The desegregation of America’s schools was a trying time for our country culturally and emotionally. It was also a very interesting historical time in America. A time met with fear, hatred, compassion, angst, and perseverance. Nowhere in the country were these emotions more evident than in the southern states. From Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 it took some schools in the south almost twenty years to begin their desegregation process. Through all the hardships and labors that it took to desegregate the country’s school systems, many good things came from the sacrifices that were made by the first black students and families to go through the desegregation process. Their courage paved the way for others and helped to create a better society.

The desegregation of the south was a part of the country that’s desegregation took decades and caught mixed emotions and reactions throughout southern states. Metropolitan areas such as Atlanta were more accepting of desegregation than small towns. While small towns and minor cities were more aggressive in fighting the desegregation of their school systems with methods like picket lines and verbal and physical abuse toward blacks. Not that this did not happens in Atlanta, but many people in the white community chose other means to protest the desegregation of their schools. In this paper I will share points on the overall desegregation of the Atlanta School System through the courts and politics, busing programs, the explosion of white students enrollment in private schools, and a form of involuntary segregation today.

When the Supreme Court made its ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 it was met with a mix of hostility and gratitude. This many people hoped would begin to bridge the education gap between blacks and whites, as well as help to bring the country together from a cultural sense. But the solution to segregated schools did not start to materialize for many years. Petition after petition were filed with the Atlanta Board of Education from parents of black children. Unfortunately for those who submitted these petitions the board either passed them over or ruled against them for a plethora of reasons. In 1958, Calhoun v. Latimer, the first lawsuit was effectively brought against the school system by the Atlanta Chapter of the NAACP charging that the Atlanta School Board was administrating a segregated school system. The Board attempted to get the case dismissed, but was not successful. On June 5 1959 the case was brought to trial where the School Board lost and was ordered to devise a plan to desegregate the school system by December 1 of that year. Atlanta, like some many other towns and cities across the south held up desegregation in the court system for many years. Once the politics and legal battles were settled the integration of Atlanta schools began in small numbers. 1

Courts cases were a major battleground in this civil rights battle. Court cases were a more civilized way for blacks and whites to voice their discontent with their current situation. And although violence connected to this issue did happen it was very limited and rare in Atlanta. Dozens of petitions to court rulings and lawsuits were raised from 1958 throughout the 1960’s. Since there was very little the Atlanta School Board could do on account to the standard set forth in Brown v. Board of Education, they used their own litigation to stall and attempt to disrupt plans of desegregation in the schools. The Board used excuses such as the economical problems that would be caused by desegregating schools. All of their reasons for not desegregating schools were deemed unlawful and thus they lost the cases. But none-the-less they were able to keep this issue tied up in court for years before integration began.2

While the courts were less than helpful to the school board and its agenda, it was greatly successful for the black community. Although it took years for the courts to work out the problem thus is the nature of our legal system at times. Aaron v. Cook in 1950 was the first lawsuit in Atlanta to cite the inequalities between the white and black schools. It said that the over 20,000 black students in Atlanta schools were having their 14th Amendment rights violated by the lack of funding for black schools that led to lesser education for blacks. The case was dismissed years later, but it was the first suit refuting the segregated schools in the south in a major city. This led to a few minor attempts to appease the black community through a sales tax increase and planned school improvements to black schools. These appeasements did not work for very long. After Brown v. Board of Education, began the string of petitions and suits that led to the desegregation of Atlanta schools. 3

Although the courts did not work in the favor of those who opposed school desegregation, this group found other ways to fight back. Violence and intimidation were not commonly used in Atlanta and those who opposed Brown v. Board of Education used other methods. From passing State Constitutional Amendments to not recognizing Brown v. Board of Education. The day that the Brown v. Board of Education decision was announced the Georgia state Attorney General, Eugene Cook, makes a statement that the Supreme Court’s decision does not apply to the state of Georgia. Later that year Georgians pass a Constitutional Amendment in order to give the Governor the power to close any desegregated school and provide subsides to private school students. This was a blatant dismissal of Brown v. Board of Education, only helping to fuel opinions on both sides of the argument. Every level of government from county to state fought the desegregation of schools. 4

The list of political moves made by government officials and teachers associations goes on and on from Brown v. Board of Education to the first Atlanta high schools to desegregate in August of 1961, and many years to follow. One of the most interesting things to me is that those who opposed integration made many claims that would seem outrageous today. Mainly their willingness to close schools that integrated or were being forced to integrate. 5 The problems that would have occurred due to such school closings would have been much worse than integrating them. Thousands of white students would be left without a school to attend, those who could attend private schools would receive sub par educations. 6 Plus, the politicians neglected the strain and dismay it would place on the students in the schools that were integrating. All of that just to keep a dead way of life from disappearing, one that had no room in a changing America.

