February is Black History Month and this month has already proved history making with last Tuesday's election of an African-American woman, Judge Angela M. Eaves, to the Harford County Circuit Court.
But before anyone starts to hail Eaves' election triumph, which may have been aided by the primary election day ice storm that all but brought voting to a halt at 3 p.m., as a breakthrough in race relations in Harford County, let's remember this is the same Harford County which has successfully managed to keep the old Jim Crow era practice of "separate but equal" alive in its public education system more than half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed such discrimination.
I know there are plenty of apologists out there who will claim our schools are completely integrated to the letter of the law and, technically, they would be right. After all, as long as the overwhelming majority of the black kids in the county live south and east of I-95, and as long as the schools on the north and west side of I-95 have enough seats for all the white kids in those communities, the school system has met its responsibilities vis-à-vis the law.
In the 1960s, the condition which exists in Harford County's schools today would be termed "de facto segregation," essentially segregation occurring naturally because of economic and demographic reasons, rather than institutionalized — or de jure — segregation caused by actual law and/or overt public policy.
For those unacquainted with history, Harford County's public schools were strictly segregated along racial lines from the end of the Civil War when slaves — and there were several thousand living in this county — were freed until the last all-colored or "consolidated school," as they were euphemistically called, closed in 1965. For those who know their dates, that's 11 years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court that separate schools for white and black children were unconstitutional.
Harford school and community leaders fought a war of attrition against complying with Brown. In the face of lawsuits brought against the county by black students represented by the NAACP, a "blue ribbon committee" was appointed to craft an integration plan, one that called for a gradually phased in mixing of the races in the public schools. The original plan was open-ended. It "allowed" black children to seek admission to all-white elementary schools, subject to screening by a committee of school officials. If this phase succeeded, the county would then "allow" high school students to do the same.
As the NAACP kept up the pressure, and for obvious reasons, in 1956 a handful of black students were admitted to all-white elementary schools, Halls Cross Roads in Aberdeen and Edgewood Elementary, which essentially served the racially mixed military community.
Opponents of the so-called "stair step" integration plan claimed it moved too slowly. Baltimore Federal Judge Roszel Thomsen, however, upheld the plan with modifications, namely that black high school children could take a special examination, administered by the white school establishment, to gain admission to all-white schools. Thomsen also ordered two students who had filed the original suit to be admitted to the school of their choice. This is essentially how A. Dwight Pettit, one of the original plaintiffs, got admitted to an all-white Aberdeen school and later graduated from Aberdeen High School before the Jim Crow era in Harford schools officially ended. Pettit, a successful lawyer in Baltimore, was inducted into the high school's Hall of Fame last summer.
Fifty years ago this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond upheld the Harford stair step plan. The Aegis, whose stand on black-white relations has been well documented — the newspaper identified every African-American whose names appeared it its pages as "Negro" or "Colored" well into the 1960s — heralded the appellate court's ruling, writing: "This, it is felt, will bring a close to a controversy of long standing."
The person usually accorded the villain's role in all this officially sanctioned pussyfooting is the late Charles W. Willis, who was superintendent of schools at the time, and postscripts to history written by me and several of my colleagues have judged him harshly. Willis apologists say he acted in accordance with the wishes of the establishment that employed him, including one of his closest friends, the then-owner and editor of this newspaper, the late John D. Worthington Jr.
While the latter assessment is probably true, Willis certainly didn't stand up to the establishment and say: "Folks, the law is the law and we need to implement it posthaste." Instead, he crafted a number of excuses, such as, we don't want to force this in a way that it foments the violence that occurred other places, like Little Rock. Or, black students weren't equipped educationally or emotionally to be assimilated and it wouldn't be fair to just thrust them into new surroundings. And, what about all those black teachers? Wouldn't they face similar pressures? In other words, Willis and other community leaders all but admitted the all-black schools weren't up to all-white standards. Fancy that.
Cynics say the Harford school integration plan dragged the process out just long enough for the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, with urging from several prominent Harford County residents, to decide to build a new high school in Bel Air. A coincidence of history that John Carroll opened as integration was ending? You be the judge.
But back to Harford County of 2008. You may have read in Friday's newspaper how the school system is having difficulty filling the principal's job at Edgewood Middle after the incumbent announced his departure in mid-year. (Principal Wayne Perry will remain until his replacement takes over.)
The underlying problem is a lack of qualified candidates in the pool of assistant principals from which new principals are typically drawn. Because Edgewood Middle is an under performing school in the eyes of the State Department of Education, the principal must possess special qualifications. If the internal pool lacks such applicants, the obvious question is, "Why?" School officials know where the problem schools are and what they have to do to comply with federal and state laws, such as No Child Left Behind. They shouldn't allow something like this to happen.
People will argue the de facto school segregation that exists in Harford County may be insipid, but it's not by design. The majority of the county's black population lives in the communities south and west of I-95 because that's where it can afford to live. If the schools there underperform state standards, and most do, it's no different that what happens in many other communities, not just in Maryland but across the country. And, besides, what's the remedy? Would you have us go back to the practice of busing to achieve racial balance, so prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, and so disastrous?
To the credit of the school system and some of the local elected officials, the furthering of the concept of magnet schools for specific curriculum and career paths, is starting to put some "equality" into the concept of equal educational opportunity, Harford County style. Unfortunately, full implementation is still years away and, doesn't this still sound a lot like: "Any student can apply to be accepted," subject, of course, to review by a screening committee, or maybe an entry exam.
Which should make us all wonder. In a county where you can still find the stars and bars flying proudly from Fallston to Whiteford, or emblazoned on many a gun rack equipped pickup truck, how far have we really come in 50 years with race relations in Harford County?
History answers: "Not very."
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