Posted on 05/07/2017 5:14:03 PM PDT by re_tail20
On a winter afternoon that threatened tornadoes, retired federal judge U.W. Clemon stood at a window 31 floors above Birmingham, looking south. In the foreground was the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose medical center powers the city’s economy. To the west, railroad tracks snaked between warehouses, vestiges of boom times, when Birmingham was known as “the Pittsburgh of the South.” On the horizon rose Red Mountain, a slight green ridge. Clustered on the other side of its hump, outside the Birmingham city limits, are some of the wealthiest suburbs in Alabama: Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Hoover and Homewood. They have the best schools in the state, and although Alabama has some of the worst schools in the nation, those suburbs frequently make it onto national best-schools lists. Many medical center faculty live in these “over the mountain” suburbs, as do older Southern families.
Clemon did not go to school over the mountain. His grandparents were sharecroppers in Noxubee County, Mississippi. His parents left for Alabama, where his mother worked as domestic for a white Birmingham family, while his father was a bricklayer’s helper. He started at the Dolomite Colored Elementary School. “We had outside privies,” he remembered over lunch at City Club Birmingham. The crowd was light. Other than the servers, he was the only black person in the room. At one point, two white men came over, and one of them greeted “the judge.” The other asked if the judge was famous, and the first one said yes, he was.
Clemon went to Miles College, right outside Birmingham, and became involved in the civil rights movement, working with Martin Luther King Jr. He jokingly recalled unfavorable coverage the movement received from Newsweek in the 1960s. When I mentioned that I hoped to do archival research at the...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
I think I remember reading about that. Basically funding per pupil in poor districts had to be equal to that in the the wealthiest districts.
Only problem was that when the funding was equalized, the proficiency gap between the low IQ (economically disadvantaged) and average Joe students actually widened.
Segregation has been back for a while, except it was excluding whites from ‘safe zones’ and things like that.
The Democrats created segregation in this town by gerrymandering the majority-white school until it was 95% minority. Then drugs and guns entered the student body, and most of the white families moved away.
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