Still desegregation took time. It was not until early in the 1970’s that the Atlanta Public School System became fully desegregated. I had no idea that it took almost twenty years for the city where great civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Maynard Jackson were from to desegregate its schools. But Atlanta was very much like the rest of the south using gradual integration hoping that people would get fed up with it, and abandon the idea. But the black community stayed strong in their resolve through all the adversity thrown at them by the state government and school boards. They fought the school closings and bad funding, they fought state constitutional amendments and public disdain, but one issue that still remains to this day is the issue of busing. 7

The issue of busing students from their neighborhood to schools much farther away than their neighborhood school has been a continual issue since desegregation began in Atlanta. It is still an issue to this very day in some parts of Atlanta and its suburbs. I witnessed several school board discussions on this very issue when I was a high school student because my parents were representatives for my school. The main points of those meetings were the costs of the program that could be used for better things like more teachers, new schools, and computers, as well as the disproportionality of certain schools populations in comparison to the area the school was located in itself. I did not attend an Atlanta Public School System school, but did attend Dunwoody High School in Dekalb County, which has a busing system similar to the Atlanta School System’s program. My former high school is located in the suburbs of Atlanta and had a very interesting demographic of students while I attended it. Although Dunwoody as a town is about 85% to 90% white, the high school itself was only 45% white. Only 60% of the students at my high school were residents of the Dunwoody area. The rest of the students were bused in from parts of metro Atlanta, most over fifteen miles from their home. The interesting thing about this program is that its name is Majority-to-Minority or M-to-M. In my school’s case it was a bit of a paradox.

Although it may appear that I am bashing the busing program M-to-M intended to integrate and diversify school populations, I am not. I am attempting to show that the reasons for disputing this policy have remained similar for years. For example, in 1970 a group called HANDS Across Atlanta (Helping Atlanta’s NeighborhooD Schools) submitted a petition to the Governor of Georgia’s office against “mathematical racial balance [and busing due to] racial and geographic boundaries”. 8 In the petition it cites the issue of the amount of money it costs for the program and other uses for it. It also mentions the possibility of black students that are bused in becoming the majority at a school that is not even close, causing involvement of the parents to drop. These two points have been the corner stone of the argument against state mandated busing. Politicians have also tangled over the issue of mandatory school busing programs all the way up to the US Senate. In a speech by Virginia Democrat Senator Harry F. Byrd on the topic of busing in metropolitan areas he stated:

“Some people are demanding instant and complete racial mixing without regard to neighborhood patterns, the availability of school and transportation facilities, or the deep feelings of the parents and children concerned…by the arbitrary uprooting and busing of children …When the enforced mixing of races by some quota or formula becomes the dominant end of public education we are witnessing a perversion.” 9

The busing programs in Atlanta were nonetheless successful at integrating the student population. But that did not last for long in Atlanta schools. At first it was successful and there were almost no problems. There was a large increase in the number of black and white students going to school together when the program began. It was a rather harmonious arrangement, which encountered very little public resistance and practically no violence. It was interesting that in majority white communities the program went along easily, but in communities where whites were a minority they fought it and a lot of the time pull their children out of the schools they were in. The arguments about cost and student disruption from the busing were evident, but were necessary for the program to work. And it did for the most part until whites began leaving public schools and entering private schools instead. 10

Although public school desegregation was supposed to help blacks gain equality in schooling facilities and bridge the cultural gap helping whites and blacks to learn tolerance and understanding by learning together, many whites chose another form of protest by putting their children into private school. When school desegregation on mass began in Atlanta during 1970 many whites decided to remove their children from integrated public schools and place them in all white private schools, or move them to all white public schools. But mainly these students moved to private schools or what became known as ‘Escape’ Academies and “Segregation Academies”. 11 The number of students that moved to private schools in that one year was astounding. Over 20,000 white students left their neighborhood public schools and enrolled in private schools in Atlanta raising their enrollment over 50,000. Finding a private school for white students was not hard because over sixty new private schools were built in Georgia in between 1969-1970. Travel to these new schools was of little concern because most whites lived near a private school making the transition for the families easy. With this mass exodus from public to private schools by whites many public schools became all black. Though, there were drawbacks to these new private schools. 12

