About racial inequalities in education. This is live coverage of the southern festival of books. Good afternoon and welcome to the session. The two different stories of the integration process. Its triumphs and failures and to all of you at home watching we say welcome as well. As wel the audience will enjoyoy the talks and will have questions that we are going to save until the end this afternoon. Both of these deal with education. We take a lot of pride in our history. We see ourselves as a progressive Southern City and we also like to present the story as almost a triumphant story. We didnt have the violence of other southern cities and weve chosen to craft that narrative and forget some of the painful parts of the story and we will hear some of the painful parts as well as the successes. Our presenters today hes written a book about the integration of athletics at vanderbilt and it has aof natio tremendous amount i know that you will enjoy his presentationo from another who crossed over into vanderbilt to be the first on the Basketball Team. He will be followed by Hans Lee Erickson has a fine book called making the unequal metropolis and this is the integration of metro Public Schools but much more than that. In her book you see nashville pursuing urban renewal money after world war ii the model cities programs and how all of this ultimately ties togetherge into our educational system sofi andrew is going to go first and then he will tell you about the story and vanderbilt. It is an honor to be on thebh panel. You talked about how nashville likes to celebrate without talking about the pain it took to get there. The subject of mine is phrased is reconciliation without the truth is just acting and people often want to get to the reconciliation part without thee hard work that it takes to get there so this year youve seen a lot of this celebration. My book is being read with thee entire class and an engineering scholarship and a courage award in the Athletic Department so if you look at what is happening today its a feelgood story that would work out the way everybody planned but that isnh how it happened so learning the truth of how it came together is what i try to do in this book and im happy to be on a panel thats about civil rights. It was important for me to tell the story of the context and the place that. Wallace operated and thats the deep south in a tumultuous period in history and its not about the scores of games or statistics, its about what it takes to be a pioneer and it is a legitimate civil rights story considering he started in 1964 in brown v. Board and was around nfl. Age to see what the College Students were doing heel entered the week after Martin Luther king i have a dream speech and defend 64 and 65. He will say he could feel the country changing that there was a sense of momentum for him and members of his graduating class been that happened then mary and he needed to be prepared to take advantage of these opportunities and he was. He was the starting center on a team that won the championships ichampionships intennessee incle and 66 but more importantly than that he was the valedictorian of his class and he was into math and science and played the trumpet, hes learned karate, sings opera, all of his older sisters went to college and this is on the incomes. Education was important in their home. He saw basketball as a means to an end and a ticket out of jim u crow south so his goal was to get a scholarship in the midwest and he went on recruiting trips to places like wisconsin, michigan and he was even recruited at ucla and this was his whole dream is to get a scholarship to the north but unfortunately he saw the ugly underside of College Sports that still exist and on a lot of the trips he was told heres yourr car come here some cash when you come to school here and you dont need to worry about going to class. He was an engineer but i considered him a poet at heart. He wasnt going to leave the deep south for his athletic ability and one of these better campuses. So at that point he began to take vanderbilt seriously even though he grew up just a couple miles from the campus they were segregated until 64. He would have been excluded most of his life it goes back to the same settings. They were leading the nonviolent protests at the lunch counters and when the administration learned it was one of their own students doing this they expelled him from the university so this is at the time they wert going to become one of the stronger universities and the Media Attention that came was as you could imagine very negative so it was an embarrassing moment on the National Stage so a newge chancellor was brought in was a much more progressive figure at the time and he spoke often about race being the central issue and his daughter was a music professor told me her dad was also a big sports fan. Pr so he understood the role of sports plays and he knew if he made a move people would Pay Attention so he called the coach into his office and said you can recruit a black player and i would like you to so you had the valedictorian star player, the obvious choice and the only question was would he accept the assignment and face these road trips just a couple years after all the famous encounters that you see. So i spent eight years working on this book the first four on research and durin during that l fouryear stretch, the now professor in washington, d. C. Flew down to nashville and we spent the day just driving around town looking at the parks he played in and are one point we were over by the fact i thate this uppity and i appreciate all of you being here instead of at the titans game. He said to pull the car over here i want you to see these and we looked at the rocks and treea and thats all it was. He said thats the rocks that i prayed on. So that was cool to see thesat actual rock that he