CHAPTER 5

From Charlotte to Milliken

One warm day near the end of the 1971–72 school year, a high-ranking RCSD administrator took a drive up to Charlotte Junior High School. It was one of the last days of a tumultuous year for the district’s reorganization plan, which included, among other things, the transportation of students from various neighborhoods to racially desegregated secondary schools. The administrator saw the buses making their way up Lake Avenue and pulling into the school—but on one, he didn’t see any passengers. It appeared to be empty except for the driver. Perplexed, he followed it into the bus loop, and there he finally saw the Black children passengers as they got up from the floor of the bus, dusted themselves off, and exited. They had been hiding, he realized, from people concealed in Holy Sepulchre and Riverside Cemeteries on Lake Avenue, waiting to throw rocks at the unwelcome visitors.1

For the weakened but remaining coalition of Black and white liberal activists pushing for racial integration in Rochester schools, the 1970s began with hope for meaningful action at last. There was a year of grueling political drama, with thousands of students, both Black and white, boycotting class and marching on the school board, where meetings lasted well past midnight. A fresh board majority eventually approved an ambitious, decade-long reorganization plan that would not only desegregate neighborhood schools but also revitalize teaching and learning at all levels. “Schoolmen and women of the Seventies must find ways to hasten needed change,” Superintendent Herman Goldberg told teachers as the decade began. “[They] must see beyond the range of the crowd and must risk its anger if new ways of learning by students are to be accomplished by them with your help.”2

As it turned out, though, these liberal crusaders were overwhelmed by an army of white opponents fighting a furious defensive battle on the home field of their neighborhood secondary schools—and the battle was literal as well as figurative. A yellow school bus, Charlotte-bound and filled with crouching, terrified twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, is as fitting an image as any. Rochester had looked on with horror at violent white opposition to desegregation in Arkansas and Alabama. Now, a generation later, white Charlotte residents were lined up on the east side of Lake Avenue, armed with bricks and rocks and chanting “n——s go home” over the heads of a police cordon at the teenagers leaving school across the street. They swarmed yellow buses and hanged a Black effigy from a tree. Black students in turn took to packing brass knuckles and chains along with their lunches and homework.

Bob Sagan began teaching English and theater at Charlotte High School in 1966. The students were well behaved to the point of torpidity, he said, and blissfully ignorant of anything happening south of Ridgeway Avenue and the Kodak plant where many of their fathers worked. He hoped to jolt them with art and teach them about the world. Instead, in 1971, Sagan found himself one day huddling in the library with his students after the building was locked down because of racial fights. Through the window he could look out at the front lawn and bus loop, where white Charlotte parents were speeding to collect their children. Nearly half a century later, Sagan could vividly recall one of them rushing into the school wearing a blood-drenched butcher’s jacket. “The community, I think, was afraid of the outside coming in,” he said. “I just remember when this integration was to take place, all hell broke loose.”3

Black parents’ desire for integration waned as their children began returning home from school bloodied and bandaged, and thus the progressive contingent splintered. Less than two months after the massive reorganizational plan was put into place, voters used an off-year election to rescind it, marking the third time in three dizzying years that a majority of the board had turned over. Even if integration proponents had been able to rally for another charge, developments at the federal level made it clear that the age of desegregation—at least as far as it concerned places like Rochester—was over.

Violence in schools, often based on race, had been a growing problem in Rochester for several years. By all accounts it peaked during the 1970–71 school year, even more so than in 1971–72 when the controversial reorganization was in place. “The number of student behavioral problems has increased markedly in the last two years in Rochester,” the school board wrote in November 1970, announcing stricter disciplinary policies after a rash of incidents at Franklin and other high schools. Black student leaders responded by calling the heightened disciplinary actions “dehumanizing, unconstitutional and unjust,” and accused the district of transferring Franklin’s Black Student Union president to another school in an attempt to silence protests there. Charlotte closed early three times that year because of racial violence, including the last day of the year, when police separated Black and white students carrying tree limbs, tire irons, and baseball bats. A district official attributed the closing to “greater exuberance than usual.”4

The violence was often instigated, directly or indirectly, by white parents or community members rather than white or Black students. “I’ve seen it in the halls—the kids will be great friends, then all of a sudden parents come down and you don’t recognize the kids,” a Jefferson school sentry said. An effigy of a Black student was hanged from a tree outside Charlotte High School with a sign on its chest reading “kill all n——s.” Black Charlotte students also remembered the school bus being pelted with bricks and rocks as it made its way to and from the school. “They would hide in the graveyard, and there was a wall, and they’d come out from behind the wall and throw bricks, rocks, irons, anything they could find at the bus,” James Beard, a Black Charlotte student leader, said. Marlene Caroselli, a Jefferson teacher, recalled the faculty forming a protective cordon to allow Black students off the buses and into the building, past the parents gathered outside. “I remember red faces as they screamed at the children,” she said. “Sometimes they would use words that were enormously offensive. . . . Fear was in the air.”5 White community groups perpetrated or threatened violence away from schools as well. One integration advocate reported having a gun pulled on her outside of a meeting in northwest Rochester. Benjamin Richardson conducted dozens of interviews with white and Black community leaders on both sides of the question and concluded that white groups “accounted for all the reported instances of personal assaults and intimidation” in 1971.6

The malignant combination of fear, racism, and political expediency came together in a grotesque series of events on June 10, 1971, the Thursday before the school year ended. The day began with a tragedy, when an eight-year-old boy, playing on the sidewalk with his friends on the way home from School 8, fell into the street and was struck and killed by a truck. The accident had nothing to do with the reorganization plan; the boy attended his neighborhood school. Louis Cerulli, though, claimed that such deaths were “going to happen again and again” with increased student transportation. He accused the district of neglecting to provide crossing guards—in fact, three had been on duty—and encouraged members of his United Schools Association to protest to take advantage of the moment. “If we fall flat on our faces, we’ll never have this chance again,” he said. “Even if it is a tragedy, we have to use it to get our message across.”7

Cerulli’s followers heeded his call. Late that night, about thirty of them stationed themselves in front of the home of David Branch, leader of the school board’s liberal wing, some wearing white sheets. Cerulli was photographed with them as well, though he later said that he was seeking to calm them down. The United Schools Association vice president, Mary Nicolosi, who had threatened months earlier to “get” Branch, denied that the sheets had any significance. Instead, she explained, the protestors were using them to become “more visible at night on a very dark corner.” Although the newspapers reported on just one night of protests, Branch later revealed that the white-sheeted demonstrators were there for eleven nights in a row, always coming after dark.8

