies like desegregation. Resistance expressed as departures from public schools in general or from specific school districts contributed ultimately to the making of segregation across district lines and the weakening of the school systems most likely to serve black and poor students. Resistance to desegregation had important impact, in schooling and beyond, but within many historical accounts the analysis of reaction has displaced close attention to the policy choices that gave desegregation its form and nature for those who experienced it.¹⁹

Because of the strength of the resistance narrative, less attention has flowed to other fundamentally important critiques of desegregation. Legal scholar Derrick Bell consistently emphasized the centrality of inequality within desegregation, an inequality not only characteristic of desegregation’s outcomes, but of its core design. Bell looked beyond the more frequently recognized inequalities in the first waves of desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, when many black schools were shuttered and black educators fired or demoted, to note continued inequalities in busing. For Bell and others working in his tradition, these inequalities demonstrate interest convergence, the way policies such as desegregation aided black communities only to the extent that they served white interests. But how did desegregation continue to prioritize the felt needs of white communities over black ones? Local and federal desegregation planners achieved statistical desegregation via some policy choices that increased opportunity for students like Hubert and others which undermined opportunity.²⁰ A focus on the momentary and easily measurable—the ratio of white to black students in a school, especially—took precedence over the deep and long entrenched—as in the consequences of segregationist housing policies or the relationships between schools, communities, and economies—and thus prevented the conversion of statistical desegregation to more broadly constructed equality of educational opportunity.

The emphasis on dramatic white resistance has also shaped the chronological boundaries of many of the leading studies of busing for desegregation. Most accounts examine legal struggles and then court and school board negotiation over the initiation of busing. They offer at times intricate and valuable perspectives on how initial busing plans took shape, but they often stop not long after the first buses roll and loud protests quiet.²¹ By stopping at this point, they miss at least two key dynamics. The first is the experience of busing over its longer course—over decades, in places like Nashville. Over time, the various approaches to and meanings of desegregation shifted, as did the metropolitan landscape. Black activists’ and legal advocates’ perspectives on busing for desegregation evolved not only as a matter of changing ideological currents in the black freedom struggle, but as highly situated responses to local policy choices that had failed to join statistical desegregation with black communities’ and individuals’ desires for recognition and ownership of educational spaces and processes.

Recent work on black communities’ experiences of desegregation, and the only previous book-length treatment of desegregation in Nashville specifically, name white leaders’ and citizens’ commitments to cultural assimilation as a key cause of desegregation’s inequalities. To the extent that desegregation helped black and white students access and share educational resources, that sharing had to happen on white communities’ terms, this interpretation holds. School boards shut black schools instead of white ones and focused on mollifying angry white parents. Surely in Nashville as well as in desegregation cases both South and North, powerful white individuals and institutions shared in racist ideology that made them unable to see—much less credit or support—black communities. But their stunted vision was as much material as cultural; their racism a system of power as much as a matter of individual feeling. Basic structures of economic and political power in the metropolis supported, and at times depended upon, disregarding or destroying black communities and institutions, in schooling as in other venues.²²

Many scholars have examined schooling in American cities, but too few have traced how schools figure in the making of the city.²³ Schools were not simply pawns in a changing and challenging urban and metropolitan context; they helped shape that context. A key example comes in the interactions between schooling and housing that, together, helped construct segregation. Conventional formulations, both in history and in many legal accounts past and present, take school segregation to simply follow residential patterns. In fact, planners and real estate developers identified schools as defining features of neighborhoods, and property markets valued connections between housing and schools. Through their locations, as well as through zoning and student assignment choices, schools helped to segregate the metropolitan landscape. As Nashville shows in years of segregation and desegregation, school policy became an actor in the city, embedded in and contributing to basic structures of metropolitan inequality.

Nashville also sheds light on how government power, at multiple levels, operated in segregation, desegregation, and educational inequality. In cases like the dramatic federal and state confrontation that unfolded in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, federal power can seem to be squarely on the side of desegregation. And indeed, in Nashville, desegregation surely would have proceeded more slowly, and more incompletely, without federal pressure in the form of court orders. Yet desegregation’s inequalities in Nashville also had federal court approval—and at times even originated in federally supported ideas. Locating education within the broader landscape of federal intervention in the metropolis means considering the federal presence in highway construction, urban renewal, and Model Cities alongside desegregation. Federal pressures for desegregation in schools often ran against federal encouragement for segregation through housing construction and neighborhood destruction, for white suburbanization in the form of housing finance, transportation infrastructure, and tax subsidies. If some aspects of federal power encouraged desegregation, many others did the opposite.

A similar complexity is visible in the ideas about government power that various (and sometimes the very same) actors engaged around desegregation and other contemporary issues, such as the pursuit of economic growth. Local and state business leaders marshaled multiple government mechanisms to encourage growth—from property seizure and resale to private developers in slum clearance, or by shaping schooling toward the production of future workers. In the very same years, they joined local working- and middle-class voices and political officials nationally in declaring busing an overreaching