sat on so he makes the decision to come too vanderbilt and today he has a phrase you can be treated well, treated poorly or not treated at all. Id never heard that before but its a profound way to look at life. So from the beginning he experienced all three treatmen treatments, one including the chancellor and the chaplain at the university that has univerl group of black students but for the most part he experienced tha other type right from the beginning so h since he arrivedn campus about a month early just to move into his dorm and get acclimated and meet people. He wanted to get a little of a head start in on one of the trips, the name star showed him around campus and said heres the church of christ where you should go to church. He said growing up in nashville he never would have thought of walking through the doors of a white church but this is what being a pioneer was all about soap or three sundays in august he walked in, sat in the backin and was eager left alone or ignored depending how you want to look at it and the fourth sunday he is pulled aside by some Church Members and theyey said you cant keep coming to the church, some say they will write us out of there though. You have to leave right now. This is before hes taken his first class hes expelled andnd his best friend followed. To vanderbilt and his first day of class the teacher says i see they let the nword in. On the Basketball Team he wasnt treated very well either. They canceled rather than played against the team so its not until his sophomore year heye becomes the first to play and the first half of the game hes hit in the nose, cant see out of one eye. They dont even whistle to stop the gam game so it isnt until y come out on the court and as they walked into the vanderbilt locker room the crowd cheers that he has been injured and he spit on when he walks back. They assist him with ice packs and a half timeclock the rest of the players and Coaching Staff walk out to the court before the warm warmup. They leave him alone in the locker room knowing that he will have to walk back out where all of these people harassing and are waiting on him. What would have been an ordinary walk back was a long and hellish trauma for him and when asked about the approach to road trips in general he said when he looked at the schedule each year and knew he was traveling to mississippi and Mississippi State he looked at the schedule with a sense of dread and would imagine whats the worst that can happen to me on one of these trips and in his mind it was that he would be shot and killed another one of these towns were on the court and yet he still had the courage to persevere and try to play like anybody else. But he said theres three types of treatment being treated well, poorly or not at all it was the third way not being treated at all that was the most difficult. It wasnt a verbal abuse but defends of isolation that was the most difficult for him and this is the time when do greekgd system dominated the sociald scene. To those. There was no student center. You would walk in and she would tell me as she looked around there were no other students. You could walk into the biology lab and who ever sat next to you became your lab partner but what if no one sat next to you. There is a feeling of isolation it deprived him of humanity. But he didnt quit. Growing up he had been a student of sports history and read a lot about Jackie Robinson said he would ask himself what would Jackie Robinson do in this situation and that was to not quit. His mom told him to put on the full armor of god and that is what will protect you in these circumstances that he doesnt quite and his mother passes away of cancer before his senior year and he dedicates the last game of his career to his mom and he plays the game of his life. He has about as many as they team might get and he saves the best for last. It was a slam dunk in the middle of the game and that doesnt sound very noteworthy except it was outlawed in College Basketball at the time and i have a whole chapter about the undertone of this but she saved it for the last minute and said growing up in segregatedand he v nashville over segregation laws that are unjust and there has been no dunking rule so this was his form of protest on the way out. So he gets a standing ovation and theres a lot ofsi significance and at that moment he is more popular in this townd than hes ever been and if there is every movie made about this book which i hope there will be, that would probably be the triumphant scene. But he didn didnt let it stop. He had this feeling in the pit of his stomach when he walked off the court that they were too eager to want to wrap up the story. Even though there were no other players coming along behind him and he only played against one in their entire careers with this rules were not really jumping on board he said he had an obligation to the people that would come behind him to tell the truth about his experience had been like so even though hed been this valedictorian and engineering graduate he ended up setting himself up as a Hometown Hero for a bright career in his hometown he said he understood he was writing his ticket out of town and it was all over in nashville and unfortunately he was right. I interviewed the reporter thatd wrote this article about him and he told me the phones rang off the hook when it ran on the front page where he talked about being kicked out of the churchth and the way the day addressed his best friend. And they were calling to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper saying he was ungrateful and wishing him good riddance out of town so. Graduates and is adopted by the 70 sixers come he goes to philadelphia and he has never lived here again but he goes on to a successful career. S in the he served six years in the National Guard and he is an attorney for