Fighting at Charlotte on the last day of the school year triggered the early closure of secondary schools throughout the city. Thus did the 1970–71 school year mercifully come to an end. “Our children have become performers on a stage, acting out the hostility they sense in their parents’ daily behavior,” former RCSD assistant superintendent William Rock wrote. He continued: “The expressions on the students’ faces at Charlotte are reminiscent of those seen thousands of times on the faces of their parents and others who have fought an eight-year battle to prevent integration of the city’s schools, the city’s housing and the city’s employment rolls. The continuing disturbances in our city’s high schools indicate that the children, segregated by the adults responsible for their education, have learned to mistrust, fear and even hate one another.”9

The 1971–72 secondary reorganization had two main, related components. First, the eight schools that previously had served grades 7–12 were now split into two groups. East, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall became grades 9–12 high schools, while West, Monroe, and Charlotte were reserved for grades 7–8, joining the existing Frederick Douglass Junior High School. The second, more controversial part of the plan had to do with changes to the enrollment patterns at those schools. Rather than serving just the Charlotte community north of Ridgeway Avenue, for example, Charlotte Junior High School would now take in children from the mostly Black Joseph Avenue neighborhood as well. Jefferson, which had been overwhelmingly Italian, would get an influx of Black Third Ward children, while students from the all-white northwest quadrant would attend Madison Senior High School.

The school year started with no planned protests, and for the first three weeks relative calm prevailed. The major initial difficulties had to do with the enormous logistical operation that the reorganization entailed, such as renovating buildings and finalizing student assignments and bus routes. “I think parents worry more than we do,” one Marshall student said. “But there hasn’t been any trouble, so I guess they better stop worrying pretty soon.” Reorganization opponents had spent the summer encouraging families to make their voices heard at the polls rather than picketing or boycotting. With the change happening smoothly, those opponents wondered whether they had misplayed their hand. “[People] are beginning to say, ‘Why didn’t we protest?’” Gordon DeHond said.10

By October, tensions began to flare. Large-scale fighting broke out at Franklin, where about two hundred white students met to form a White Student Union. When schools sent first quarter report cards home in the mail, an unusual number were returned to sender; it turned out students had falsified their addresses to remain in their neighborhood high schools. There was a rush on enrollment in the Russian language program at East High School, because students in such specialty programs were exempt from the normal enrollment rules.11

Each school faced different dynamics among its students, families, and communities as school buses crossed what had been sacrosanct boundary lines. West Junior High School, for example, had to reckon with the complex setting of the 19th Ward. On one hand, the 19th Ward Community Association had been an early and prominent supporter of integration efforts, something that continued even after 1972. The group represented “young people . . . who see the wasteland of the suburbs set against the wasteland of the ghetto, and who see that there has got to be something in-between,” one leader said.12 At the same time, Genesee Street, where West stood, was the city’s most infamous racial dividing line. The gradual, pernicious effect of blockbusting had shifted that border farther west by 1971, but the West enrollment zone still included a great number of families who viewed school integration chiefly as a threat to their property values.

Ed Cavalier began teaching at West in 1968 and remained after the reorganization. By 1971 he was already considered a veteran teacher, in part because teachers with seniority by and large had declined assignments to the new middle schools, moving instead to the redesignated senior high schools. They were replaced by junior faculty and new hires, including many of the newly recruited Black teachers from the South. This skittish, unprepared faculty combined with a volatile new mix of students led predictably to a surge of disciplinary issues. Cavalier recalled finding a boy outside the school with a stab wound; he himself suffered a lasting back injury after falling down the stairs chasing after students. Incidents that might otherwise have been dismissed as middle school antics were often invested with much greater significance. “Any time there was a problem [between] a white kid and a Black kid, the white kid would probably be gone by the following Monday; his family would have moved to the suburbs,” Cavalier said. “That’s how everything was being solved in those days, was: ‘We can’t go to school with Black kids.’”13

At Charlotte, there were clear divisions by class as well as by race. As a federal judge would later put it, desegregation was “not a discontent of the well-to-do sector.” Even before the reorganization, a researcher, Ralph Barber, had remarked on Charlotte’s “social cleavage between upper-status Anglo-Saxons and lower-status Italian-Americans.” The former called themselves the “Collegians,” he said, and referred to the latter as “the Hoods.” Many of those “Collegians” were the children of white-collar Kodak employees, comfortably swaddled in Rochester’s socially conservative upper-middle class. “This insular condition,” Barber continued, “breeds an intellectual lethargy and an immature and complacent social conscience. . . . The greatest, single frustration felt by teachers at [Charlotte] is generated by student apathy in all subject areas.” Bob Sagan remembered plenty of dedication among his students, but said: “To those kids in Charlotte, the world began and ended at Ridge and Lake. . . . The community, I think, was afraid of the outside coming in.”14

Large-scale racial fighting broke out at Charlotte in late September 1971, leading many Black parents to keep their children home from school. The perpetrators were largely “roughniks,” as one student called them: “The ones that really wanted to start the trouble, that didn’t go to school or class. It was a lot of outsiders who came to school to fight, too.” FIGHT called for Black students to boycott Charlotte “until their safety [could] be guaranteed.” A white community group, Charlotte Concerned Parents, demanded police officers on every floor of the school as well as the dismissal of two administrators whom they considered insufficiently sympathetic to the plight of the “intolerable situation” of white students at the school. Black parents reportedly were barred from meetings called by white Charlotte parents. Charlotte Concerned Parents organized its own boycott that brought attendance below 50 percent for several days and forced the school to close early at least once.15

The neighborhood around Jefferson Senior High School was as insular as Charlotte but owing to ethnicity more than geography or class. The school had been overwhelmingly Italian for several generations. “I remember kids saying they spent every Sunday afternoon listening to opera with their grandparents,” said Sagan, who transferred there from Charlotte in 1971. “Now all of a sudden they felt their neighborhood was being invaded with Black people coming in. . . . They were working-class people and they feared Black people taking their jobs.” The Italian students referred to Black students with the epithet mulignan, Italian for “eggplant,” former teacher Bob Stevenson recalled.16

