Introduction

The Question of Questions

“Please don’t get your feet wet,” the grown-ups kept saying. But it was an unusually sunny day in January 2020 and as the first- and third-graders walked in front of Anna Murray Douglass Academy School 12 they could not resist kicking the clumps of dirty snow, sending them splattering across the sidewalk. They forded the snow drifts piled in the landscaping and tramped up to the Frederick Douglass statue in the front of the building, rubbing their fingers along the ridges of his coat and hands and hair to see what they felt like.

This short walk—a perimeter of the Frederick Douglass Community Library, the Anna Murray Douglass Academy, and the Frederick Douglass Recreation Center—likely contains more Douglass artwork than any other acre on the planet. The Douglass family lived at the site until their house burned, or was burned, in 1872. “He used to go to our school,” a girl whispered, pointing. Her sneakers lit up in blue neon lights when she kicked snowballs. Now they were wet. One of the older children overheard her comment and corrected her: “No, he used to live at our school.”

School 12 was renamed for Anna Murray Douglass in 2018. The Rochester school board decided to do so after a fourteen-year-old boy named Trevyan Rowe walked away from the school one morning earlier that year without anyone noticing and drowned in the Genesee River. Teachers at the school had marked him present even though he never showed up for class that day. The new name, said the school board president, Van White, would be “an opportunity to talk about a different, more positive future, given what happened to Trevyan.” About 85 percent of the students at Anna Murray Douglass Academy are Black or Latino, and the same number qualify for free or reduced lunch. A few decades ago, the opposite was true. Djinga St. Louis took a bus there in the 1980s from her home in southwest Rochester’s 19th Ward and was one of the very few Black children in the school’s gifted program. “I’ll never forget, I didn’t know if I was in a city school or a suburban school, because there were so many white kids around me,” she said.1

Ideally, Anna Murray Douglass Academy would be at neither demographic extreme but instead enroll a more racially and socioeconomically diverse population. To achieve that, the Rochester City School District (RCSD) and the Brighton Central School District, just a mile away, used about $100,000 in state desegregation funding to create a joint program based on School 12’s popular bilingual program. The effort fell apart, however, when it became clear that the Brighton children would have to enroll in the city school. The prospect of that happening was remote. The squandered grant was chalked up as a learning experience.2

“Did Frederick Douglass learn how to read in school?” a girl asked.

The Anna Murray Douglass Academy children were back in the classroom and sitting on the carpet, cross-legged or splayed out on the floor. Douglass’s stern, middle-age face beamed out from the smart board. The image was low resolution and distorted, squished horizontally so that his bushy, graying hair spread across the screen like purslane. The second “s” was missing from his name.

The teacher pursed her lips admiringly. This was a good question—the kind that might earn a kid a few Douglass dollars to spend on pencils or stickers or candy.

“No, because slaves couldn’t go to school. It was against the law. Is that fair?”

The girl frowned and shook her head, the white plastic beads on her braids clacking against her skull.

Frederick Douglass would not approve of any of this.

He would not appreciate that all three of the schools named after him and his family in his adopted hometown have been deeply segregated. He would not be happy that one of them, the NorthSTAR program, closed in 2020 after being described as “sub-par at best,” with “virtually no instruction occurring” and 85 percent of students chronically absent. The other tribute, Frederick Douglass Junior High School, was built in 1968 as part of a wide-reaching desegregation program that white Rochester residents derailed through protests, voting, and throwing rocks at Black children until their parents reluctantly conceded that racial integration was an unwise goal. Douglass would not like that, either.3

Douglass earned his own liberty and education after the harshest possible ordeal and then devoted his life as a free man to securing those rights for others—not only by abolishing slavery but by working to erase the stain of racism altogether. Such a lofty goal could only be accomplished, he believed, through integration, especially among the young. “Let colored children be educated and grow up side by side with white children, come up friends from unsophisticated and generous childhood together,” he wrote, “and it will require a powerful agent to convert them into enemies.”4