the Justice Department for about seven years and has now been a professor of law at American University in washington, d. C. And when the book came out, the first event we did together was at politics and prose. It was a very warm and welcoming crowd the next day we were flying down to nashville and he said we are going into a hot environment in nashville and he didnt mean it by any good sense of the word. So we had our fingers crossed and he did an event at the Downtown Library had 400 people showed up. Afterwards there was a long line of people. I had a chance to watch this interaction. It was surprising and touching and emotional. People came up crying with bloodshot eyes as if they had been crying. They were saying things like i wish that i had been paying attention to what you were going through at the time. Een ther i wish i had been there for you. You are a hero please forgive me. For me to see that was very rewarding and over the last year or so since the buck came out, that sentiment has been relayed more often and often and it sparked a conversation aboutar,s race at vanderbilt which is pretty cool to see. The difference between the way that he was perceived when he gave that interview and how he is perceived now he said het wa suspected people wouldnt want to hear what he had to say. He had this hope people would understand so now its like all the people hes been waiting for the last 50 years. Thank you very much. [applause] good afternoon. Its a pleasure to be here andl im thankful for the southern a festival of books for inviting me and i am also grateful for you choosing to spend your saturday with us. Someday. N [laughter] the story is powerful in the way that americans often are. They help us think about the different kind of interactions w with students in the past andulh adult in nashville today that capture a lot of feelings of justice or injustice so what i want to do is pick up on some of those individual stories but also try to look more broadly and think about not only the individual actions of the policy choices in politics that condition a lot of those interactions. Vi the national desegregation story offers many powerful stories for example, in 1957 she held her fathers hand as she walked to school for the first time. She walked to school as a young black girl going to a school and through a crowd of white protesters she described as not being afraid because she had her fathers hand and at a different school, grace mckinley led her daughter and a friend through the same crowd. After the night before pressing and buying out his close very carefully. We should recognize and appreciate and applaud challenging the regime of segregation. They took a really important step in moving beyond that regime but if we start with only those children, we are going to miss a lot about what created the conditions they confronted. In nashville as most of the a country segregation resulted from a very powerful andation. Robustly, that created extensive discriminatory housing policy. Who got mortgages to live in what place with what kind of federal subsidy. It was in a lot of ways as ws another hiscribed it, a centrifuge easing their movement in that respect. The centrifuge operated not only because they were denied access to those that because the Public Housing focus on concentrating them in the segregateded neighborhoods. These are policy choices that reinforced the discrimination and other aspects that we have to recognize them as policy choices that were consequential. And schools were not separate from the making of this. They were in fact and we can see this really well in nashville part of the way people thought about making a segregated metropolis. The commission to find a neighborhood around the existence of a school and thought about segregation both in relation to each other so its not just that segregated schools like the ones they were trying to challenge resulted from housing policies that schools followed. Owed. Instead they had been part of making that segregated space, and additionally there were ample ways that this was in the 1950s were deciding toactively s actively segregate children. Boxing is one of the first examples of that act. You are likely to ride a bus for the purpose of segregation beyond closer segregated schools that the city or the county was assigning you. Other decisions like the shape of the school zones were like reinforced segregation as well. So these are the names of children that we need to keep in mind in the recognize their courage in doing this work. But what they were up against was this interconnected web ofie policies. That is a lot to ask sixyearolds and their parents to challenge. So although we are talking about the 1950s, we are talking about a lot of the structures that still shape american is, for ty today. For example its an important part of the story of how it comes to be that the average american white family has a wealth of more than 150,000 whereas the average africanamerican family is less than 10,000. So choices that we made 60 years ago have really a present impact to this day and when you think of the National City where the highway runs into Public Housing sits you can see other decisions that shape the landscape that matter very much today. Hi so there is nothing distant about this and i would assertac there is Nothing National either in its historical form or present form. We can identify the causes both historically and in the present day. Shifting to the later phase of the story was 1954 when thee it supreme court. It was a part of a consequential move towards the desegregation but it turned out to be very gradual and more than a dozen years after they began to desegregate the vast majority of students that the vast majority that attend, so that initial form proved to have limited impact for most children. Nashville moved into