A roll call of some of the leading opponents of desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s is suggestive: Cerulli, Nicolosi, Di Sano, Strippoli, Bianchi, Ciaccia. In the Edgerton Park neighborhood around Jefferson as well as elsewhere in Rochester and indeed across the country, Italian Americans, both foreign- and native-born, served as what one national commentator called “the shock troops of anti-Negro politics.” They were the last major immigrant group to arrive in the city prior to southern Black migrants and the next lowest in terms of economic prospects and educational attainment. Still, their prospects for advancement were much higher. Their social station was “a no-lid kettle,” one academic wrote in 1970, “in that . . . the gates into the larger community are not closed nor are opportunities for alternate associations restricted.” Newly arriving Black Rochesterians, on the other hand, “appear doubly bound to the ‘kettle’ . . . by the ‘cooling’ influences external to the Negro subcommunity and by the ‘heating’ generated from within it.” Another researcher in Rochester concluded around the same time: “Since [the Italians] live in closest proximity to the ghettoes, are active in the illegal activities in which a large number of Negroes participate, and constitute a high percentage of the city’s police force, there are numerous areas of tension between the two groups.”17

For Cerulli and other board members who belonged to or counted on the Italian community, the politics of the school reorganization in particular were clear. Bob Stevenson, who later became close to Cerulli after marrying a Sicilian woman, said it plainly: Cerulli didn’t support reorganization “because he was Italian. . . . The Italians and the African-Americans, they didn’t get on.” For lower-class, as-yet-unassimilated Italian Americans, reorganization presented a direct threat to their tenuous economic and social progress. “There was tremendous reactive fear [on the part of] Italian Catholics,” one integration advocate said. “I had so many people say to me, ‘You know, the church is changing, and all of a sudden the rules aren’t the rules anymore. . . . And in the middle of all this, you’re coming in and telling me you’re going to take my kids and send them back into the inner city.”18

The author Jerre Mangione, in his classic, lightly fictionalized memoir of Rochester’s Italian community, described the same dynamic in his own family: “American morals bewildered my relatives. In Sicily their rules of conduct were well defined and though strict, fairly simple to follow, because the same rules had been used for many centuries and were known to everyone in the community, even those who broke them. Here there were many different kinds of people and, as far as they could make out, no rules that were taken seriously. In fact, everything seemed to conspire toward the breakdown of the rules they had brought with them.”19 Jasper Huffman had a vivid introduction to these social norms in the mid-1960s, when he was an underclassman at Franklin High School. He became friendly with an “attractive white Italian girl—gorgeous legs, nice smile.” It was more a mutual flirtation than a true romantic relationship, he said. They’d talk in the halls, and he walked her home on occasion. One day he walked into school, he said, “and it was like Christ parting the waters. . . . I got to my locker and my buddy said, ‘Hey man, her parents came to school this morning. You in trouble.’” Huffman was called to the main office, where he said a counselor cut right to the point: “White folks and Black folks—intermarriage—it doesn’t work.” Huffman was asked to come in once a week for “counseling.” He declined, but also took care not to be seen with the girl again.20

Dana Miller did not know that context when, in tenth grade, he was assigned to ride a bus to Jefferson. Fifty years later, he vividly recalled a day when adults gathered outside the school as the bus pulled up along Bloss Street. He thought for a moment they were there as a welcoming party—until they began to smash the bus with baseball bats and bricks, breaking a window and setting it rocking before the students could escape into the school under police protection. He continued:

When you saw those pictures [of violent protests] on TV, they were always, always Southern cities. Mississippi, Alabama. . . . My parents are from Kentucky. I always thought whenever we went down there it was like going backward in time. To see that happen in my hometown, where I’d grown up—it completely shocked me. . . .

It’s almost like time slowed down. It felt like it took an hour for the bus to get down the street, and seeing their faces and their anger. . . . Finally it kind of dawned on [me]: They’re unhappy because I’m here. Not because the power went off, or the street flooded. As a 10th grader, that realization causes you to think: “Why? What did I do? I didn’t even really want to be here.” . . . That was a difficult thing to process.21

Nydia Padilla, her parents, and ten siblings were one of the early families to move from Puerto Rico to Rochester and one of the few in the Maple Street area, not far from Jefferson. Like many of their neighbors, the elder Padillas worked long hours on their feet to make ends meet; Nydia recalled combing crumbs out of her weary mother’s hair after her shift at the Schuler Potato Chip plant. Most of her neighbors and classmates at Jefferson were Italian and she made friends with them quickly. “They were Italian or Sicilian, but they were dark, and they faced a lot of discrimination just because of being dark, so we just hung out together,” she said. “We had something in common.” Spanish language classes weren’t offered at Jefferson, so she took Italian instead, quickly gaining proficiency in the curse words her friends wielded so adeptly.

The 1971–72 school year, when reorganization took effect, was Padilla’s senior year. If before her Puerto Rican ethnicity had marked her as a harmless oddity, she soon sensed that her Italian friends—former friends—now saw her as part of a nonwhite invasion. She was called a n——r and a s——c. A friend said Padilla couldn’t visit her at home anymore because her parents wouldn’t like having a Puerto Rican in the house. “It was like a disease that came out of nowhere,” Padilla said. “With all the Italian students it was a sense of ownership and identity: ‘We’ve got to keep this school the way it is.’ . . . I felt like I’d been in this fantasy world, thinking we’d be able to get along and [race] shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it started turning pretty ugly.”22

Most white families adapted to reorganization as best they could, even if with reluctance. But hundreds of families pulled their children out of the district altogether in favor of a controversial new option. These were block schools: unaccredited, privately run “tutoring centers” that sprang up in the fall of 1971 to cater to parents who didn’t want their children in the reorganized junior high schools.

The first block school opened just a few days after the school year began, with the help of the Cerulli-aligned United Schools Association. It enrolled about a hundred seventh- and eighth-grade students in classes held at the Italian-American Sports Club on Emerson Street beginning September 14. Over the next two months four block schools more opened, enrolling about five hundred students combined at their peak. Children and their parents said that they had abandoned RCSD schools after violence or threats of violence at the beginning of the school year, or because of an unwillingness to take a bus to school. Students attended class in shifts for two hours a day; their parents paid $5 a week in tuition and claimed their children were learning more in the short session than they would in a full day in district schools. Many of the teachers and administrators were either retired from RCSD or unable to find a teaching job elsewhere, and books were hand-me-downs donated from unknown sources. A windfall came in October, when the Holley Central School District provided several hundred surplus textbooks, thinking they were going to “Black schools,” not block schools. “I feel terrible,” the district superintendent said. “It was a difference of an ‘o’ or an ‘a.’”23