Again and again, Douglass returned to the necessity of an equal, integrated education if Black children were to become full-fledged citizens of the fractured nation. It was, in his words, “the question of questions for the colored people of this place.” When his own daughter was forced to sit by herself in a classroom closet away from her white classmates, he excoriated the school in an open letter published across the country. When the Black trustees at African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church offered in 1849 to lease their basement for Rochester’s Black-only school, he blasted them as “stupid creatures . . . servile tools of their own proscription and degradation” and organized a protest against the move.5

“There is no reason, nor can there be a reason why a colored child should not be taught in the same schools with white children,” Douglass wrote. He could not have foreseen Rochester as it stands today, segregated by a municipal line that did not have the same force during his lifetime. His words nonetheless are prescient: “It is evident that colored people will continue to form a part of this community; and that their influence in it, for good or for evil, will be considerable. They may either contribute to its prosperity, virtue and happiness, or they may become a serious drawback upon all these. To elevate and improve the colored people, is but contributing to the general good of the whole community . . . [and] would be a noble example of justice and liberality worthy of the city of Rochester.”6

Which is the path of justice and liberality in the matter of public education? How well have Rochester and other US cities followed it, and what has been the effect on their communal prosperity, virtue, and happiness? The current woeful state of schooling in Rochester and the educational disparities across the metropolitan area are attributable to explicit racial segregation and discrimination dating back to Frederick Douglass’s age and beyond. That segregation was enacted through both government action and personal bigotry, and every attempt to dislodge it has been defeated by those same factors.

Once the exodus of white and middle-class families to the suburbs became irreversible, the topic of school segregation came to be seen as passé. Instead Rochester and other US cities have invested billions of dollars in the hope that technical fixes to school structure, governance, and pedagogy, together with sporadic bursts of federal funding, will relieve them of the obligation to confront the stark racial and socioeconomic divisions in their communities. The hope, in other words, is to operate separate but equal schools for mostly white and mostly nonwhite children. The fact that they are not equal—and have never been equal in any metropolitan area in the country in any meaningful sense for any meaningful period of time—is taken not as a refutation of the fundamental premise but rather as a sign that the conditions of the separation still need some adjusting.

This idea, of course, is best known from Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 US Supreme Court case that upheld states’ right to provide racially segregated facilities. But it was not born with Plessy. And though Plessy arose from a case in Louisiana, the idea had currency far north of the Mason-Dixon line. One of its most forceful expressions, in fact, came from an 1883 New York school-segregation case that the Plessy court later used to support its argument. The New York case, People ex rel. King v. Gallagher, had to do with a twelve-year-old Black girl who was barred from a public school in Brooklyn. The New York Court of Appeals ruled in the school’s favor. “The attempt to enforce social intimacy and intercourse between the races, by legal enactments, would probably tend only to embitter the prejudices . . . which exist between them, and produce an evil instead of a good result,” the majority wrote in upholding the girl’s exclusion. “It is believed that no sincere friend of [Black] people could . . . wish any other result than that which should sustain them in the enjoyment of those institutions specially organized for their benefit and advantage.”7

Dissenting from the majority opinion was George F. Danforth, a judge from Rochester. In his dissent he inadvertently predicted Plessy and foreshadowed its reversal fifty-eight years later by Brown v. Board of Education.

With equal plausibility it might be said that the city of Brooklyn could provide parks, streets and sidewalks exclusively for persons of color. . . . It would not answer in either case to say all these things are equal or even better in degree than those [for white people]. This would still be discrimination against the race, and so with the school, the main business of which is to prepare a youth for his future duties as a citizen in his various relations toward the State, the performance of obligations due to other citizens, and possibly even forbearance and conduct toward opposing races.8

Time would prove that Danforth was correct; Brown, which follows his logic, is rightly upheld as a high mark in US history. And yet when one looks at schools in Rochester and across the country, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that Plessy has prevailed in spirit. The mechanisms behind school segregation were not local inventions but rather repeated in cities across the country. Rochester stands as a sorrowful archetype. In each chapter of this book, the reader will see evidence of political and social trends at the state and national level. Some of these forces—the insidious, underrecognized effect of racial discrimination in hiring, for instance—did particular damage in Rochester, but none bypassed it entirely. A reader outside western New York can take this book as a case study. Rochesterians, meanwhile, should bear in mind that the inequity they see in their community is the product of far-reaching influences. Purely local reform-based solutions—firing the superintendent, cutting teacher salaries, voting out the school board—fail to acknowledge the full scale of the problem.