its next stage that began requiring busing across neighborhood lines and sends under the pressure of the court order the schools became the statistically the segregated schools in theools ih country from 1971 to roughly 98. We can see this through the eyes of another student. In 1971 he was a second grader that road to nashville and also had a first day of school story. He remembered being a seven or 8yearold on the bus and seeing people at the school when he arrived and he remembered thinking its a parade. They are welcoming me to school. When he realized what was on the sign she realized it was a protest rather than a parade but over the course of the next ten years when he moved through various schools he felt he had a combination of positive and negative experiences. He made friendships that he realized talking a huge amount he wouldnt have otherwise learned and he saw the teachers placed him in the lower reading groups and then he had to work his way out of those based on his own ability. He was in the end convinced that it was worth it for him. Educators may powerful traces that in some ways helped it become a large experience for other students. Because we have this story i will tell you that one is of a coach on the Basketball Team that made a decision that in the early 1970s, he is team would have dinner in the homes of all of their players and so that meant sometimes they would gather together in donaldson in the suburbs and a white family home and sometime they would have students gather together to enand those decisions are to facilitate the interaction on terms that were equal and cooperative and represent some of the promise so i want to recognize those accomplishments but its also the case that it contained to inequality is oneid was deciding when where kids would go to school and when. So he would ride out of his neighborhood and in 1971 with the local and federal influence in the shaping of the national desegregation plan, several Elementary Schools were closed h and several junior or senior schools were converted to lower grades into the relationship s between the neighborhood and ate school was broken not just with busing that the act of closing the schools and in the intentional effort to minimize, the younger children rode buses out of the neighborhood. White suburban students were never asked to make that move. At the vulnerable ages as many families would feel they stayed closer to home so these create inconveniences but moree crucially we could think of it as a public pedagogy. What does it teach about who gets what and why. It was understood that rather than approaching it as a matter of fairness it has to be approached as a matter of mitigating resistance and that logic produced a lot of inequalities. Another came when thinking about curriculum in the same year as they begin to bus their students, the city and the statd invested heavily at the High School Level and this is when for those of you in nashville are familiar they get big and c predominantly in the suburban locations. That decision is another part of the public pedagogy. The idea that schools should be thinking about kids as workers and in practice, that opened a lot of opportunities for the segregated schools to segregatee again between vocation and academic classes were some cases between different types of vocational classes. I give you these examples because i want to point out that it doesnt just one thing. Its the consolidated results of seemingly small and disconnected decisions that shape what the experience is going to be and often even as the city became one of the most of the segregated placethe segregatedpe process conveyed a lot of these messages about how different communities in the city would be treated. That doesnt negate the fact that students like hubert dixon had consequences for themselves as individuals in the process. But i think we have to think both about the inequalities and benefits and we have to notice the Public Discourse about what it meant and how people responded tended either to focus on the inequalities or wha her t it was that students were learning and instead is dominated by the language in the process of the segregation so its taken a lot of years to pull away the focus and to ask basic questions about what can be learned in the process. So i want to point out these difficulties right now especially because we are in an interesting moment. There is now a lot more scholarly knowledge and possiblw public attention to how segregation is a problem and how it might be an important policy approach. We have social Science Research that makes it very clear in terms of the variety of educational outcomes most celebrated among them test scores but also social learning and the way children come to understand who they are in the world and understand their community desegregation can have strongly positive benefits but it would be a shame if we were to return to that approach without also recognizing the complications and difficultieses of previous cases, so i hope that the story offers us a way to think about what it would mean to return to the promise and the need and benefits but to do so in ways that are informed by the complications of the earlier era. [applause]the audi the one request that id make is if you come to this microphoneur over here to your left and myr r right so that everyone can hear the question please just line up here with your questions and our guest would be delighted to answer the questions. While you were getting up to ask your questions i would like to ask you to say a few words about the relationship of all of this and i ask because those of you that live here know that our mayor has made Affordable Housing a major priority because so many of these formerly africanamerican neighborhoods in sort of re gentrified if you know and they are pushing africanamericans