United Schools Association president Frank Bower and the rest of the block school leaders quickly came to find out that many state regulations are involved in opening a school. Among other things, they needed to provide five and a half hours of instruction each day, covering all required topics, and the buildings—most of them in commercial space or churches—had to meet rigid standards for educational facilities. The block schools argued that they were “tutoring services,” not schools, and therefore had to meet lower standards. “There’s no such thing as setting up a tutoring service,” Superintendent John Franco responded. He declared the block schools illegal and their students truant. “These parents deprived their children of an adequate [educational] program but taught them a meaningful lesson in racism,” former assistant superintendent William Rock wrote. School Board member David Branch likened them to the “segregation academies” in Prince Edward County, Virginia, and other southern communities where white parents had withdrawn their children from newly desegregated public schools and entered them instead into hastily formed private academies, usually with the use of public tax dollars.24

In March the block schools remained open, and state education commissioner Ewald Nyquist chided Franco for not acting sooner to resolve the situation. “At the rate you’re going, some kids will have lost a whole year . . . in below-standard schools,” he said. In May, the district formally brought child neglect charges against the parents of more than 250 children who remained in the block schools. The charges ultimately were dropped, but not before the parents and their children paraded triumphantly to the courthouse to defend themselves. Three of the five block schools continued operating until the end of the school year, and the grades they handed out were recognized by the district the following year.25

The block schools provided yet another rallying cry for reorganization opponents in the weeks leading up to the momentous November 2 election, when five out of seven school board seats would be decided. The conservative United Council on Education and Taxation put forth a five-person slate, headed by DeHond, who pledged to overturn the reorganization plan in its entirety. They faced off against Branch, Best, and two pro-reorganization newcomers, Ann Camelio and Dean Miller. Complex issues of racial justice, fiscal responsibility, pedagogy, and organization ultimately boiled down in voters’ minds to one question for the candidates: Will you maintain the reorganization plan, or won’t you?

DeHond’s anti-reorganization slate included one unlikely candidate: twenty-four-year-old Frank Ciaccia, a 1965 private school graduate with no children in the district, still living with his parents on Maplewood Drive. DeHond had been his social studies teacher at Aquinas Institute and, though they hadn’t spoken since then, called to recruit him to run for the school board. The campaign, Ciaccia said, was a simple one: a return to neighborhood schools, full stop, and an end to race-based policies of any kind. “We felt the main point of a school board is not to solve social issues or housing patterns; it’s to educate the students,” Ciaccia said. “Anything that interferes with that, get rid of it.”26

In describing the campaign, Ciaccia also proposed a much narrower definition of racial segregation than New York, or indeed the country, recognized at the time. He recalled watching with anger on television when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus barred Black students from integrating the schools in Little Rock and, following Cerulli, drew a stark distinction between that and the situation in Rochester. “We never had segregated schools,” he said. “I wouldn’t be part of a segregated school system. . . . Yes, some schools were majority-populated white or Black, but they were integrated.” The only all-white schools in the city in the fall of 1971 were the block schools.27 Ciaccia also described receiving significant support from Black voters as well as white ones: “I would campaign in Black wards and they’d say, ‘Why is my kid being put on a bus and taken to the other part of the city?’” This, to him and the others on his slate, was proof that their position was based on common sense, not racism. They ignored the fact that Black families and community leaders abandoned the push for integration only after becoming convinced that white racism represented an insurmountable barrier. As Reecy Davis said in 1969 after the school board (unsuccessfully) attempted to implement a total ban on busing for desegregation: “After a move like this I have no alternative but to give up the fight for integration. But I’m not going to say we worked in vain. We’ve helped show black people like myself that no matter how hard we work, white people don’t want integration.”28

The anti-reorganization slate and its supporters were in general fiscally, culturally, and pedagogically conservative. They campaigned on rescinding reorganization and trimming the budget, but also on the breakdown of school discipline and the harmful potential effects of sex education. They “tended to look with skepticism [at] anything that dealt with flexibility or openness or humanness,” a central office administrator later observed. As Cerulli put it at a February 1970 rally: “If you don’t know enough to stay away from dirty people with long hair, then you don’t deserve an education.” Anti-reorganization supporters advocated for a minimal educational program featuring little more than basic literacy and numeracy. “I don’t mind if there is a lack of, you know, special teachers,” one anti-reorganization organizer said. “I don’t believe that the majority of the kids in the school system are going to turn out to be artists or musicians.”29

The result of the election could not have been clearer. DeHond’s five-person anti-reorganization slate swept all five seats on the school board, with more than 6,000 votes separating them from the rest of the field. They lost only six of the city’s twenty-four wards, including the Third and Seventh Wards, where the largest nonwhite population was concentrated. Immediately they pledged an end to “forced busing,” beginning in the 1972–73 school year. “This is the referendum that the people of Rochester waited so long for,” Elizabeth Farley, one of the victors, crowed from the victory party at a downtown steakhouse. “The idea that you can’t have quality education without busing children didn’t snow them at all.”30

Why did voters overwhelming reject the reorganization plan just a year after having voted, in a similar referendum-style election, to enact it? The anti-reorganization slate in 1971 ran a better organized and more vigorous campaign in comparison to both their current opponents and their predecessors in 1970. The support of the United Council on Education and Taxation proved significant, providing the manpower and funding to “campaign them to death,” as Lewis Bianchi put it. “Everything [we] printed, was done in the tens of thousands. We covered the areas again and again.”31

Branch and Best had approached Election Day with confidence. Ed Cavalier remembered sitting with them in a hotel room at Midtown Plaza, watching Branch shake his head as the results came in. “We were all positive they were going to win,” he said. “They all thought they were doing what this community was asking for.” Yet the definition of “this community,” as always, had shifted. The splintering of the pro-integration coalition cut into voter enthusiasm and hindered campaign coordination. Reports of violence in the schools over the first few months of 1971 had left parents feeling skittish, while the ways that integration benefited children were hard to demonstrate. “A basic problem was defining the educational advantages of reorganization for the children to the parents,” Best said. “It was the emotional level of the people. They felt a bit threatened.”32

In a letter shortly after the election, Nyquist held out hope that the new board, once seated and “responsible in a different way for their words and actions,” might have a change of heart.33 This was certainly overoptimistic. Rescinding the reorganization plan, however, proved more difficult than they anticipated.

Asked to describe her mother, Sereena (Brown) Martin pursed her lips and began with what she wasn’t: mean.

“She was strict, but she wasn’t mean,” she said. “We had a voice within limits. But there’s a line you don’t cross, and we never did.”