This book proceeds in roughly chronological fashion with occasional detours to follow important issues. Chapter 1 begins with the earliest local educational opportunities for Black children and the first long fight to desegregate the public school system. Chapter 2 departs from a close focus on education to explain the Great Migration in Rochester and subsequent patterns of housing discrimination, for the action of the Civil Rights era cannot be understood without that background. Some of the most flagrant housing policies in the early to middle twentieth century included massive federal subsidies for which Black families were ineligible, targeted disinvestment by banks and real estate agents, and exclusionary restrictive covenants upheld by neighborhood associations and individual white homeowners. At a time when most children in the United States attended school within walking distance of home, these policies led inevitably to racially segregated schools.

At the same time, local school officials were not innocent. As will be seen in chapter 3, they drew school attendance boundaries and sited new construction to reinforce and extend residential housing segregation. When budget or physical space got tight, schools in Black neighborhoods suffered the first and deepest cuts, contending with shortened school days, loss of nonessential opportunities, and portable classrooms parked on ballfields. The distinction between accidental and intentional segregation on which the courts relied so heavily during the Civil Rights era was a lie and a con.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine in detail the Civil Rights era fight to desegregate Rochester schools. It included several major district proposals, half a dozen federal lawsuits, public protests involving tens of thousands of students and no small amount of bloodshed. Ultimately it was unsuccessful. Chapter 6 reviews various attempts over the last century to implement metropolitan-level solutions for Rochester’s educational ills, while chapter 7 deals exclusively with the most prominent of these, the Urban-Suburban Inter-District Transfer Program. Chapter 8 brings the historical narrative to the present day, illustrating the flaws inherent in the school reform model that has dominated national education policy for nearly forty years. The conclusion offers three recommendations for the people of Monroe County, where Rochester is located, to combat school segregation now.

Many other important subjects are discussed only in brief, or not at all. This book is neither a history of Black education in Rochester nor a history of education more generally. It touches only lightly, therefore, on topics that deserve a fuller treatment, such as the advent of common and secondary schools in the late nineteenth century or the explosive growth of charter schools in the early twenty-first century. It also is not an exhaustive account of the Black community in Rochester, the discrimination it has faced, or its resistance and activism. Rich subjects such as housing and job discrimination and disparities in criminal justice and health care are discussed only as context for education.

Three main themes will recur in this story. One is persistent white opposition to racial integration throughout the history of education in Rochester. This opposition has been based largely on several enduring fears. One is the fear of violence, including sexual violence. The Rochester school board in 1849 declined to close its separate school for Black children in part because, as one board member said, “no citizen would want a colored boy sitting in school beside his daughter.” One hundred twenty years later, the school board president and antibusing leader Louis Cerulli insisted that the district investigate a purported increase in “shakedowns, beatings and attempted attacks on girls in the schools,” in particular at the high schools where Black enrollment was increasing. The resulting study occupied a special committee for several months but ultimately showed no such trend. “Violence in the schools has been overplayed and used as a smokescreen,” said Franklin Florence, the president of the local Black Power organization FIGHT. “The real issue is, black kids are not learning in inner-city schools.”9

Another persistent fear is that the quality of education for white children will be degraded or that they will lose resources to their Black peers. National research has consistently shown this fear to be unfounded—schools that desegregate usually see an increase in funding, and Black children benefit educationally while white children suffer no harm and benefit in important nonacademic ways. Neither this research nor appeals to equity have reduced white parents’ anxiety. A group of parents at all-white School 30 sued the district in 1964 over a plan to add some students from the overcrowded, all-Black School 3. “Is this going to take the roots from under my little girl?” one white mother asked the school board. “If she suffers, will this board pay her psychiatry bills?” In 2014, as the Spencerport school district to Rochester’s west was considering joining Urban-Suburban, some residents protested on the grounds that their own children would lose academic scholarships or spots on the basketball team if more Black children were brought in.10

