The complex story of busing in Charlotte, North Carolina, occupies an important place in how we understand, teach, and document the complicated history of desegregation. In Color & Character, Pamela Grundy skillfully guides readers through this history, conveying how in the 1970s the city championed a highly contested example of political “engineering”—busing as a means to citywide desegregation—and how from the 1980s to the present this political project unraveled. A wonderful example of local history, Grundy deepens our understanding of the history of busing and how this history connects to the contemporary politics of school choice and corporate education reform.
The first two chapters of Color & Character cover a historical landscape well traversed by previous scholars. However, Grundy's local perspective on West Charlotte High School fleshes out this history. She describes the “close-knit compassionate community” of West Charlotte, where residents fondly recalled an “old-fashioned ethos, built around strict curfews, good manners, and respect for adults” (p. 13), an ethos the white community tried to maintain by undertaking strategies to equalize funding as a mechanism to avoid integration. Grundy also explores the saga of Dorothy Counts, the tenth-grade student who desegregated the all-white Harding High School, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at West Charlotte High School in 1963 just weeks after being released from the infamous Birmingham jail.
The most salient aspects of the book are covered in the third and fourth chapters, which reconstruct the history of busing in Charlotte. Beginning in the fall of 1970, the courts ordered the public schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg to desegregate to the point where they reflected the area's racial demographics, which was 70 percent white and 30 percent black. It was the most far-reaching desegregation plan to date. Grundy takes the reader through the muddied waters of the busing policies behind the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision that enforced desegregation. Heralded as a success, Charlotte was viewed as an exemplar for desegregation through busing. The student body at West Charlotte High School reflected a proportional representation of the city's racial demographics. Students and their parents supported the school, participated in extracurricular activities, and embraced its history and its history-making desegregation plan. Indeed, there were negative outcomes, such as a disproportionate placement of black students in lower academic tracks and a loss of effective black teachers from the segregation era, which mirrored regional patterns of persistent inequality. But at the same time, test scores increased for black students, and beyond the school, the desegregation plan resulted in African Americans being elected to key positions in city council. On the surface, Charlotte experienced racial advancement that shaped an identity of a progressive, forward-looking city.
Though far from encapsulating the true ideals of integration, in the 1980s, West Charlotte High School steadfastly persevered. Yet, ultimately, external influences cut short the gains made. Tracking and instances of persistent segregation within the school hampered the progress desegregation had inspired. Local support for larger national trends—such as a general divestment of public funds for public goods, including education—unraveled the carefully crafted school setting. In spite of increasing financial prosperity across the city and the region, poverty and income gaps persisted, along with residential segregation practices. The new interstate split the black community to make way for “progress,” illustrating how African Americans bore the burden of change. Additionally, growing suburban areas built new schools. The county also embraced the logic and rhetoric of choice and corporate reform. District leaders focused less on busing and desegregation and more on magnet schools and standards of “excellence.”
As Grundy reminds us, in the Reagan years, race-neutral, corporate-reform rhetoric shaped education policy; it disparaged teachers and blamed students and their communities for falling test scores—the objective tool for defining success in the era of accountability that Republican administrations ushered in and that their Democratic counterparts faithfully maintained. As such, the education policies of the 1990s, even after Reagan–Bush, continued to champion the politics of school choice. Thus, it was not surprising when, in 1999, the court found in Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg that the school system was unitary and the district was ordered to create new student assignment plans that did not account for race. By the end of the twentieth century, busing, and its modicum of success, was over.
Though principally a history of racialized policy and institutional racism, Grundy's narrative is also about social class. For instance, she addresses how the state court found in Leandro v. State, a long and contentious lawsuit from 1994 to 2005, that North Carolina committed “academic genocide” at the secondary level (pp. 155-56). As one of the many court cases that sought to address the states’ dismal record of funding even an adequate public education, this case highlighted the fact that state courts may often rule in favor of poor and segregated districts, but state legislators rarely, if ever, follow through.
Grundy's history of busing and desegregation in Charlotte and at West Charlotte High School illuminates the promises and pitfalls of public education reform. Choice produces mixed results, at best. After rescinding the requirement of busing students to maintain a level of desegregation, school segregation persisted. Yet there were promising anecdotes too. Some families voiced positive stories of connectedness to the schools’ prideful past. Local leaders such as Counts, the first student to desegregate schools in Charlotte, lead grassroots revitalization efforts. The seeds of progress have been sown in this tumultuous southern soil.
At times the book suffers from brevity, covering a complicated seventy-five-year history in a succinct two hundred pages, putting forth themes that are well known, such as quality education during the era of segregation, at the expense of elaborating on new chronologies that follow resegregation through the era of neoliberal reform. Yet what distinguishes this text is that Grundy expands upon a local history to bring in elements of spatial analysis that illustrate the connection between residential segregation and education policy to examine the nefarious persistence of institutional discrimination. Moreover, Grundy effectively demystifies the lauded success of the Charlotte story for a national audience. While scholars and educators may be vaguely familiar with the “success” of busing in Charlotte, Grundy compels us to critically examine the toll that post-busing school choice and corporate reform have taken on the city. We have not moved beyond race, this history reminds us; race must be considered, including in relation to neoliberal corporate school reform. Color & Character is a must-read for scholars of southern history and the history of education, and it provides a valuable window into the contemporary landscape of the politics of race and educational policy.