Lillian Colquhoun grew up in New York City after her parents moved up from Savannah, Georgia, searching for a better opportunity. Lillian, in turn, moved farther north to Rochester, hoping for better wages and accommodations and “something slower for the kids,” Martin said. She and her four daughters landed in the Hanover Houses, which by then were already well advanced on their descent into chaos and eventual demolition. The conditions offended Colquhoun; for instance, that residents paid rent but could not control the temperature in their own apartments. So, along with FIGHT president Raymond Scott, Sister Grace Miller, and others, she began to organize the tenants to protest for greater rights. In March 1970, after the Rochester school board rejected Herman Goldberg’s ambitious plan to reorganize the schools in the interest of better education as well as racial integration, Colquhoun did not hesitate to put her name on a federal lawsuit accusing the district of failing to address segregation.34

Colquhoun was one of three Black mothers in the district to serve as plaintiffs, accusing the district of intentionally allowing segregated schools to persist and demanding a comprehensive desegregation plan by May 1971. The case landed in the court of John Henderson, the top judge in the Western District. Oral arguments were not held until September 1971 and by then the local situation had changed dramatically—the Goldberg plan had been enacted, and secondary students already attended reorganized schools. The district asked Henderson to dismiss the case for that reason, but the plaintiff’s lawyers sought to proceed, arguing that a future board could undo the plan—as, in fact, happened.35

The relevant federal case law was moving fast. In particular, court watchers in Rochester were paying close attention to a similar case in Denver (Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver). Voters there in 1969 had chosen an antibusing board, which rescinded a previously implemented desegregation plan. A federal judge ruled, in response to a subsequent lawsuit, that the new board’s actions were a deliberate step backward for the purposes of integration and thus represented the sort of de jure segregation that had been disallowed by Brown v. Board of Education. The upshot in November 1971 was that, as slowly as a northern school district might move in addressing racial imbalance in its schools, it would be courting trouble if it took decisive action and then walked it back—exactly what the new Rochester school board members had promised to do. “My colleagues who were elected with me are finding out rescinding reorganization isn’t so easy,” Joseph Farbo said. “We have a tiger by the tail. . . . And if we wind up with a high school that is 90 percent Black, we are in trouble.” The Colquhoun plaintiffs’ lawyer dared the school board to rescind the plan, predicting that a judge immediately would force desegregation to occur even faster than originally had been expected. Frey and Phillips, the school board holdovers, said that a repeal had “no chance” of passing judicial review, especially given that Nyquist just that month had ordered the Buffalo school board to draw a desegregation plan with nonwhite students spread more or less evenly across the district. In Rochester, that would mean nonminority enrollment of about 40 percent in every school.36

FIGURE 5.1. Lillian Colquhoun and her daughter, Sereena Brown, in 1971. Colquhoun was the lead plaintiff in a 1970 desegregation case. Photo courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.

Such legal quibbles, though, meant nothing to the tens of thousands of voters who had cast a ballot to rescind the reorganization plan. Rather than consider its options further, the new board opted for immediate action. On February 1, 1972, with central-office staff still feverishly at work on redrawing neighborhood zones, the board announced that it would repeal the secondary reorganization beginning in the fall. “If we have to fight in court, we might as well get it over with now before the staff has done all the work,” Elizabeth Farley said.37

The reorganization repeal plan restored all the junior and senior high schools as 7–12 schools, with the notable exceptions of Madison and West, and gave all students the right to attend their neighborhood high school. In practice, though, the repeal plan depended on Black students at Madison and West applying for transfers to mostly white schools. Madison, for instance, would be over capacity by 625 students if none of them transferred elsewhere instead. Nonwhite parents and community leaders saw the gambit as coercive and a return to one-way busing. They also did not detect in the new plan any increase in local control over schools in minority neighborhoods. “I voted for you because you said you liked the idea of community schools,” the Community School Council chairman, Cero Sepulzeda, said. “If the devil or God gives me justice, I’ll take it from either one. But you haven’t said you will give us control of the money and hiring in our schools. What you have planned is one-way busing of black and Puerto Rican children.” Joseph Farbo responded: “Sure, it’s one-way busing, but . . . I haven’t heard anyone say that anyone who attends an all-white school doesn’t get a good education.”38

The school board next voted to rescind the elementary portion of the reorganization, and there too it faced opposition. School 14 on University Avenue had been the only elementary school affected by the 1971–72 reorganization, changing to grades 4–6 from K—6 and decreasing its nonwhite enrollment from 96 percent to 39 percent. Just a few months into the school year, white parents who at first had objected to their children’s new assignment now fought to preserve it. They, along with the teachers and principal Warren Heiligman, protested the reversal. The faculty wrote directly to Ewald Nyquist, asking that he do “everything in [his] power to prevent . . . a blatant move to resegregate our school.” The school board threatened to fire Heiligman or remove him from the school, but ultimately did neither.39

The elementary reorganization repeal vote took place on March 11, a week before a scheduled hearing in the Colquhoun case. As anticipated, the plaintiffs had asked Henderson to stop the board from rolling back the reorganization plan. District administrators, dreading the logistics of a second massive citywide restructuring in two years, pleaded for a decision from the judge that would allow them to proceed one way or another. At the national level, though, the backdrop for the case was very much in flux in all three branches of government, and Henderson was loathe to make a misstep. The Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the Denver case, which had the potential to govern the situation in Rochester. Meanwhile the idea of desegregation was coming under increasing attack from Congress and President Richard Nixon.

Indeed, the 1971 Rochester school board election and the subsequent battle over rescinding Goldberg’s reorganization plan were part of a nearly universal rightward swing in the national politics around segregation. The Supreme Court’s momentous 1971 decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education made it clear that compulsory busing was, in at least some cases, a constitutionally acceptable remedy for segregation. That, along with a political clash over federal funding in Chicago and a looming metropolitan solution in Detroit, had brought many northern legislators into an awkward but sturdy coalition with southern avowed segregationists. Both feared the effects of the courts’ “mania for busing” for their constituents and for their own re-election prospects.40

The same week that the Rochester school board rescinded the elementary school reorganization, Nixon gave a televised address introducing legislation that would put a national moratorium on busing orders. Yellow school buses, he said, had become “a symbol of helplessness, frustration and outrage—of a wrenching of children away from their families.” National polls demonstrated again and again an overwhelming antipathy for desegregation actions, and Congress took note. The House of Representatives passed a slew of antibusing bills and amendments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a Long Island conservative introduced an antibusing constitutional amendment.41