Despite these protests, the Spencerport school board voted unanimously to adopt Urban-Suburban, and several other districts followed suit in 2015 and 2016. These actions, beneficent on their face, highlight the second recurring theme in the history of segregated education in Rochester. White opposition to integration has tended to soften only where it would benefit white families in some way, in particular financially. Suburban school districts rushed to join Urban-Suburban only after it became apparent that Rochester students represented a significant untapped revenue stream and a way to prop up declining enrollment. Similarly, the Rochester school board closed the segregated Black school in 1856 only after the cost of educating a handful of Black children in their own separate building became intolerable. In the context of higher education, the University of Rochester in 1939 finally agreed to admit Black medical students not in response to complaints from the local Black community but because the state threatened to strip its tax-exempt status if it did not.11

The emergence of a converging financial interest for white families, though, does not suffice to explain these and other instances of racial progress. Rather, such victories were earned through the long advocacy of Black parents to improve their children’s educational opportunities, most often through desegregation. This is the book’s third theme. Black parents organized a series of school boycotts in the mid-nineteenth century to press for an end to formal desegregation. They flocked to Rochester and other northern cities from the segregated South throughout the twentieth century in part so their children could attend nonsegregated schools. They organized and joined lawsuits during the Civil Rights era, pressing for integration with white students—not for the privilege of those students’ company, but because of the resources that attached to them. As the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote: “Parents demanded integration only after they realized that in a country that does not value black children the same as white ones, black children will never get what white children get unless they sit where white children sit.” The constancy of Black activism is an important through line in the history of segregated education in Rochester and provides a hopeful lens for the future.12

The argument of this book is that the effects of intentional segregation can be addressed only through intentional desegregation—and, ultimately, true integration. Any such appeal immediately must reckon with the fact that many Black community leaders in Rochester and elsewhere are opposed to such a strategy. This opposition may reflect political calculation but is nonetheless deeply grounded in experience, dating back in Rochester to 1832, when Black parents petitioned for a separate school where their children would not be “despised, called negroes, and completely discouraged by the white children.” It was evident at the height of the desegregation movement in the late 1960s as well, when a group of disillusioned Black community leaders switched course and called for greater local control of mostly Black schools in Rochester through “community school councils” rather than integration. “We’re not looking to build a separate black world for our children,” FIGHT’s president, Bernard Gifford, said then. “All we’re saying is that we’re sick and tired of black children being used as pawns.”13

Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren is among those who support improvements within the current segregated paradigm rather than explicit desegregation efforts.* This position is guided by her family history. Her grandfather, Cecil McClary, dropped out of school in Kingston, South Carolina, in 1933 at the age of seven because he was ashamed not to have shoes to wear to class. In 1964 he moved with his wife and eight children to Rochester, where his wife’s sister was already living. The first generation, indigent and thickly accented, struggled to fit in and were taunted as “Geechies.” But McClary saved carefully from his job as a security guard and began to buy property to rent. His children graduated from school, got jobs, and provided greater opportunity for their own children. One of those second-generation Rochesterians was Warren, who was elected mayor of the city in 2013 and took the oath of office in her grandfather’s hospital room just days before he died.14

“My mom and her older siblings . . . were stable, middle-class, taking care of their families,” Warren said in a 2019 interview. “Every Sunday getting together at my grandparents’ house for dinner, everyone going to church together. . . . That’s what I grew up knowing.” That stable family proved an important safety net when her father became addicted to drugs when she was a teenager. So, too, did her teachers and administrators at Wilson Magnet High School, who kept her from dropping out. Because of this deep faith in the value of intact, vibrant communities Warren has spent much of her time and political capital as mayor on community schools, arguing for more and better resources in existing neighborhoods rather than integration. “There’s something [about] the connection between the school and the neighborhood you go to school in—it’s a sense of family and belonging,” she said. “There is something in that style of educating the child that matters.”15

What has gone wrong, then, in Rochester and other cities? Warren believes it to be a combination of two main factors. First, traditional school attendance patterns where the buildings serve as neighborhood anchors have declined. More broadly, that has led to decreased stability at schools, with higher teacher and administrator turnover as well as weaker connections between the school and other neighborhood institutions. Second, according to Warren, teacher quality has declined, and among white teachers in particular the belief persists that “students are too poor to learn, and that poverty is an excuse for their failure.” She referred approvingly a number of times to the way things “used to be.” When asked to identify that time period, exactly, she said it referred to both her own education—she graduated from high school in 1995—and the segregated South before Brown v. Board of Education. “There was something about teaching as a noble profession, that the top-tier folks—the people who become doctors and lawyers—back in the day they would become teachers,” she said. “You still had that sense of leadership.”16

