Failed urban public schools helped produce a black ghetto whose
residents evolved their own language. Having failed
to teach English, school bureaucrats in Oakland,
California decided to teach the black kids what they already knew.
In place of English, they proposed to teach "ebonics" [1].
A question comes to mind. What caused the quality of
our big city schools to go from excellent to pathetic in
a few decades? Various experts will give you a long
list of reasons, but they'll never mention the main one.
Public mention of that reason would end the career
of an educator or a politician; so they all practice
denial. Our urban public schools went from
excellent to pathetic because of the actions of a lawless
federal judiciary.
We discussed the Warren Court's landmark school
desegregation rulings in a companion essay, Viking Jurisprudence, Part 2. And we learned that they
were based on fraudulent constitutional interpretations. However, they served important
values, and they now enjoy a high degree of public respect. So let's not beat a dead horse. But
let's keep two things about Brown v. Topeka in mind [2].
First, the Brown case was about busing.
The Topeka School Board had required Linda Brown,
because of her race, to ride a bus two miles rather than
walk four blocks. That injustice caught the public
attention. And it helped gain acceptance for
legislation by judges. Second, the Brown ruling ordered that students be admitted to
public schools "on a racially nondiscriminatory
basis." That seemed fair to most Americans and also helped assure public acceptance
of a 14th Amendment interpretation that defied the well-documented intent of the Amendment's authors [2].
The Court soon junked the idea of public school admissions "on a racially nondiscriminatory basis."
And it soon lost its distaste for forced busing based on race. Following its direction,
federal judges ordered millions of school children, white and black, to do the same thing the Topeka School Board
had forced Linda Brown to do. They ordered them all to ride school buses miles past their neighborhood
schools. And they selected the victims by race.
The justices' motives had nothing to do with the
Constitution. They acted out of wounded pride.
In the South, the states had not offered much
response to the Brown ruling. Sometimes they even
used state or local police power to frustrate its goals.
Southern public school segregation remained virtually unchanged
until Congress passed an effective civil rights law a decade after the Brown decision [2].
The idea behind forced busing has been described as the
"hostage theory". Most citizens, black
and white, supported the idea of equal access to public
schools. Most white parents were willing for their
children to have black classmates. But it was not
their top priority. So the justices decided to get
their attention. Federal courts took their children
hostage and demanded ransom payments in the form of support for their own social
engineering project. The ransom note said, in
effect: we'll make your children suffer until you make
our plan work [4].
In all the desegregation cases, the judges asserted that the programs were required by
the need to uphold the Constitution. However,
forced busing based on race was contrary to the plain
language of the Constitution. It was also contrary
to everything said by the people who framed the
14th Amendment, even the minority who took the broadest
view of its meaning. But at least our judiciary
occupied the high moral ground. It was only trying
to serve the ideal of racial equality. Right?
Wrong. While the Supreme Court was demanding forced busing
programs, its members ran their own shop like a
plantation. You can read about it in the book, The
Brethren, by Woodward and Armstrong. All the
high-ranking Court employees were white, all the lowest
ranking workers were black; and the justices treated the
Blacks like serfs. They forced them to
provide personal service on the workers' own
time.
Justice William O. Douglas was the worst offender; he ordered
black Supreme Court employees to drive him around, clean his home,
and do his shopping. Black cleaning women lived in
fear of being fired if they broke anything. Within
the Supreme Court, racism was plain to see. That
racism mocked the justices' claim to be acting out of high
ideals. They were acting out of concern for
their own power and prestige [5].
Under the direction of a racist and power-mad Supreme Court, federal judges all over America took millions of children hostage. They poured many billions of taxpayer dollars down various educational rat holes and ruined dozens of fairly successful school systems. The complete story would fill a library. One can, however, review two fairly typical cases by visiting the Internet web site, The Cleveland case study included there includes well documented numbers that we'll use to compute an estimate of the total damage inflicted on American families and taxpayers by desegregation programs nationwide. In response to federal court orders, the Cleveland schools wasted about one billion dollars in a little over two decades during which about 200,000 students passed through the system. That averages out to about $5000 per student [6].