Henderson, then, had reason to tread carefully in Colquhoun. He signaled in March that he was not ready to decide. District administrators moved forward with crafting the repeal plan, including an option added later in March allowing most white secondary students to stay in their current, comparatively desegregated high schools in 1972–73 if they wished. While any potential judicial consequences to overturning reorganization were delayed, however, the district’s significant federal desegregation funding fell into jeopardy. US Office of Education officials visited Rochester in February to understand how a $137,000 desegregation grant would be used after the district’s flagship desegregation program was ended. “Rochester now has people federally funded to work on problems of desegregation and others locally funded working in exactly the opposite direction,” a state education official observed. In April, federal officials pulled the money.42

In June Henderson denied the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction in the Colquhoun case, a step that would have stopped the repeal from proceeding in the fall. “The resolution rescinding the reorganization plan is not, on its face, based upon a classification of race,” he wrote. “[There] are material questions of fact. . . which preclude the granting of summary judgment at this stage. Although Henderson called for a trial, he did not schedule one, and in fact none ever took place.43

Desegregation advocates waged one final, unsuccessful campaign with the board that spring. The 19th Ward was one of the two areas of the city where Goldberg’s recommended “home zones” had been permitted to go into effect in 1970–71, chiefly because families there were supportive and no busing was required. Now, the 19th Ward Community Association urged the school board to leave reorganization in place there. A parent survey showed that 80 percent were in favor of keeping the nongraded, reorganized structure. It would be especially appropriate, they said, given that nearby West and Madison were the only secondary schools not being returned to grades 7–12. “What we can’t get through [their] heads is that having children of all one age group in this school has meant we can provide music, art and physical education specialists without increasing costs because all the children in the school can be grouped together at times,” School 44 Principal Mildred Ness said.44

In the original vote to rescind the elementary school reorganization in March, Gordon DeHond had indicated that he would spare the 19th Ward, if that was what people there wanted. When an amendment came up in early May to do just that, however, he opposed it, instead casting the crucial fourth vote to defeat it. His change of heart came, he said, after a “two-day mental retreat.” Others took note of the fact that DeHond had announced a primary campaign for the state senate. The campaign would rely heavily on the support of the United Council on Education and Taxation, which opposed any carve-outs to a full repeal. The 19th Ward Community Association, led by president Conrad Istock, went further, appealing directly to Nyquist to intercede where Henderson had not and block the repeal altogether. Nyquist declined, just as James Allen had done before him.45

A school year of threatened and actual violence came to a fitting conclusion in June 1972. On the final Friday of the year, June 16, Charlotte community members pelted the Black students’ school bus with rocks as it departed, while a mob of white parents gathered outside Jefferson after hearing a rumor that a white student had been assaulted the day before. The ensuing fighting, a Jefferson school sentry said, was begun by “irate parents who took off half-cocked without getting all the information.” Both white and Black students then spent the weekend preparing for violence on Monday. Dozens came to school with bricks, bats, rocks, and other weapons. “The black kids came to school as usual Friday, but some white kids brought clubs, threw rocks and taunted them,” Charlotte principal Santo Patti said on Monday. “A number of black kids came prepared today to get revenge. They were tired of being called names.” At West, similarly, teacher Ed Cavalier recalled: “Toward the end of the year, it was very much the Black kids feeling like: ‘You don’t want me? I know how to handle you.’ And we were holding on by our fingertips.”46

What followed was the single most violent and chaotic day in the history of the city’s schools. Dozens of students and several teachers were taken to the hospital with injuries ranging from lacerations to a broken back. A thirteen-year-old girl at Charlotte broke her arm after falling, or being pushed, from a second-story window. Nearly a hundred windows were broken, among other property damage. A white Charlotte teacher said that forty Black students broke into his locked classroom and assaulted him, and Black students said that a white police officer threw a Black school counselor to the floor, then beat students who tried to come to her aid. At Franklin High School, teacher Dorothy Pecoraro remembered walking down the hall with a fellow female teacher who had just given birth and seeing students running out of the cafeteria brandishing broken-off table legs. “She said, ‘Oh my God, I’ll never see my baby again,’” Pecoraro recalled.47

White parents gathered outside by the hundreds, opposing the Black students exiting the schools as well as about a dozen Black parents and community leaders. “There were parents—perfectly nice, decent, good people—throwing rocks at school buses,” Jefferson teacher Marlene Caroselli recalled. “It was horrifying. . . . It wasn’t the Jefferson I knew, the Rochester I knew.” Idonia Owens, one of the few Black students who lived in Charlotte, said: “It is amazing I have my life, honestly. These same parents I had seen, had grown up with their kids, knew who I was, were standing on the street saying: ‘N——s go home, we don’t want you here,’ throwing bottles, all kinds of stuff at us. It was absolutely horrible.” At the urging of the police commissioner and with the consent of the state’s education department, the district canceled the rest of the school year, including statewide Regents tests and local final exams.48

Later, in testimony for a school board investigation, several teachers and Black students and parents highlighted the harm that police had done—not just in failing to break up the rioting but also in taking the side of the white people. Josh Lofton, a district administrator, was among several to say that he heard police using racial slurs. Police aggressively frisked Black students but mostly let white students through, according to several teachers and Black students and parents. Though the white parents outside Charlotte and Jefferson greatly outnumbered the Black ones, police reportedly focused their energy on the Black side. James Beard said that the same thing had happened in June 1971, when he graduated: “I remember one riot we had where they called the cops in and they were facing us. . . . “The guys across the street are yelling, ‘N——s’ this, ‘n——s’ that, throwing shit. I said, ‘Wait a minute, they’re throwing shit! Why’s your back turned?’” A sixteen-year-old girl at Jefferson told the school board that she was hit by a rock while leaving school. When she turned to see where it came from, she said, she saw “nothing but white people. . . [and] a policeman with his arms folded.” The police chief, John Mastrella, defended officers for not acting more aggressively against the white contingent, saying that if they had done so, “it’s very possible some serious injuries would have resulted.”49

One seventeen-year-old Black Jefferson student, Perry Lang, was charged with reckless endangerment for throwing a rock. He, in turn, succeeded in having criminal harassment charges brought against a police officer, David Cona, who he and others said struck him with a club for no reason. At trial, Cona’s attorney had a different police officer wear Cona’s uniform and badge and sit at the defense table. Lang correctly remembered the badge number but mistakenly identified another person in the audience as Cona. The judge called the tactic “shrewd” and dismissed the charge against Cona for a lack of proper identification.50