labor force especially in downtown and the city center out to places where we dont have transportation to help them get into the city where they work. Can you say a few words about Housing Development and the impact . I hope that in experiencing this economic boom, the resources that brings shows the desegregated approach to what it would be and it would be a shame to have this opportunity go missing. There are ways they need to operate in a housing policy that if you think about the schools and housing together it i to con opportunity to do so. Know i have the luxury of knowing about half of the crowd here. We have worked on a project and barbara knows that i will tell you. I also wanted to ask a question related to the former Freedom Fighters where they areu reflecting back generously for the rest of us and one of the things that has come out and iyo wondered if you had comments about the impact is when the freedom writers would do things courageous to risk thei risk thn safety and to standha up for wht we all theoretically believed in our training they were punished, animprisoned etc. And when theyv came back to nashville, many of them are starting to talk about how they were not welcomed realr becausebased Church Things up and made things more difficult and i wonder if you have similar reactions. Widelythe sense that he wasntt always welcomed but it is a little different than youe was m described. When he was a freshman he said that this was at the time you have to decide. He chose the sort of Martin Luther king path and a lot of his friends from high school that he was too conservative and that he was just being used as a token so i write a chapter she describes this as four days in hell anhell and its the most os they got the day before theyey travel down to oxford he knew this would be a difficult experience so he went back to gain some strength and be around friends and feel this environment before he goes off f to this cold oxford mississippi and as hes walking down the hallway and administrators as they are just using you as a token, so this warmth and support that he was hoping for he didnt receive. One of those days is when he goes back to church in his homef neighborhood and they say i hear that they adopt lynched you to him it wasnt a joke at all so o to him, those cases do not represent the entire feeling he was receiving in nashville but10 it wasnt 100 positive as you might havthat youmight have ass. Other questions from the audience. I dont want to treat you like my students and start calling you by name. I am an adjunct professor and i did get in late but i was wondering if any of you could touch on politics. Richard fulton who was the only member representing the state or one of only four that voted forr all three i wondered if you have any commenthadany comment on thl situation at the time. Of local Leadership Matters tremendously and one of the things that distinguishes nashville and experienced the beginning from some of the other places like charlotte have created a municipal not unanimity that the broad support was the difference between the leadership of both elected and judicial so they began with them meir that explicitly opposed it and sought to work with the city council by making it difficult to buy buses. And a dot product of that is very material. Without enough you end up with kids having to start and end school on a staggered schedulele thats difficult for families. So there was a lot of resistance and to prove to be consequential in experience. The other thing needed is essentially called for the week he useful and he caught it and do d not move, unlike in charlotte where the judge proved consequential in the details of house charlotte with desegregate, there was a judicial supervision that allowed a lot of these inequalities in the process which the plaintiffs attorneys knew and were trying to contestn to go on altered so i think they suffered especially from weakro leadership on this question. That relates to schools and your book that nashville has a reputation as you mentioned of being a moderate city at that time but it wasnt so much that there was a lack of Job Opportunities for africanamericans for highly educated so he will talk about his experience into the incredible caliber of the teachers and the bees were people that had studied as the most highly educated but in nashville not that theres anything wrong with being a teacher but the only jobs that were available if you were that highly educated was to be a teacher and so they were incredible and he loved his experience there and i think its a little bitthose when counterintuitive when they say he should have been grateful for this opportunity he came from a highly academic high schooloe where he had a wonderful experience and he goes from that warmth to the cold experience possible politics in terms of the Job Opportunities played a large role and created theere wt excellence and there was the irony of segregation. Other questions please. [inaudible] i wondered how pervasive the experience was and how they chose which teachers went to which schools. In my case i had no history witb nashville but i heard from the people in the faculty that were africanamerican that they were in a dilemma and they didnt want to send their best teachers to the white schools or the first teachers they were kind of in a catch22 in terms of that and there was no preparation for the kid to to move into these environments where they were meeting students from wildly divergent cultures. They were just so difficult to manage. The administration kept changing but i didnt see what the answer was to not having any backgrou background. There was a tremendous amount of shifting between the schools and it isnt clear to me how those decisions were made so there was some influenza but the court requirement was to createi a constant ratio