Michael Overstreet

Hist 3090  Gagnon

November 5, 2004

Research Paper

 

 

 

Cobb County School Integration: A not so difficult transition

 

 

            The History of America has been one of a resistance to rapid change.  The people of this great land have long been unwilling to accept what is cast upon them by the powers that be.  Decisions are usually passed down and usually rejected by people around the country.  Something has to happen on a grand scale in order to bring about change in the social structure of the American way of life.  It was this way with slavery and women’s liberation and the Civil Rights movement.  So having this been said, it should have come as no surprise to any that it was so this way with the integration of schools.  It began in the late 19th Century with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that “separate but equal” facilities were Constitutional.  This brought about long struggles with segregation throughout most parts of the country and the entire South.  This segregation was not limited to the restrooms, buses, street corners, and lunch counters.  This segregation was prevalent in schools everywhere.   The struggle for integration began early in the twentieth century all over the country.  The eventual freedom of civil rights for blacks in America was not won overnight but over many years of suffering and death and hard work on the behalf of civil rights activists from many different demographic arenas.  While the integration of Cobb County Schools was undoubtedly as much of a long time coming as anywhere else in the country, the bloodshed and serious controversy took place predominately in places outside the county for it took little other than monetary withholding to force its hand.

            The question to ask in order to understand the relative ease with which the Cobb County School System was integrated lies in understanding things about Cobb County and what made it unique as well as a brief background of the integration movement. 

            In 1954, the United States Supreme Court came to a unanimous ruling that repealed the idea that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional.  In the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that the rule of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.  This meant that schools were to integrate as well as every other aspect of public life had to do the same.  This case may have done splendid things in theory, the implementation and enforcement of this ruling was a different sort of question all together.  While this laid the ground work for the eventual success of the Civil Rights movement, the struggle was hardly near the end. 

            Now that the background of the Brown case is out of the way, the next major theme to help in understanding the rarity of Cobb County brings itself forward. 

            Most of the major problems that arose from integration of schools were in heavily black populated areas.  These are areas like Birmingham, Alabama.  In Birmingham there were race riots and federal troops and federal orders to force integration.  None of these were so in Cobb County.  While the County was not going to integrate until they had to, it was not going to be as big a problem there as it had been in aforementioned areas.  The next area of discussion will be the problems that Cobb County did have with integration and then the reasons why the conventional violence and other problems were not so prevalent in Cobb County.

            “Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the Cobb County Board of Education on 1 March 1965 formally agreed to desegregate by a vote of 5 to 1.”  This plan involved students in grades one and twelve being allowed to choose between the school they currently attend or the school that is closest to them with ample space and transportation.  According to this plan, every year subsequent to that two more grades would be added to the list.  This would allow for each grade to have been fully integrated by the 1970-71 school year. While this plan seemed completely reasonable to most of the members of the board, the HEW turned it down and said that they needed to come up with a way to perform this task in a much quicker manner. 

            The pressure spoke of previously refers not only to political pressure, but also to funding pressure.  Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, schools that did not have an integration plan or at least one in the works by March 3, 1965 would have federal funding of their schools cut.  This was the most pressure necessary to get the ball rolling in Cobb County.  While this rule was for all schools, Cobb County was one of only 3 of the 190 school districts in Georgia that had a plan approved by the HEW at the time that one was eventually approved.  This displayed how quite obvious it was that most districts were not terribly eager to bring about the end to segregation.

            Some on the board were angered not only by this decision, but by the fact that this was being imposed on them at all.  They saw the HEW as nothing but a group of unelected officials and beaurocrats forcing an agenda on them.  They believed that this should be done at the pace and will of the inhabitants of the particular local government, locality, or municipality.  The original and lone dissenter of the original proposal, Gene Housley, said that he did not disapprove of integration but that he simply did not approve of the dictation of morality from Washington beaurocrats. 

            After this dealing with and rejection from the HEW and an honest attempt at a reform by the Cobb County Board of Education, they got back to work on a new plan.  This plan took what the HEW had said to heart and sped up the integration process.  This plan called for four grades to be integrated in the same fashion as was stated previously in the first agreement.  Then the next year another four would be integrated and after that the next four would be added.  This meant that by the 1967-68 school year that all of Cobb County schools would be integrated.  This plan, too, was rejected by the HEW again stating that it allowed too much time for the integration to take place. 

            The current head of the Cobb County School Board, Jasper Griffin, decided to take it upon himself to fly up to Washington, D. C. and meet with members of the HEW and see what they felt to be an appropriate integration proposal.  After a while with the officials, they had ironed out a pre-approved plan that now had to simply be approved by the County’s Board of Education.  This plan involved a much quicker way of desegregating the schools.  It began with the 1965-66 school year having half the grades in the district integrated in the way the previous two plans had prescribed.  Then in the following year the other half of the grades would be integrated in the same manner.  The HEW said that they rejected the previous Cobb proposals on the fact that there was such a low Negro population.  The HEW said that the county should have little or no difficulty integrating the system due to this fact.  The division of the Board of Education in Cobb County was never before displayed in a greater manner than when this issue went to vote.  The resolution passed by a narrow margin of one vote, 4-3. 

            There were other complications as well.  In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Marietta city schools had attempted to reduce scrutiny by pumping money into black schools.  Marietta had black schools and decent facilities, but Cobb County had never operated a black high school. The county had always paid the tuition for black students of appropriate age to attend Lemon Street High School in Marietta.  The city of Marietta, which is in Cobb County but has its own separate school district and board of education, would allow black students living in Cobb districts to attend the 1965-66 school year at Lemon Street High School, but following that they would no longer accept students from outside the Marietta School District.  This meant that Cobb had to immediately integrate all of its schools grades 10-12.  While the students at these schools were of great importance, the ones doing the instructing were just as important.