Absent from these incidents was Louis Cerulli. In January 1972 he stepped down from leadership of the United Schools Association because of worsening lung cancer. He died in the hospital on March 13 at age sixty-one, two days after the DeHond board formally rescinded the reorganization plan. The newspapers and Cerulli’s admirers highlighted his long medical career and framed his time on the school board as part of a life of integrity and courage. “He had what most political men don’t have—the courage to stand up for what he felt was right,” one ally wrote. Two years later, the school board voted to rename School 34 on Lexington Avenue after him, an honor pushed by the Italian-American Civil Rights League. There was no public criticism of the move then or later, but, as Ed Cavalier said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point someone brought up changing his school name. . . . There’s other problems the district has to figure out, but he was a segregationist.”51

The 1972–73 school year was supposed to represent a return to normalcy, at least for parents who had supported maintaining neighborhood schools rather than reorganizing to desegregate. Because the school boundaries were not exactly the same as they had been previously, however, the district was inundated with enrollment complaints nonetheless—the same number of them as in 1971–72, in fact. “We have former East High students who don’t want to go back to East from Franklin and East High students who don’t want to go back to Monroe and Frederick Douglass students who don’t want to go to East,” secondary schools director Herbert Norton said. Several schools saw dramatic resegregation. Madison, for instance, went from 59 percent to 79 percent nonwhite, and Charlotte went from 32 percent to 10 percent. School 4, with an enrollment of 638, became the first school in the district without a single white child.52

The number of students riding buses decreased, from 12,100 in 1971–72 to 9,700 in 1972–73, but not as sharply as the district had anticipated and still well above the pre-reorganization mark. This shortcoming was not held against the purportedly antibusing school board—proof, to Black families, that all the “emotionalism of busing” was never about transportation. “Is busing the real concern of those parents who threaten to move out to the suburbs where there is no doubt that their children will be bused during their entire school career?” Jerome Balter asked. In his book Why Busing Failed, the historian Matthew Delmont used the word “busing” in quotation marks throughout to acknowledge its added semantic cargo: “With ‘busing,’ northerners found a palatable way to oppose desegregation without appealing to the explicitly racist sentiments they preferred to associate with southerners.” Noting that transportation on school buses was commonplace throughout the country by the early 1970s, Delmont concluded: “School buses were fine for the majority of white families; ‘busing’ was not.” Or, as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund put it: ‘It’s not the distance, it’s the n——s.’”53

The Colquhoun lawsuit—seen as recently as March 1972 as a powerful potential bulwark against a retreat on desegregation—died quietly, as the Aikens case had before it. Like Aikens, it had been poorly funded and, as a result, timidly litigated. Just three months after it was first filed, in June 1970, its organizers were soliciting for “tangible evidence of support by the community for this effort in the form of a fund to meet certain expenses.” The national NAACP declined to support it despite entreaties from local leaders as well as national advisors, including J. Harold Flannery, who was deputy director of the Harvard University Center for Law and Education at the time. “To dismantle for racial reasons an education-based plan. . . must be a new world’s record,” Flannery observed. The case was dismissed for good in February 1976, any momentum for an appeal having been thoroughly squandered.54

Conrad Istock of the 19th Ward Community Association, one of the most active proponents of desegregation in the final years that the city wrestled with the question, wrote to Nyquist in September 1972. He acknowledged the broader defeat and conceded that little remained beyond “this rather esoteric writing up of the denouement.” He continued:

The entire indigenous education-reform movement in Rochester has been defeated and largely destroyed. . . . We had throughout hoped we could rely on swift action by state and federal judicial authorities once this critical juncture [i.e., backlash to reorganization] was reached. Thereafter, we expected palpable educational advances to steadily increase popular support. . . .

The momentum in Rochester. . . has been broken and it now seems likely that no court decision can come in time to repair that damage and remove the losses in educational opportunities for thousands of children which we must now bear.55

The journalist Jerome Zukosky reached the same conclusion in an article about Rochester in Time magazine. Its title was “Giving Up on Integration.” The city, Zukosky wrote, had seemed “an inspirational example of what can be done by local initiative and quiet leadership. . . without court order or significant special help.” Instead, he wrote: “Rochester didn’t make it. . . . The school board was controlled by mean-spirited ‘antis’ determined to return to the old days when Rochester’s ‘happy blacks’ kept their problems and their children to themselves. A mood of acceptance has settled on the city: it is as if an era has passed.”56

Rochester’s experiment with reorganization lasted, in effect, from the first day of school in September 1971 until the decisive school board election fifty-four days later. It was marked by protests, violence, and logistical mayhem. For most students, it was the first time they had ever boarded a school bus and been dropped off in another part of town. It was also the first time that most of the city’s secondary teachers had been tasked with working in classrooms with rough racial balance.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the entire episode, then, is that so many students and educators viewed reorganization as a success, no matter how short-lived. Teachers stressed the stimulating effect of diversity in classrooms. Marlene Caroselli recalled introducing Black literature into her English classes at Jefferson for the first time. One militant Black student wore a scowl in her classroom throughout the entire semester—“but his poetry was marvelous.” She entered one of his poems into a regional contest, where it won the fifty-dollar first-place prize. Teachers and administrators advocated strongly for the ungraded “open classrooms” and the increased peer training time and professional development that came with them. “We’re going to find more and more teachers who are going to look [back on] 1971–72 as a high mark in terms of the schools we had,” one community leader told Benjamin Richardson. “I think we are going to be more strongly in favor of it when we begin to live with the alternatives.”57

Students—even those who vividly recalled their lives being threatened—said the brief experience of a significantly desegregated school building had changed them for the better. White students at Madison, now a distinct minority after relative parity in 1971–72, responded to a spate of violent incidents at the start of the 1972–73 school year by creating a “unity group” with Black students and petitioning the school board to better balance enrollment. In a meeting with Franco, they expressed a desire that “relationships in the school could be like last year when black and white students got along well together.”58

James Beard, a Black Charlotte student, said:

When you’re young and you’re Black and you come from a totally Black environment and community, you learn something when you’re immersed into a white culture and community. . . in a way that’s almost organic. I am so grateful, regardless of all that happened at Charlotte—all the tears, all the fighting, all the blood, everything—I am so grateful that I got the opportunity to meet people whether they were Black [or] white. . . . Because I didn’t have any white friends. There were no white people in my community.