Warren’s primary objection to the pursuit of racial integration is pragmatic. Racism, she said, is something children are taught. She notes that her daughter attends a relatively diverse private school, and that she herself benefited from diversity at Wilson Magnet and elsewhere. “Do I think my daughter is better off for having a diverse classroom? Absolutely,” she said.

But, she continued:

We know, the suburbs and the city—they don’t want a metro school district. That’s just politically not going to happen. So why come up with solutions that politically won’t happen? That’s why I’m saying, deal with the situation you have. . . .

You can’t force people’s feelings to change. Just because you put Black kids and white kids together doesn’t mean things are going to change. It just doesn’t happen that way.17

Derrick Bell makes a more formidable case against pursuing integration. The eminent legal theorist, one of the architects of critical race theory, spent the early years of his career with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he supervised hundreds of school desegregation cases. As white resistance persisted and lasting improvements proved scarce, Bell began to question the very premise of integration. He came to believe that the NAACP’s single-minded focus on desegregating schools put too much faith in judicial intervention and underestimated the “near-seamless national web of constitutional injury” of which segregated schools were only a part: “Zealous faith in integration blinded us to the actual goal of equalizing educational opportunities for black children, and led us to pursue integration without regard to, and often despite, its ultimate impact on the well-being of students.”18

To flesh out his argument, Bell went as far as to draft an alternate Supreme Court decision in Brown, imagining a scenario where the justices upheld the separate but equal holding in Plessy v. Ferguson, motivated in large part by foreseeable white resistance. “The ‘separate’ in the ‘separate but equal’ standard has been rigorously enforced. The ‘equal’ has served as a total refutation of equality,” Bell wrote in his hypothetical ruling:

The Court recognizes these cases as an opportunity to test the legal legitimacy of the “separate but equal” standard, not as petitioners urge by overturning Plessy, but by ordering for the first time its strict enforcement. . . .

A decision overturning Plessy, while it might be viewed as a triumph by Negro petitioners and the class they represent, will be condemned by many whites. Their predictable outraged resistance could undermine and eventually negate even the most committed judicial enforcement efforts.19

Bell’s imagined ruling included strict and specific standards for equality in both resources and academic achievement as well as a restructuring of school boards to ensure minority representation. All of this would be done with court oversight. If this plan failed, or if a judicial panel were to discover “actions intended to subvert or hinder the compliance program,” it might issue an order to “promptly desegregate,” just as the Brown plaintiffs initially requested.20

Effort spent on desegregation will inevitably be wasted, Warren and Bell believe, as white Americans rise in opposition. History shows that even the Brown ruling, one of the most momentous decisions in US history, was insufficient to overcome this hostility. The same energy, they argue, would be better invested in improving the situation already existing in urban schools without attempting to address directly the racial and socioeconomic differences compared to their suburban counterparts.

A great deal of historical evidence supports argument; indeed, much of it is gathered in this book. The rebuttal to it is based not on naïve trust in postracial harmony but rather in examination of the academic and lifelong outcomes for students who have attended desegregated schools. The road to opening such schools has been fraught, to say the least. When they are opened, though—what happens then? The academic literature on this point is vast. Some studies focus on long-term outcomes for students who attended forcibly desegregated schools from the late 1960s to the early 1990s; other studies examine contemporary differences among schools, school districts, and metropolitan areas. The consensus from this rigorous, large-scale research is clear: desegregation and integration offer the greatest opportunity to improve population-level educational and economic outcomes for children of color in the United States.