The Kansas City case was included to illustrate the incredible gall of our renegade judicial employees [6].
The Cleveland busing story was replicated dozens of times during the 1970s and 1980s.
For most of the period in question, about forty-five million
students, give or take a few million, were in U. S.
public schools. In a typical year federal judges
ran school systems containing at least 20 percent of the
forty-five million. That works out to about nine
million victims each year [7].
Each of those nine million children, on average, stayed in the
public schools for about a decade. In thirty years, the nine
million victims turned over about three times. So
27 million ruined educations is a reasonable estimate.
We'll assume that the $5000 per-student-cost in Cleveland was not far
from average for the nation as a whole. We know
that 27 million is a reasonable estimate for the total
number of students affected by integration programs
nationwide. Twenty-seven million times 5000 equals 135
billion.
Now we should probably admit that a minority of
students in schools run by courts somehow managed to get
a decent education. And all the above numbers are
kind of rough anyway. Let's just round off the
estimates to $100 billion wasted and 20 million ruined
educations.
There is growing alarm over the income gap between those who are
well educated and those who are not. Lawless
federal judges deserve some of the blame for that gap.
They ruined the educations of twenty million
people. Most of the twenty million are on the wrong
side of the gap.
Ruined public schools led middle class Whites to abandon dozens
of large cities. This wrecked the economies of
those cities and the quality-of-life they could offer to
those who remained. Tax receipts went down and
crime rates went up. That caused most of the rest
of the middle class to get out. I don't plan to
abuse you with more arithmetic; I won't estimate the cost
of the damage to the cities. However, you can bet
that it's a very big number.
One can also make an argument that the desegregation programs
damaged the educations of most public school children,
not only the 20 percent, or so, who were directly
involved. The programs warped our public education
priorities for more than a generation. The wasted
$100 billion came from state and local education budgets.
Consequently, that money was not available to cover
real educational needs.
The programs also corrupted our public education
establishment. For more than three decades it
embraced a fraud in order to avoid political problems and
increase its cash flow. How could it help becoming
corrupt? For those same three decades its cost has
been going up and the quality of its work has been going
down.
IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT
Beginning in 1954 the Supreme Court assured African Americans that their
children had a right to a good public education.
And the courts were going to make sure they got it.
But the courts didn't deliver. The black
kids' educations did not get better; they got worse, much
worse.
Liberal supporters of judicial activism needed to deflect attention
away from the culprits. They needed somebody else to
blame. So they proclaimed that America's white
majority is racist. Otherwise it would have
followed the Court's leadership.
Let's take a look at that claim. Let's look at two other
public arenas in which racial integration programs were
put in place; professional sports and America's defense
establishment.
Perhaps you watched the 1997 World Series on TV. It was
played between the Cleveland Indians and the Florida
Marlins. The Marlins won; so that year Florida had
the best team in baseball. If you did watch the 97 Series, you saw a
lot of black faces when the Marlins took the field.
Seven out of nine starting players, on the best
team in baseball, were black. So you would probably
agree that America's best-loved sport is integrated.
By 1954, the year the Supreme Court decided Brown
v. Topeka, major league baseball had forty-nine black
players [8].
Major league baseball did not always welcome Blacks.
Prior to 1947, they had to maintain their own
league in order to play. Everyone familiar with the
game knew that plenty of Blacks were good enough to play
in the majors. But the major leagues had a
whites-only rule. It wasn't written down; it was
informal. But the most powerful man in the game
enforced it. From 1920 to 1944, the Baseball
Commissioner was a former federal judge named Kenesaw
Mountain Landis. Landis made sure the Whites-only
rule was enforced.
