Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 19, 1993 TAG: 9303190092
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH THIEL LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
AFTER SCHOOLS' RACE FIGHT, FEELINGS OF BETRAYAL LINGER
A RACIAL DISPUTE in Richmond schools suggests that, four decades after the civil rights movement began, black and white adults still have not figured out how to let their children learn together.\ By most definitions, 10-year-old Emily Hulburt should be an example of success in America's struggle to integrate public schools.
Emily, a white fifth-grader at Richmond's Bellevue Model Elementary, has learned in her predominantly black school not to consider color in her observations of people.
When a reporter asked her recently about the racial makeup of her class, Emily proclaimed the reporter rude for even talking about the color of someone's skin.
Now, though, because of a racial fight that has ripped Richmond's school system apart over the past three months, some have come to view Emily as a symbol that segregation still thrives.
The fight erupted in December, when a black parent complained to the School Board that administrators from two of the city's majority-black schools, one of them Bellevue, had for years clustered the few white children in their buildings together in certain classrooms.
The Bellevue principal, a black woman, said she grouped the white children together for social and emotional reasons. A white child might feel awkward or different by being the only student in a class who wasn't black.
The practice, however, drew swift and sharp criticism from black leaders, who called it just another form of racist segregation.
The revelation has called into question the lengths to which school systems will go to hold on to racial balance. In Richmond, some officials said clustering would help attract white families to majority-black schools and maybe to some slipping neighborhoods.
But some black leaders demanded an immediate end to clustering and the dispersal of white children to new classes.
Parents resisted and filed a lawsuit to force administrators to wait until a new school year to redistribute their children.
The black leaders won. This month, white and black children settled into new classes.
The situation has prompted an ongoing federal investigation of the city's school system for possible civil rights violations. That was the last straw for the Richmond Education Association, the teachers' union, which has handed the Richmond School Board a unanimous vote of no confidence.
Now that the children are reassigned, things have settled down.
But feelings of betrayal linger on both sides of the debate.
Chuck Richardson, the Richmond City Councilman who sponsored a successful resolution supporting the School Board's move to end clustering, said it "should never have been tolerated for one minute."
"When you do that, you very suddenly justify segregation."
Richardson said school systems must face the challenge of integrating schools without succumbing to subtle segregation - an even bigger challenge for an inner-city system like Richmond, which is nearly 90 percent black.
For many, clustering brought back painful memories of black children forced to endure segregation in the '50s.
But some parents, black and white, said Richmond's schoolchildren should not be punished in the middle of the year and separated from their classes because of adults' mistakes.
Many white parents, who believed they were advancing the cause of integration by ignoring the odds and keeping their children in Richmond public schools, now are stunned to be labeled racists.
"I wish you could know the parents who are involved," said Sherry J. Finneran, 45, Emily Hulburt's mother. "Certainly it's not racism."
Finneran and others chose to have their children bused across town to Bellevue.
"It was so ludicrous to look at this group [of parents] and say it was racist. No racist is going to go all the way across town to a school" that is predominantly black.
But Richardson said the parents' commitment to integration did not excuse the clustering.
"I hope we can learn from this," he said. "All of us who thought we were open-minded and thought we were fair need to sit down and re-evaluate ourselves."