The last integrationist?

A Memphis attorney is using a 1963 desegregation lawsuit to block expansion of suburban schools and get a better deal for inner-city black students.

By King Kaufman

Aug 27, 2001 | On Aug. 30, 1963, Lee Winchester, the attorney for Shelby County, which includes Memphis but has a separate school system, filed a desegregation plan for county schools in response to a lawsuit by black students.

"Negro plaintiffs have wanted a plan. Here it is," Winchester said that day. "It calls for a complete integration of all schools by next fall -- all grades, all schools at once."

And sure enough, a year later, a Memphis Commercial Appeal headline read, "Racial Barriers Drop Smoothly: County Schools Open All 12 Grades to Negroes Without Incident." The story went on to detail how all of seven -- seven! -- black children had enrolled in previously all-white schools, and seven more had enrolled in an elementary school that had had six black kids the year before. (A federal court had ordered the desegregation of schools serving military institutions.) There were 45,000 students in the Shelby County schools that year.

Thirty-seven years after that "complete integration," school desegregation is an issue again in Shelby County -- perhaps "still" would be a better word -- only nowadays, it seems, the battle is not so much about race as it is about money.

Except for this: When you're talking about schools in the formerly segregated South, you never get very far from race.

This month Richard Fields, the attorney for the plaintiffs in Robinson et al. vs. Shelby County Board of Education -- the 1963 desegregation lawsuit filed by the NAACP that's still active and open -- said he would withhold approval of the county's plan to build a new high school in a mainly white, eastern area of the county far from the city limits in an attempt to halt what he calls "construction of a virtually all-white school system in eastern Shelby County."

The current court order in the case requires that the plaintiffs' lawyer and the Justice Department, which intervened in the suit in 1967, sign off on the construction of new schools. For two decades, that hasn't been a problem. There's been no denying the need for new schools in the county. The number of Shelby County residents who don't live in the city of Memphis has nearly doubled since 1980, from 130,757 to 247,372, according to census figures. Blacks make up 14.8 percent of the county's population, and 21.6 percent of school enrollment, according to figures cited by the Commercial Appeal.

"We actually have a more diverse system than Memphis schools," notes county schools communications director Mike Tebbe, and technically, he's right. Memphis city schools are more than 86 percent black, only 10 percent white.

So new school construction in the county has been a matter of rubber-stamp approval for as long as any of today's students have been alive. But early this month, attorney Fields sent a letter to Lee Winchester -- still the attorney for Shelby County schools after all these years -- saying he intended to block the county's construction of a $40 million high school in Arlington, at the eastern edge of the county, next to the old municipal airport.

"I cannot in good conscience approve any further school construction in the county without a reform of the antiquated funding system that denies city schools the operational funds needed to overcome the effects of racial segregation," Fields wrote, drawing a line in the sand that has provoked renewed debate about school funding and race in Tennessee.

Winchester, 77, calls Fields' claim "totally out of line." Asked to characterize the Shelby County school system, Winchester says, "I think it's totally integrated." The land for the new school has been acquired, but building funds have not been appropriated. If Fields blocks construction, the school district can appeal to the judge in the desegregation case for a hearing.

But civil rights advocates are applauding Fields' maneuver. "Rich's letter was part of his very skillful representation of his clients," says longtime civil rights attorney Louis Lucas, who first came to Memphis in 1967 as a Justice Department lawyer and later formed the South's first biracial law firm, "but it was also a political shot."

Fields admits that there are blacks in the Shelby County schools, but he says they tend to be concentrated in the incorporated towns of Bartlett, which abuts the city to the northeast, Millington, in the north county, and Collierville, in the southeast. And whatever integration there's been in the county, Fields insists, hasn't helped kids in city schools, where poverty is high, test scores are low, and some schools are almost completely African-American.

Two generations after Brown vs. Board of Education, Fields is fighting the toughest challenge facing education reformers today. Busing, integration and greater mobility for African-Americans hasn't changed the fact that low-income black children are still clustered in the nation's lowest-performing schools, mostly in declining inner cities. Fields is trying to make county residents of every race responsible to those left-behind inner-city kids, and he's grabbing the only weapon available to him -- stopping construction of a new county school -- to change the terms of the debate.

Next Page: "In Memphis, we have 100 percent black high schools"

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