Article About The Supreme Court Heard Argument On Monday In Two Important Cases And Information About Supreme Court Arguments, Racial Baggage, Law Schools, Law School Segregation And More.

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ONCE MORE INTO THE ABYSS
[By James Kilpatrick]
The Supreme Court heard argument on Monday in two important cases. Ordinarily I would have been there to hear them. On Monday I stayed home.
Please forgive the first-person singular. its segregated law school. Missouri’s famed brief in Case 05-908. Counsel is describing
When I write about the school cases from Journalism School was then as white as the Seattle’s “open choice” plan for racial
Louisville and Seattle, I write from a snows of Antarctica. From the J-School I integration of its 10 high schools:
particular perspective. I am 86 years old. My went to the old Richmond (Va.) News Leader
ancestral roots lie deep in the soil of 19th- as a reporter. “When a school district is oversubscribed,
century New Orleans. My grandfather served the district first admits siblings of
as a captain in the Confederate cavalry. He This is all to explain why I stayed home on enrolled students. In an effort to achieve a
owned slaves. Monday. predetermined racial balance in each school
(40 percent white to 60 percent nonwhite,
In the early 1900s, my father packed up all As a cub reporter in Richmond 65 years ago, I that being the ratio among all students
his inherited prejudices and took them with adjusted instantly to the local mores. When a in the district), the district next looks at a
him to Oklahoma City. He married a girl from black person figured unavoidably in the local school’s racial composition and uses race to
Kansas, sired three children, and went into news, we acknowledged the fact in genteel determine who will be admitted. A student
business selling bridge flooring, fence posts parentheses: “John Rogers (c) was named is deemed to be of the race specified in her
and railway ties. We had two black servants: principal ...” After a while I became editor of registration materials. If a parent declines to
Lizzie, who “lived on” in an apartment over the editorial page of the News Leader, “the identify a child’s race, the district assigns a
the two-car garage, and Nash, who came on youngest editor of a major newspaper in the race to the child based on a visual inspection
Mondays to do the laundry and stay overnight South.” of the student or parent. If the ratio of white
with Lizzie. We children loved them. And they to nonwhite pupils in an oversubscribed
loved us. I will get to Monday’s oral argument Then came May 1954, and the Supreme school deviates by more than a set number of
in a moment. Court’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board percentage points from the desired balance,
of Education. For Southerners both black then a student whose race will move the
I inherited my father’s inheritance. With it I and white, a world that had been steadily school closer to the desired racial balance
inherited all the racial baggage of a thousand teetering was now a world turned upside will be admitted, and a student whose race
years. It’s not easy to explain how people down. In the name of “civil rights,” every will move the school away from the desired
can be so intimate and yet so far apart. It social institution known to my grandfather balance will be denied admission. There is no
was an established way of life, as immutable was about to topple -- hotels, restaurants, individual consideration of applicants ...”
as the seasons and the tides. Black people buses, trains -- and now our kindergartens!
(generally identified as “colored” and more From the grave, my grandfather asks: Who’s
formally as “Negroes”) had their jobs, their When something comes along in the news “racist” now?
churches, their foods and amusements. like Monday’s argument in the high court,
We had ours. I went through Hawthorne I look back upon those pre-Brown years (Letters to Mr. Kilpatrick should be sent by
Elementary, Taft Junior High and Classen with shame, embarrassment and something e-mail to kilpatjj@aol.com.)
High School, and Lizzie and Nash were the close to disbelief. We defenders of school
only black persons in my life. segregation were so very wrong! Legally COPYRIGHT 2005 UNIVERSAL PRESS
wrong. Morally wrong. We should have been SYNDICATE
I did not mean to get so autobiographical devoting our energies not to better white
when I started this column. If you want to schools and better black schools, but simply This feature may not be reproduced or
read something else, go to it. In 1941 I was to better schools, period. distributed electronically, in print or
graduated from the lily-white University of otherwise without the written permission of
Missouri. It’s almost forgotten now, but the The more things change, et cetera, et cetera. uclick and Universal Press Syndicate.
university once fought fiercely to maintain I read from the petitioners’ mind-numbing
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