across the city and that created a lot of disruption in the schools where the faculty had been they majority africanamerican and the core question that you are asking is what does it mean to take a statistically desegregated student population and make it a place that is just and fair. One of the things that prompted this was talking in 2004 and he said i think i went to de segregated schools budesegregatr had an integrated experience and the distinction that he is drawing is part of theever difference putting kids who come from different neighborhoods with different experiences, both black and white i should be clear into the same place and allowing the numbers to signal compliance versus asking what does it mean to make sure everybody is getting what they need in schools. And i think you made a good point that we achieverepresen statistical representation but they were always the minority of the statistical end and so eventually africanamericans realized wit what a high price s being asked of them and theyme wanted to change the ratio toesn some degree. Contesting the shape of the initial order to modify it inntd ways that didnt make the existence of the schools and possible pitch is one way to describe what the order was doing and that process didnt end up changing the plan but would it is surfaced a lot of the questions about the costs and tradeoffs. You mentioned the segregation through housing and how the inner cities related to theated suburbs. Do you have any examples of how that was accomplished, was that contracts or the law or mortgages, how did that work . I think all of those are part of the story. If we were thinking about the 1960s, there are federal programs through the g. I. Bill that provides a lot of Financial Support to purchase homes in suburban areas and you might be failure with the maps that were a product of the late 1930s and early 40s and those are in the earlier example of a visual one of the decision of where the credit would flow into who woulh not have access to the credits there was the decision to setesu port and mortgage credit and a decision on the part of the typically local bankers choosing who they thought of as credit worthy or not too often denied the black by years. It continues into the early 70s. You asked about contracts and i think one of the National School administrators became the plaintiff when he tried to buy a home and was told by the agent that there was a colored paper on the house and it was invalidated in 1947 but was not unusual to linger well beyond that. So yes mortgages and contracts and yes, discriminatory banking decisions often that the collective corporate level but we should also think about where it was being built and extensive investment in the highways as choices that make getting to the suburbs possible. A lot of the inter state structure opened the same year the busing began and in some ways that tells you about the forces of segregation happening at the same time that the efforts are accelerating. Last question please. Im also an engineeringd graduate so i would like to thank you otherwise i wouldnt have gotten here in the firsti e place. I remember reading a while back that they were going to try to run a larger busing system through town to make it easier for people and i think it ran from east to north nashville and there was a lot of pushback. I also read an article that they are trying to build a train system through tennessee not all of it but the metropolitan area. Do you think there will be that kind of pushback that the buses will expand through nashville and if you think that there will be a pushback from the Training System as the . I think youve already seen n the pushback from the equity in the routes that are selected in the Public Transportation but its clear as you mentioned the transportation is taking place and you have people moving to different parts of the region where there may not be any transportation. This is what the city is facing right now and what can be the seeds of the paul. I think the transportation is at the heart of the issue to watch. Thank you to those in the audience i hope you will read these books. They should be required reading for anybody that has anything to do with Public Policy and middle tennessee. Thank you. Have a nice afternoon. [inaudible conversations] you are watching th book tv on cspan2. Esentation to talk about the representation of women in the media we will be back with more coverage from nashville in just a few minutes. Owant to introduce you here now to the executive director [inaudible]is a a private nonprofit around for 40 years we do humanitiesmanitye educationbased programs [inaudible] how did it begin . It began to sort of gather at the same time they came to ralln around the cause and its been going strong ever since. Its been every year but two ofe them so other than that weve been in nashville every year. Hit how many do you invite and what does this cost . Over the course of the threeday weekend its inexpensive event to put on for the individual contributors and the nationalow endowment for the humanities that supports all loved programming. Its somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. We are here outside the sessions the legislative process in the public library. We expect around 20 to 25,000 to be here. We get great support from the arts commission, very supporti supportive. Hats a gr [inaudible] the authors that areing, anyf participating many of them are th actually local but the scope of the program over the years has expanded and we have authors coming from all over so while that may have changed we still think there is a regional flavor. We have local food trucks that are serving people all weekend and regional exhibitors. The programming itself we think has become regional. As you and others booked solid for the country. [inaudible] we do. T