When Judge Landis retired a man named Branch Rickey decided to
stick his neck out. Rickey was president and
general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He decided
that it was time to end the rule against black players in
the major leagues. Rickey didn't hire lawyers to
contrive a fraudulent new rule in the Constitution.
He risked his own career and his own money; he
hired a talented young black player named Jackie
Robinson.
Mr. Rickey brought Jackie Robinson on board in 1947.
That was seven years before Brown v. Topeka.
Jackie's performance on the field played a key role
in the Dodgers' success for the next decade or so.
During that time the team won several pennants.
In one year it won the World Series. Jackie
also performed off the field as Mr. Rickey had hoped.
Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson changed millions
of minds and hearts. The only federal judge in the
story was Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Baseball, like most other professional sports, has long been
integrated. Black and White professionals respect each other.
Millions of white children
admire the black players. The story of pro sports
gives the lie to the claim that attempts at public school
integration failed because most white Americans are
racist.
Now let's take a look at race relations in America's armed
forces. Until 1948, the Army and Navy had
segregated units. In that year, President Harry
Truman issued an Executive Order ending the practice.
Truman offered no fiction about a need to follow
the Constitution. He just issued an executive
order. There was a fair amount of grumbling about
the White House forcing the Army and Navy to change.
Politicians predicted dire results. However,
the soldiers and sailors all knew that Harry Truman was
Commander-In-Chief. The legitimacy of his order was
beyond question. So the officers and men not only
followed that order, they made it work [9].
America's armed forces have long led the nation's progress in
racial equity. All three services have a higher
percentage of Blacks than does the public at large.
There are many thousands of Blacks commanding
Whites. By the mid 1990's, 7 percent of the Army's
Generals, 11 percent of its commissioned officers, and
about 35 percent of its sergeants were black [10].
In February 1954, a young black man named Colin Powell
graduated from Morris High School in the South Bronx.
That was a couple of months before the Supreme
Court decided Brown v. Topeka. Powell then began a long
and successful career in the U. S. Army. He found
bigots there, but he also found a system that allowed him
to succeed. About forty years later, Colin Powell
retired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He had reached the highest and most visible
position in the U. S. Armed Forces [11].
Colin Powell, like Jackie Robinson, gave a class performance in
a pioneering role. Whites in America responded to
Powell in the same way they had responded to Robinson.
It appeared, in 1995 and 1996, that Colin Powell
could have become U. S. president in the coming election,
had he chosen to run. Leaders of both major parties
offered him support. Republicans begged him to
compete for the nomination of their party.
According to public opinion polls, he could have
easily beaten all of the other contenders in the 1996
election [12].
Professional sports and our armed forces both ended
segregation. Both successes resulted from
legitimate and honest actions. And both enjoyed
public support. The efforts of lawless judges not
only failed to achieve their stated goals, they wrecked
our urban public schools. And they badly damaged
millions of lives.
Why did public school integration fail while the other two
efforts succeeded? Blaming the racism of the
American people is part of a brazen cover up. The
attempt by federal courts to integrate public schools
failed because it was not legitimate. The people
saw judicial lawlessness for what it was. So they
refused to cooperate.
THE CONSENT DECREE SCAM
It's probably worth pointing out that lawless judges don't
deserve all the blame for the ill effects of forced
public school integration; they had accomplices.
The nominal plaintiffs were usually school
children, but the children were just pawns. The
real plaintiffs were special interest groups composed
mainly of liberal social engineers and trial lawyers.
In some cases, liberal public school insiders also
helped them out. The defendants played dead while
the lawyer-lobbyists suing them "proved" that
local public schools had been segregated on purpose.
None of what's written just above is any big secret.
It's well known that bureaucrats often sell out the
public and help position judges to legislate in order to
get a budget increase. You can read about this in a
book written by Richard Posner, a federal judge.
Posner suggested that judges played the game
because they enjoyed the "patronage" and they
were sometimes "drunk" with power.
