Race in Richmond: Inequalities persist in schools

Forty years after a judge's ruling sent whites fleeing Richmond's school system, for some students, it's still about busing.

Not who's forced to ride one, but who can't — students like Joseph Gray and his two brothers, who spend about $10 a day to ride the city bus from their South Side neighborhood to Thomas Jefferson High School in the near West End. It's worth the cost, Gray said, for the educational benefits TJ offers that his home school doesn't.

As out-of-zone students who attend TJ under the system's open-enrollment policy, Gray and his brothers are required to find their own transportation to school. At 6:38 a.m., they catch a city bus that takes them to Fourth and Broad streets, where they await another bus that usually gets them to school late.

With budgets tight, no school bus service is available for the brothers, even though the school system sends a bus for out-of-zone students enrolled in TJ's International Baccalaureate program.

So in a way, it's still about separate but unequal, too.

Decades after U.S. District Judge Robert R. Merhige sought to desegregate Richmond's schools through busing, the disparity in resources he tried to end — which had black students using cast-off supplies from white schools — still exists, just in another form.

Richmond students notice that disparity when they visit suburban schools and see the athletic facilities, the laptops their county counterparts are issued, and even the cafeterias.

It's a frequent topic of conversation at TJ, Gray said. "It's all they talk about, for a long time, till someone changes the subject," he said of his classmates.

When students from county schools visit TJ, "they like the way the school looks," Gray said. The 1930 school, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, looks "almost fictional … like something out of 'Harry Potter'" to students from sleek suburban schools.

But it's not a school they want to attend, and neither do many white families who live nearby, he added, even though the school is nestled in one of the city's safest neighborhoods.

"In my opinion, TJ's a pretty darn good school," said Gray, a senior. He attends TJ for its Advanced Placement courses, and also has taken some IB classes even though he's not enrolled in the program.

His family is willing "to sacrifice this or that" to pay for a bus to get to a public school, and that irony is not lost on him.

"What kind of message is that sending?" he said. He and his brothers are "fighting to go to the school and paying out of pocket to get there, and people right across the street" choose to go elsewhere.

School census figures back him up on that point — about 30 percent of eligible Richmond residents don't attend city schools.

Gray thinks his school fights a perception problem that keeps people away, thus lowering the per-pupil funding his school receives. Perceptions need to change for results to change, he said. "Otherwise we're going in a circle."

Daniel Zipperer, a social studies teacher at Thomas Jefferson, puts it more bluntly: "Part of the sickness of the leftover racism is, I think, the last battle that we fight in this," he said.

People like to talk about good schools and bad schools without defining what they mean, he said, "because if you define it then you expose the real problem."

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Richmond was not among the regions of Virginia that shut down their schools during the Massive Resistance period that followed the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation ruling. Richmond instead chose what historian Robert A. Pratt termed "passive resistance" in "The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond Virginia 1954-89."

The strategy worked until Merhige stepped in, ordering an interim busing plan for middle and high school students in a system that was already about 70 percent black.

Before 1970, when Merhige issued the first in a series of busing orders, Thomas Jefferson was more than 90 percent white. How that ratio came to be nearly reversed is a history lesson that Gray said he and his classmates know well.

"People assume race issues are behind us, but it's still brought up," he said. "We understand that most of the county schools are filled with white people."

For Anne Holton, daughter of former Gov. Linwood Holton, that white flight is something she remembers in "a very vivid way" from her childhood.

When Richmond schools opened on Aug. 31, 1970, nearly 5,000 white students were absent. The governor's children were not among the missing.

Holton's mother, Virginia, took her and brother Woody to Mosby Middle School that morning. Her father was pictured on the front page of The New York Times escorting her sister, Tayloe, to the previously all-black John F. Kennedy High School.

"I think back to those days a lot," Holton said. Her parents saw their decision to support Merhige's ruling as an "opportunity we had as a family in helping move our country forward in racial reconciliation."