The argument for desegregation was synthesized neatly during the 2007 US Supreme Court case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The Court in that case was asked to decide whether race could serve as a meaningful factor in schools’ student placement policies; the broader question was whether desegregation efforts based on race would still be tolerated, if not encouraged, half a century after Brown. A coalition of 553 social scientists who supported desegregation summarized the existing body of academic research with three points: “(1) Racially integrated schools provide significant benefits to students and communities, (2) racially isolated schools have harmful educational implications for students, and (3) race-conscious policies are necessary to maintain racial integration in schools.”21

Two studies based on massive data sets, one contemporary and one longitudinal, are useful synopses of the research consensus in 2022. The first was an analysis led by sean reardon of the Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis of standardized test results over eight years for all public schools in the United States. It found “a very strong link between racial school segregation and academic achievement gaps,” with the gaps growing even wider in the most segregated systems. This was not owing directly to race, however, but rather to the way race was used to sort students socioeconomically: “We find that the association between racial school segregation and achievement gaps appears to operate entirely through differences in exposure to poor schoolmates. Once we control for racial differences in school poverty, racial segregation is no longer predictive of achievement gaps or the growth in the gaps. . . . Racial segregation matters, therefore, because it concentrates black and Hispanic students in high-poverty schools, not because of the racial composition of their schools, per se.”22

The economist Rucker Johnson, meanwhile, created a unique data set by merging an inventory of judicial desegregation orders with corresponding student academic records as well as the findings of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the longest running longitudinal household study in the world. He was able to create matched pairs of students, similar in all ways except for their exposure to desegregation measures. Comparing the resultant control and experiment cohorts yielded startlingly clear advantages for Black students who had attended desegregated schools for their entire K-12 education compared to those who did not:

• an additional 1.5 years of average educational attainment and a 30 percent increase in likelihood to graduate

• a 30 percentage-point decrease in both the likelihood of ever being incarcerated and the likelihood of living in poverty as an adult

• a 30 percent increase in wages earned as an adult between ages twenty and fifty

• an 11 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of reporting very good or excellent health as an adult

Importantly, these effects grew more pronounced as students spent more years in a desegregated school rather than a segregated one. And in no case did white students suffer as their nonwhite classmates gained. Johnson concluded: “Integration, when implemented in a holistic fashion, has the power to break the cycle of poverty and can benefit all groups, regardless of race and ethnicity. Like the vaccines that have saved millions of lives in the medical field . . . integration is an unmitigated good.”23

What is more, Johnson’s data shows that Black students who were affected by desegregation orders saw immediate benefits that had nothing to do with race: a 20 percent increase in funding at the schools they attended and a drop in average class size from twenty-seven to twenty-three over just three years. This echoes reardon and coauthors’ finding and lends support to the popular adage among desegregation supporters that “green follows white.” As Gary Orfield put it: “Simply sitting next to a white student does not guarantee better educational outcomes for students of color. Instead, the resources that are consistently linked to predominately white and/or wealthy schools help foster real and serious educational advantages over minority segregated settings.” Money is the most tangible of these resources but not the only one. Equally important is inclusion in the broad and deep social networks of mostly white middle-class families and exposure to what sociologist Robert Putnam called their “savvy” around higher education and professional employment. A great deal of longitudinal research demonstrates that Black students who attend desegregated schools set higher career goals for themselves and benefit later in life from wider professional social networks and higher rates of professional employment. “The social networks of more affluent, educated families amplify their other assets in helping to assure that their kids have richer opportunities,” Putnam wrote. “[This builds] their capacity to understand the institutions that stand astride the paths to opportunity and to make those institutions work for them.”24

The reardon et al. and Johnson studies also illustrate an important paradox in desegregation research. Those studies and many others like them were conducted over many years or even decades. And though such long-term research has strengthened the case for desegregation among experts, the absence of clear short-term effects has proven to be a confounding factor in making the case to the public. Journalists and policymakers are more attuned to immediate feedback; by the time a ten-year study is available, the original political environment inevitably will have shifted. This was certainly the case in Rochester, where the only serious attempt at widespread desegregation was repealed after a single school year. The conclusion that it had failed was based not on the long-term effects for students, but rather the tumult it caused in the community. As Frank Ciaccia, elected to the school board in 1971 on an antibusing platform, said: “If you’re in that situation and you see all this massive busing going around, and neighborhoods are upset and parents are upset, and violence and riots in the schools—I don’t know how anybody in their right mind can say, ‘This is a good thing. We’ve got to keep this going.’”25