"Patronage" means that the judge gets to
misuse public funds to give high paying jobs to his
unqualified friends [13].
School busing cases provided the ideal vehicle for lawyers and judges to develop
and refine the consent decree scam, a slick way to sneak a
political deal into the law. As its name
implies, a consent decree is a court order to which the
defendant has consented. The scam works especially well when the defendant is a group of public
officials like a school board.
A plaintiff, who aims to force a policy change opposed by
"We the People," sues in court. He claims
that the court must order the change to satisfy the
Constitution. The "defendant" likes the proposed change. It
will raise his budget or get him out from under the
control of the voters. So he plays dead. He
allows the evidence presented in court to be biased in
favor of the plaintiff's claim. The judge may also
favor the proposed change. He moves in the same
elite circles as the plaintiff and the defendant.
And they all share a fondness for social
engineering.
Most of the people oppose the change; but they don't get to
vote. This is a matter in which only lawyers get to
vote. The lawyers for the defendant and the
plaintiff make a deal. They agree to spend millions
of dollars of the people's money and to bus thousands of
the people's children all over the place. The
defendant doesn't care about any of that. It's not
his money; they're not his children. The money and
children belong to "We the People." Who
cares what they think?
The judge signs a court order giving the deal the force of
law. So the results of that consent decree will
bind the people for decades. The lawyers then call
a press conference. They say "thank God; we
are now following the Constitution." Then the
judge and the lawyers on both sides shake hands all
around, and go to lunch. The next summer they
attend each other's daughters' weddings.
The people grumble; but they accept the result because they
respect the Constitution. Nobody tells them the
truth. Nobody tells them their school busing
program has got nothing to do with the Constitution; it's
just another smelly political deal. The media helps
with the cover up.
NOTES & CITATIONS
1. Around the end of 1996, there was much discussion
of ebonics in the press. See, for example, the
piece in USA Today, Dec. 20, 1996, page 3A. It was
written by Anita Manning.
2. The essay, Viking Jurisprudence Part 2, can be found on the Internet.
3. We've argued elsewhere that the Supreme Court is defying the First Amendment by imposing the precepts of an alien religion on "We the People."
4. See Bentley for the original sources of the term,
"the hostage theory."
5. The account of the "plantation" in the Supreme Court was taken from Woodward, pages 288 and 289. Beyond that recent evidence, the record shows that the Supreme Court had been a thoroughly racist institution for at least a century. See the online essays, Racism in the Court and Congress Shall Not Have the Power.
6. Click here to visit Equal Child Abuse. The Cleveland case study is entitled Forty-Six Felons on the Payroll and the Kansas City study is entitled Three-Billion Dollar Taj Mahals.
7. National statistics on school desegregation were
obtained mainly from Welch. Welch's study analyzed
109 of the largest public school districts affected by
court ordered desegregation programs. The 109
districts contained a little less than 20 percent of all
public school students. They contained a little
less than 50 percent of the black students.
Information on total student enrollment was spread
throughout Welch's book. I found parts of the story
on pages 9, 11, 14, and 53. Adding it all up I
concluded that, on average, our public schools had about
thirty-five million white students and about ten million
minority students during the years in question.
8. Information presented on the Jackie Robinson story
was all obtained from Allen. See especially pages,
44-75, 195, 196, and 205. You'll have to take my
word for the count of black Florida Marlins. Or, if
you prefer, call up the team's management and request a
check of its records.
9. The story of Truman's order to integrate the armed
services was based on material in Bernstein and Matusow,
pages 95-114.
10. Moskos, Chapter 1, provided the statistics presented here
concerning the success of Blacks in the armed forces.
11. Information on Colin Powell's career was obtained mainly
from his autobiography (See the Bibliography).
12. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Colin Powell
to the position of Secretary of State, the most
prestigious position in the Cabinet.
13. See Posner, 1996, pages 340-1.