When I started to develop friendships with those young white guys, I had a consciousness shift, and my revolutionary [attitude] of, “All white people need to just die”—regardless of what was going on at Charlotte, I then knew—“Wait a minute, all white people aren’t like that. I actually love some of these people.” And I know that sounds crazy, but I’m grateful for that.59

Keyes v. School District No. 1 was finally decided in 1973 in a difficult-to-parse Supreme Court ruling, the first since Brown in 1954 not to command unanimity among the justices. The court found clear evidence of intentional segregation but declined to spell out the standard by which it had done so. It declined as well to address head-on the burning question in northern cities: whether so-called de facto segregation, of the sort seen in Rochester, would be subjected to the same strong medicine as southern-style de jure segregation. For the purposes of Lillian Colquhoun and the Rochester plaintiffs, Denver ended up being much less useful a guidepost than Judge Henderson or other observers had anticipated.60

Meanwhile, continuing demographic shifts in the Rochester area were beginning to make the matter of intracity desegregation obsolete. When the district first tallied its nonwhite students in 1963, they made up 20 percent of the student body. A decade later that proportion had more than doubled. That occurred largely because of in-migration; US Census data showed that the city had a net increase of more than 44,000 nonwhite residents from 1950 to 1970. Equally important, though, was a loss of 80,000 white residents, or one in four, over the same time. They had left the city for the Monroe County suburbs, which registered a net gain of 224,000 residents in that twenty-year stretch. None of those trends—the growth of the nonwhite population, the decline of the white city population, and the shifting of the county’s population base from the city to the suburbs—were to relent anytime soon. For that reason, even before Keyes was decided, education officials and advocates in Rochester had shifted their attention to litigation in Detroit.61

In the broadest sense, racial segregation of housing and schools in Detroit followed the same pattern as in Rochester. Detroit was an early organizing point for the Black Power movement, and its schools proved to be an important battleground. From 1969 to 1971, Detroit Public Schools suffered waves of violence that made Charlotte Junior High School in June 1972 look like a nursery school picnic. “Literally hundreds of incidents, including shootings, stabbings, rapes, student rampages [and] gang fights. . . occurred in the schools or school property,” one historian wrote.62

In the middle of a complicated, multiyear fight over community control and desegregation, the NAACP in 1970 filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ronald Bradley and other Black Detroit schoolchildren. Hoping to restore an earlier intracity desegregation plan, it presented evidence to the court of segregative actions not only by Detroit school officials but also by the state of Michigan. The federal court trial judge, Stephen Roth, accepted the plaintiffs’ argument and—following the recent Supreme Court guidance in Green v. County School Board to find a remedy that “promise[s] realistically to work now and hereafter to produce maximum actual desegregation”—rejected proposed Detroit-only desegregation plans, instead issuing an order that would include more than fifty suburban school districts in three surrounding counties. “The higher courts. . . say when you find segregation you have to go about desegregating,” Roth explained. The state and the outlying districts, which had not been given the opportunity to defend themselves at trial, promptly appealed, but an appellate court upheld Roth’s order. The next stop for the case, Milliken v. Bradley, was a highly anticipated hearing before the US Supreme Court.63

The question before the court was a simple one: When a constitutional remedy ran up against a locally drawn school district boundary, which must yield? The NAACP warned against a legally sanctioned “containment” mechanism: “If that dividing line is permitted to stand without breach to perpetuate the basic dual structure, the intentional confinement of black children in schools separate from whites will continue for the foreseeable future,” it wrote. US Solicitor General Robert Bork, whom Nixon had instructed to intervene, pointed instead to the admonition in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg that “the nature of the violation determines the scope of the remedy.” Because no evidence had been presented at trial of the outlying districts’ segregative actions, he argued, they should not be implicated in the solution.64

The Milliken decision was the exact moment Richard Nixon had been preparing for since taking office. In choosing his nominees for the Supreme Court, he had said: “I don’t care if he’s a Democrat or a Republican, [but]. . . I have to have an absolute commitment from him on busing and integration.” At the critical moment, his men kept their commitment. The four Nixon appointees, along with Potter Stewart, held in a 5–4 decision that Judge Roth’s metropolitan plan was unconstitutional. “Without an inter-district violation and an inter-district effect, there is no constitutional wrong calling for an inter-district remedy,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in the majority opinion. The question, he said, was not whether the plaintiffs achieved “the racial balance which they perceived as desirable,” but whether Black students in Detroit were treated equitably.65

To desegregation proponents who see Milliken as a fatal blow, the eloquent dissent of Thurgood Marshall has come to serve as a eulogy. Marshall, who twenty years earlier had helped lead the victorious NAACP legal team in Brown v. Board of Education, accused the majority of “conjur[ing] up a largely fictional account” of the facts of the case, including the possibility of intra-district desegregation, and of bowing to political pressure:

Desegregation is not and was never expected to be an easy task. Racial attitudes ingrained in our Nation’s childhood and adolescence are not quickly thrown aside in its middle years. . . .

Today’s holding, I fear, is more a reflection of a perceived public mood that we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee of equal justice than it is the product of neutral principles of law. In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.66

The importance of this ruling is hard to overstate. If Brown v. Board of Education can be seen as the dawn of the Civil Rights era, Milliken was its sunset. It marked the first time that the Supreme Court voted to overturn a locally developed desegregation policy. By leaving a clear escape hatch for worried white families, one scholar wrote, it “calcified the lines of racial and social class inequities between urban school districts of color and wealthy, white suburban districts.” The harm was compounded by the Supreme Court’s decision the previous year in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which held that unequal school funding did not imply a lack of equal protection under the Constitution. “Today’s decision, given Rodriguez, means that there is no violation of the Equal Protection Clause though schools are segregated by race and though the black schools are not only ‘separate’ but inferior,” Justice William Douglas wrote in his Milliken dissent.67

In Rochester, the Milliken decision was mostly an afterthought. Frank Ciaccia, now the school board president, said that it settled “once and for all Rochester’s right to maintain neighborhood schools without any court interference.” Reporters sought no comment from desegregation advocates; perhaps they did not know whom to call. Goldberg’s reorganization, by now, felt like a lifetime ago.68

“Our efforts may have resulted in setting back integration in Rochester several years,” one frustrated former district official wrote. “The black community knows even more concretely what it has always known before: the white community will not have integration. Can they be blamed then if the only hope they see is to establish black schools, run by black staff, for black children? And if this occurs, the integration movement will have gone full circle.”69