            Cobb schools had to deal with an even greater issue than integrating its schools’ students.  It had to integrate its faculty as well.  This was something that was state wide.  This ruling was commissioned by the Office of Equal Educational Opportunities and had a lot of bearing on the integration of students.  While this must have caused problems in many places in the state as well as around the country, it did not cause that many problems in Cobb County relative to what must have happened elsewhere.  The impact of black teachers on black students was greatly underestimated by many.  One teacher at Lemon High School said that the faculty there was top notch and nurturing of students in a segregated world.  He said that the school had a family atmosphere because of the few blacks in the county, everyone knew everyone.  By August 1966, 11 of 56 schools had both black and white instructors.  The importance of this integration as well as that of the students is hard to overshadow.  The black schools in the county as well as those in the city of Marietta would take large hits in the backlash of this desegregation movement. 

            With the loss of the Cobb county students at Lemon Street High School, the enrollment dropped very suddenly.  The school was closed by the fall of 1967.  Some students elected to stay in the all black schools that they had previously attended.  Against the recommendations of the HEW, these black schools remained open and students who wished to attend them were bussed in from around the county.  While these schools hung on for a few years, the lack of willing students forced them to close and the end of an era had seemingly come and gone.  With the progress so went some of the things people had held dear.  Though it seemed to be for the best, and everyone knew it was for the best, there was still a part of identity and culture that was lost forever in this struggle.

            By the latter half of the decade schools were completely integrated and the whole fiasco seemed to be a thing of the past.  School signups were happening at the same time every year and school districts did not involve any other statistic other than where a certain student lived.  The number of students was on the rise every year.  The number of teachers was on the rise every year.  The budget had finally been balanced in Cobb County and the county commissioner was in the black and seeing black students and teachers as much as anyone could have ever hoped for in Cobb County. 

            Now that all of this has been examined and all of the background on education and civil rights struggle in the U.S. and Cobb County given, the time has come to answer the question of why integration in Cobb County was so relatively easy.  According to the 1970 census of Cobb County residents 96% were white.  This left the remaining 4% to the black population.  This had a lot to do with the apparent lack of strife in the desegregation of the schools.  What is it to the people and students in the County to throw a few black students in the mix?  It is almost negligible the amount of black students that had to be integrated at the time.  This question is the one that must be asked in order to understand why this transition happened so smoothly and easily and without a whole lot of backlash. 

Another reason why this transition may have turned out so well could be the fact that the Board of Education was so willing to do the HEW’s bidding in order to have their schools in compliance with regulations.  As was previously mentioned, Cobb County, at the time that its desegregation plan was approved by the HEW, was 1 of only 3 school systems of the 190 in Georgia that had a plan of desegregation approved by the HEW.  While this did not include the systems that had been court ordered to integrate, this is quite a telling statistic.  The willingness of the county and apparently its inhabitants to have this ordeal be passed allowed for an easy and relatively painless procedure. 

There was a major battle going on in America during the 1950’s and 60’s.  This battle was over the Civil Rights granted in the amended United States Constitution to African-Americans.  This struggle culminated in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 65 and the Voting Rights Act of 1964.  Even though more than half a century earlier the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional, it took certain members of a large group to take it upon themselves to right what had been wrong for so many years.  Though the idea of separate but equal was struck down in 1954 by the Supreme Court, it would be a good number of years before most school districts would take it upon themselves to integrate their facilities.  Cobb County was no different in this regard from any other school district.  It took them until ten years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision to finally integrate their schools.  This was only after federal funding was threatened by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Cobb County struggled with a plan to integrate and eventually had to go to the HEW and ask them to pre-approve a plan for them.  This made many in the county angry for they did not deem it necessary for people in Washington to tell them how to run their school district.  But in the end it was Washington that won the day for blacks everywhere.  It was true that separate but could never be equal and so it was deemed necessary to eliminate separate and simply have equality.  The school board of Cobb County also had some complications in the fact that they had never run an all black high school.  They had previously just paid the tuition for Cobb black students to attend Lemon High School in the town of Marietta that is in Cobb County.

            While these problems existed in Cobb County, there were many that plagued other areas that did not plague this particular school district.  They did not have the race riots that so plagued urban areas.  They did not have the large black populations that made integration difficult for urban and other rural areas.  As was previously mentioned, the 1970 census showed that only four percent of Cobb County’s population at the time was black.  This, along with the willingness of the members of the County’s Board of Education to comply with federal regulations set down in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by the HEW lead to the transition of integration in Cobb County’s school district.

 

  1. Thomas Allan Scott.  2003.  Cobb County, Georgia and the origins of the suburban South: a twentieth-century history. Marietta, Ga.: Cobb Landmarks & Historical Society.
  2. “Board Adopts Integration Plan for County Schools.” Cobb County Times. 4 March 1965. 1.
  3. Selby McCash. “Georgia Schools must Plan to Integrate Faculty.” Cobb County Times. 1 April 1965. 1.
  4. “School Board ratifies Cobb Integration Plan.” Cobb County Times. 20 May 1965. 1.
  5. Lavice Lamey.  “Cobb Schools Begin Signups”. Marietta Daily Journal. 18 August 1968. 1.

 

To learn more about this subject matter, please see these websites:

    1. http://www.cobb.k12.ga.us/, This is the Cobb County School District website.
    2. http://www.naacp.org/, this is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s website.
    3. http://www.cobbcounty.org/judicial/superior_admin/sca_index.htm, This is the website of the cobb county government.