With some many white students entering private schools there was no way that all of these hastily arranged ‘Escape’ Academies would all be scholastically or structurally up to the state’s standards. As 20,000 white students poured into private schools, sixty of them being brand new, many problems arose for these schools. Several of these new private schools were set-up in abandon schools and churches, very few were actually new facilities. Several of the buildings that were occupied and refurbished for these private schools were denied occupant permits by the fire marshal for not being up to building codes at the time. Several of these schools were unable to receive academic accreditation from the state for having curriculums that did not give their students basic scholastic needs. Also some of these schools had trouble or were unable to provide school lunches to their students, which all public schools had to provide lunches to their students. While the “Great White Flight” succeeded in keeping some form of segregation for whites, it was nowhere near the standards of private schools that people know and expect today. 13

School desegregation in Atlanta as a whole had more than enough government infringement to attempt to stop it, but in the end turned out very well. But today with the low test scores in Atlanta schools there is a type of involuntary segregation taking place, reversing some of the affects from the desegregation of Atlanta schools. Suburbs have been expanding out of Atlanta throughout Gwinnett and Cobb Counties for example. And many of the people who moved out to these suburbs lived in the Atlanta city limits. These communities are overwhelmingly made up of white families and their schools are the same. Most of these new suburbs have very expensive housing costs, making African Americans less inclined to move there due to the income gap between white and black Georgians today. Thus, with few African Americans able to afford houses in these new suburbs these communities are not ‘segregated’, but lack the diversity of Atlanta and its suburbs that are part Atlanta counties. All though these people are not actively trying to get away from integrated schools, they are leaving Atlanta public schools because of lack of educational options and turning Atlanta public schools in to almost all African American schools. Private schools are on the rise again as well.

As I previously stated Atlanta public schools lack educational options that many other public schools or private schools have. These options such as large joint enrollment programs and multiple advanced placement course for accelerated students are small or under funded in the Atlanta school system. So many people who can afford to send their children to private schools, which are expanding as well as new ones being built. At $8,000 all the way up to $25,000 a semester very few African Americans can afford to send their children to such schools. Although Atlanta has the largest African American middle class in the nation and income is increasing in African American families, the number of African Americans enrolled in private school is a small portion of the population of Atlanta’s black community. So most upper-middle and upper class white students in Atlanta do not experience the diversity that school desegregation was meant to promote. I have experienced these factors myself growing up in Atlanta and having to parents who are very active in real estate and the school system, as well as other family member’s experiences.

Desegregation of America’s schools was a time filled with trials and tribulations for our country and the civil rights movement throughout the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. Many events that took place during that period are seen as deplorable and inhumane. But through all the turmoil, through all the suffering, and through all hate that did its best to stop the desegregation of schools, America grew and became a better stronger nation. The African American community gained leaders, pride, and the equality that they were owed since they first came to this country and became Americans. The south was the main battleground for civil rights problems during this period, and it like America learned and grew to become a better more tolerable place. Though Atlanta did not have any large-scale violence during school desegregation it was not devoid of conflict. With politicians disregarding Brown v. Board of Education, the battle over busing, and white students leaving public schools to enroll in private schools Atlanta’s schools experienced much turmoil during its period of transition from segregation to full integration. While there will always be work to do in order bridge the cultural and racial gaps in America our country is made better by its past, and can only continue to grow stronger.

1 S. Ernest Vandiver Papers, 10 November 1959.

2. H. Mark Huie, The Factors Influencing the Desegregation Process in the Atlanta School System 1954-1967 (Athens: 1967) 35-38

3. Atlanta Public Schools Timeline www.mindspring.com/~sartor/gradyhs/APS_chronology.html

4. Ibid

5. Ibid

6. “Escape Academies Have a Healthier Look Now”, The Atlanta Journal, 9 November 1970

7. Atlanta Public Schools Timeline www.mindspring.com/~sartor/gradyhs/APS_chronology.html

8. Herman E. Talmage Collection, 23 January 1970

9. US Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr., Herman E. Talmage Collection, 12 August 1970

10. US News and World Report, Clifford Hodges Brewton Collection of Lester Maddox 1964-1976

11. “Escape Academies”, The Atlanta Journal, 9 November 1970

12. Ibid

13. Ibid