There was relatively little research on student outcomes resulting from the Rochester City School District’s evolving experiments with desegregation from 1963 to 1971. The only noteworthy study was conducted by the district’s own research division and published in 1968. It compared several groups of Black students, including some at all-Black School 3, where class sizes were significantly smaller than elsewhere in the district and extra support teachers were added, against some others at School 2, where students joined desegregated classes with mostly white classmates. The Black students in the desegregated School 2 classrooms were the clear winners. Their learning outpaced that of their peers at School 3 even though their classrooms had about ten additional students in them and fewer adults. “The integrated situation surpassed the one that had the massive compensatory programs,” Superintendent John Franco summarized at a US Senate hearing in 1971. “The school that had reduced class size with a full-time teacher and all kinds of support of personnel was extremely expensive. . . . They made some gains, they did. But not in comparison to the other.”26

The political counterargument to integration has an additional component: even if white families would consent to significant racial desegregation, Black families do not want it either. “When you ask people in poverty today if they want to move to the suburbs, 99 percent say, ‘No, I want my neighborhood to be better,’” Lovely Warren said, capturing the same sentiment in an adjacent context. This reluctance to leave the neighborhood, or neighborhood school, is again perfectly well grounded in history. There are many thousands of nonwhite people still living in the United States whose entry as children into previously white spaces triggered jeers, slurs, spit, and rocks. “Busing has laid our children open to unfamiliar and hostile environments,” Alberta Cason of FIGHT said in 1969. “They have been treated like lepers in these receiving schools.” The first Black students to ride a bus to the previously all-white Charlotte High School in the late 1960s saw the words “n——go home” spray-painted on the façade of their new school and a Black effigy hanging from a tree outside. Racist incidents in mostly white suburban schools today are perhaps less vivid but persist nonetheless.27

Yet the fact remains that Black families historically have pursued desegregation opportunities with enthusiasm, a trend that continues two decades into the twenty-first century. The first such initiative in Rochester, a 1963 open enrollment program where Black students could enroll in a neighboring, mostly white school, drew interest from 35 percent of eligible families versus the 2 percent the district had anticipated.28 Later open enrollment offers throughout the 1960s were consistently oversubscribed. The cross-district Brockport Center for Innovation in Education and the Metropolitan World of Inquiry School, discussed in chapter 6, drew intense interest from Black families in the city and white families in the suburbs alike. Urban-Suburban today typically draws ten applicants for every open slot, even though it is well known that only the most qualified, easiest-to-educate students are typically accepted into participating suburban schools, and even though the program does no marketing and does not translate its application into languages other than English but rather garners interest strictly through word of mouth.

Polling, too, shows strong support in the Rochester area for desegregation measures, including a countywide school district. Polls conducted by the Siena College Research Institute in 2012, 2015, and 2018 showed that a countywide school district had the support of about 60 percent of Rochester residents and more than 75 percent of Black residents throughout Monroe County. Even higher percentages of city residents and Black respondents favored the expansion of affordable housing in the suburbs.29 In a separate 2016 poll, the overwhelming majority of urban respondents said they would send their child to a specialty magnet school where about half the children were low-income and the rest were middle-class—even if their own child were a racial minority, and even if it entailed a thirty-minute bus ride. Significantly, more than 60 percent of suburban parents also showed strong support for the above concept.30

Table 1 Opinion Poll Results for Desegregation Initiatives, 2018–19

Source: Democrat and Chronicle/Rochester Area Community Foundation/Siena College Research Institute poll, Dec. 18, 2018, to Jan. 2, 2019 (seven hundred respondents, margin of error +/– 4.8 percent), available at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20986622-rochester-siena-poll-monroe-1218-crosstabs.