Until middle school, her background had been "very much homogenous, white middle class," she said. At Mosby she saw how people differ but also "fundamentally how similar we are."

Decades later, her three children have learned those same lessons at Richmond city schools, she said. They feel at ease with people from all backgrounds, for one thing. And they have benefited from the schools' emphasis on arts and music even during times of declining resources.

Holton, wife of former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, serves on a foundation that raises private funding to bolster the school system. She's also a former juvenile court judge for Richmond and served as a clerk for Merhige in the early 1980s.

Merhige was the target of death threats, his guesthouse was burned and his dog killed in protests that followed his desegregation rulings.

But Holton said Merhige's regret was that he didn't issue his order to consolidate city and county schools before the busing rulings.

In January 1970, a few months before Merhige issued his interim busing order, Richmond annexed 23 square miles of Chesterfield County to help integrate the schools but also to reduce the black proportion of the city's population from 52 percent to 42 percent.

Two years later, Merhige ordered the creation of a single school system by the merger of the Richmond, Henrico County and Chesterfield County school systems, a ruling overturned by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, Lewis F. Powell Jr., a former chairman of the Richmond School Board, had been appointed a justice. Powell recused himself, and a tie vote let stand the rejection of Merhige's order.

The ironic twist to that chronology was that the Merhige rulings helped to integrate the county schools, Holton said. With the later ban on annexations, "we ended up with a bound city population and white flight."

But even if Merhige failed to desegregate Richmond's schools, what happened 40 years ago was the "symbolic key" that led to the integration of other parts of society, she said, especially because the process started with schoolchildren.

"People move around in a world that is integrated and that was not (the case) in 1970," she said.

"What seemed so frightening then has become so normal now."

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Dale F. Jones was among the minority of white Richmond residents who supported the desegregation efforts and kept his children in city schools. But it's a decision he said he came to regret.

"I was for it," he said of desegregation. "It's something that should have been done years and years before."

He blames the way the desegregation order was implemented for throwing the schools into chaos.

"The school administration was not prepared to handle this dramatic change," he said.

His daughter attended Albert Hill Middle School, and from Labor Day to Thanksgiving she had four English teachers. "They'd all quit," he said. "If you can't keep discipline, you can't teach."

The principal told him, "No education is taking place here. If I were you, I'd get my kids in a private school," he said.

"I felt that in looking back that I failed my children," Jones said. He thinks now he should have done what his neighbors all did, "and that was get out of the city and get into the county."

Zipperer, chairman of the social studies department at TJ, said his parents did just that in the mid-1970s. They had lived in the portion of Chesterfield that was annexed in 1970 but moved back over the line in 1975 for the county schools when he was 8.

Chesterfield schools, which weren't prepared for the huge influx of students that followed the busing ruling, had their problems, he said, "but you didn't hear about them."

Zipperer, whose two children attend city schools, thinks the perception problem that began then persists today and scares white families away from Richmond schools.

The image of county schools has been carefully guarded to protect real estate values, he said. "That's been the engine of prosperity since desegregation of the late '60s and '70s."

He said he understands his students' concerns over amenities that are missing from their school.

When he began teaching at TJ in 1993, the regional Governor's School was housed there "and that was really a serious eye opener as to the inequity of the distribution of resources."

The two schools were "very much segregated from each other," he said. For about his first five years at TJ, he taught in a classroom that had no air-conditioning, although a private contractor had donated units for the Governor's School classes, he said. "So all their rooms from the very first hour that they opened up were air conditioned. Ours were not."

Zipperer recalls a sweltering round of SOL testing his students took during that era. "It's over 90 degrees in here. The kids are sweating on their papers," he said. "And they're expected to pass this high-stakes test, and of course they didn't."

It was a poignant reminder of the legacy Merhige sought to end.

"Even though you didn't have Klansmen burning crosses out there in the field across from the school," Zipperer said, "even though there weren't racial epithets flung around, where do the priorities go? Everyone can see it, and in the case of air conditioning, everyone can feel it."

kkapsidelis@timesdispatch.com

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