Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Richard Fields, 53, who has represented the plaintiffs in the Robinson case since 1982, does not look like a Memphis lawyer. Not for him the crisp white shirts, suspenders and tan summer suits of the characters who stock John Grisham's novels and walk the real-life hallways of the Bluff City's firms. The day I met Fields at one of those firms -- with which, as a sole practitioner, he sometimes works -- he wore a green-on-green flowered Hawaiian shirt, faded blue jeans and brown cowboy boots.
A big fellow with a generous midsection, Fields has a full white beard and flowing white hair that he ties back in a tiny ponytail. A native of Modesto, Calif., and a graduate of Stanford, he's acquired a light drawl since coming to Memphis in 1969, when he married a black woman in what he says was one of the first legal interracial marriages in Tennessee.
The Memphis Flyer, the local free weekly, has called him "the last integrationist," an appellation that, like many things, makes him laugh. "I think there are more integrationists than segregationists, believe it or not," he says.
"You cannot allow a segregated system to be implemented again," he says, pointing to the fact that "in Memphis, Tennessee, now, we have 100 percent black high schools, and you have the cycle of poverty."
The state has tried to equalize school spending between city and county by requiring that money raised by Shelby County schools be shared with the Memphis city schools -- because both districts operate in one county -- following a formula based on average daily enrollment. Memphis city schools have roughly two and a half times more students, so the city gets about 72 cents out of every dollar raised by the county. The city must use construction funds for construction, but even though new schools haven't been needed in Memphis, building improvements have been. It's only recently, for example, that all Memphis schools have had air-conditioning.
Another factor reducing conflict between the city and county over the years is the fact that Tennessee laws make it relatively easy for cities to annex surrounding unincorporated areas, and Memphis has pursued an aggressive annexing program to protect its tax base as many of its residents have moved to the suburbs. By annexing, the city can gain back population and, therefore, tax revenue. Many of the schools built in the county therefore became city schools eventually, serving Memphis' heavily black student population.
Fields was happy to approve county schools that would eventually be annexed into the city system, he says, but "now they're building in areas that are not going to be annexed, and there's very substantial developments being planned out in Shelby County. It looks like the reestablishment of the dual school system. So even though I approved the purchase of property for this new high school, I'm not going to approve the construction of the high school unless there's plans to have a desegregated student body."
In other words, what Fields is doing is using the Arlington school, which the county board says it needs to relieve overcrowding, as leverage to get a better deal for the overwhelmingly black and poor student population of the city schools.
"You've got to coordinate your housing plans with your school plans," he says. "Schools were always a function of housing. As we showed in the older [desegregation] cases, it was interstates, FHA policies, all of those things added to the segregated system. And then they just superimposed the segregated system on a segregated housing pattern, and that's what they're trying to do now."
The area in question is in eastern Shelby County, far from the city limits, and the common belief is that the population is overwhelmingly white. Tebbe, the county schools spokesman, insists that's a misconception. He says the district is projecting black enrollment in the new school "would probably be in the neighborhood of 15 percent. And I don't know that that's a 'virtually all-white school.' It is a pretty substantial minority population, and if you put in Asian, Hispanic, you're probably looking at minority enrollment that would be in the neighborhood of 17 or 18 percent."
"I don't know where they're getting those kids from," Fields counters, "unless they're changing some district lines and taking a bunch of kids from other schools, which will decrease [those schools'] black student enrollment."
Jim Rout, the mayor of Shelby County (Memphis, of course, has its own mayor), says Fields just has to be patient. "The Arlington area is predominantly white," he acknowledges. "But let me tell you this. The city of Memphis annexed an area about two and a half years ago called Hickory Hill, which used to be predominantly white. By the time they annexed it, it was probably getting to 40-60, 50-50 maybe." Rout says a similar demographic change is taking place in his own neighborhood, in the southeast county.
"My point is that more and more, according to the census of 2000 vs. 1990, more and more young, mobile African-American males and females and families are moving into the suburbs in our community," he says. "Now, we still have a huge inner-city problem, and we still have economics and education issues, certainly, but I am saying that, today he's right, but ... not only are white citizens moving to the suburbs, but because of greater job opportunities and career opportunities, many young African-American professionals and couples are moving to the suburbs. And I can take him to any suburb in this community and show him that."
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