The same finding is true on a national level. A 2019 Gallup poll, for instance, showed 78 percent Black support for government action toward desegregation. “Although there is a great deal of diversity of thought within the Black community, substantial majorities of Black respondents in recent surveys see segregation as providing inferior opportunities and view diversity as an important goal, and they favor a variety of policies to increase integration to access stronger schools,” Gary Orfield and Danielle Jarvie wrote in 2020, summarizing the latest research.31

This is all to say that desegregation works as an educational strategy and has significant support among both white and nonwhite families and both in the city of Rochester and in the suburbs. The structural obstacles to cross-district desegregation, though, are formidable. Among other things, any nonjudicial attempt to revise the placement or effect of school district boundaries would require state legislation and buy-in from some or all of the school districts themselves. Two of the three recommendations offered in the conclusion of this book are aimed at this problem. The first calls for a comprehensive study of metropolitan solutions to inequality in education and other arenas in the Rochester area. Such a study has never been done despite nearly a century of debate over the merits of countywide schools, police, and government. The second recommendation is to use the existing framework of Urban-Suburban to increase equity immediately. The third and final recommendation is for extensive education for children and adults around the history and effects of racist discrimination and segregation, both locally and nationally. This root cause of inequality, racism, stretches back beyond the founding of our country and remains firmly in place today. It inevitably will derail any political or structural reform unless it is addressed directly. Confronting stubbornly entrenched racism head-on is, in the words of sociologist Dan Dodson, an opportunity for “education to bear down and do the job that it was expected to do in our historical heritage.”32 Successful antiracism work, with interest accruing from one generation to the next, is at heart the difference between desegregation and integration.

Dodson, a white man, was born in 1907 in the backwater ghost town of Panther’s Chapel, Texas. He rose improbably to become one of the nation’s foremost proponents of racial equality, helping broker Jackie Robinson’s groundbreaking contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, among other achievements. In a 1965 speech he described the difference between desegregation and integration by referring to Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount: “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” The first mile, he said, is desegregation: “In this first or forced mile, we are dealing not with compassion or reconciliation, but with simple justice. . . . The law does not say that the superintendent of schools or the teachers have to love minority children sufficiently that they will allow them to come to the schools they run.”33

This first mile of structural desegregation, Dodson conceded, “sounds harsh and foreboding,” but cannot be passed over. Instead, he said, it must be used “as the springboard from which to demonstrate the tremendous power which America believes education possesses.” This demonstration—the second mile—is integration, where students are not just sitting together but also learning and living together in a true community. “The great challenge which education faces is that of this second mile in which we can erase the existing footnotes to the American creed,” Dodson said. He continued: “This is the mile in which education must intervene purposively in the lives of all children to the end that circumstance of birth, race, creed or color shall not deprive the lowliest of his chance. It calls upon the school to be a dynamic institution which takes all the children, erases the trauma of heritage, closes the academic gaps, and brings them into full scale participation.”34

The history contained in this book provides an essential roadmap for the second mile of integration. Indeed, it is mere trivia unless brandished in the ongoing fight for justice. Phebe Ray, Walter Cooper, and Lillian Colquhoun serve as an inspiration to stand with integrity in the face of opposition. Lucy Colman, Jerome Balter, and Norman Gross show the importance of white allies demonstrating their commitment to equality. The blood spilled fifty years ago in front of Charlotte, Jefferson, and Franklin High Schools is a reminder that change does not come easily.

Fifty-five years after Dodson spoke, his words can be recast with cautious optimism. He took for granted fierce, near-unanimous white opposition to desegregation as was seen at the time in the South, but white, justice-minded parents and community members can make their voices heard. He assumed desegregation would happen under the supervision of white educators inside “the schools they run,” but such a change today could happen—must happen—with leadership from all affected communities. He described “the trauma of heritage,” but good educators in the twenty-first century know that Black students’ heritage is much richer than that. This book contains many horror stories about racial desegregation, but we are not obligated to continue reenacting those stories in our own time.

As noted above, there are many who do not take integrated education as their goal. For them, too, the story of how Rochester schools arrived at their current state is deeply relevant. It is important to understand the past working of racial discrimination so we can recognize it in the present. It is important to honor those who fought for their children’s equal education in the past, no matter the outcome of their efforts. It is important to memorialize those efforts and the forces that opposed them and hold both up to historical scrutiny, even if we doubt whether our community today has the courage to act. One day, perhaps, it will.

*Faced with a felony indictment on campaign finance charges as well as the outcry over the March 2020 death of Daniel Prude at the hands of Rochester police, Lovely Warren lost the Democratic primary in June 2021 for what would have been her third term as mayor. She was defeated by city councilman and former RCSD school board member Malik Evans.