To Fort Bend’s credit, there were no stories of George Wallace standing in a doorway or enraged white families berating black students chanting for the reimplementation of segregation. It really could have been a lot worse, this was a time when entire school districts were being shut down just to deny Black students their new constitutional right to an equal education. FBISD never even had to be sued into integrating. Admittedly, their 1965 initiative to integrate came after a more equivocal proposal was denied by the federal government, but overall, it seemed that the unitary school system I attend today emerged out of a willingness to cooperate with the changing tides. I’m sure this is the narrative of desegregation the district administration likes to hear, that it was clean and simple.
Strangely enough, when Stafford residents within FBISD voted to break away and form Stafford Municipal School District in 1977, Fort Bend took a very different stance on the existence of racism within their school hallways. The litigation that ensued from FBISD’s dispute of this breakaway made for some of the most surreal court opinions I have ever seen. Unwilling to let go of the Stafford residents under its umbrella and fearful of a similar separatist movement growing within Sugar Land parents, Fort Bend and its superintendent, Lawrence Elkins took to the stand to argue that the racism was still too present throughout the district, and the secession of the Stafford residents would impede FBISD’s Constitutional duty to desegregate its schools.
Mr. Elkins stated: "I think that we probably encouraged [some of the black teachers] in their own minds to retire because what was happening was just as visible to them as anyone else." He also admitted that the "end result" of the district's practices during this period was that black teachers were encouraged to resign in order to avoid demotion or were demoted because they were black.
Reading the lawsuit feels like you’ve been transported to an alternate universe where post Brown v Board, southern districts were actually very keenly aware of the ways in which structural racism lingers in school systems even though they might ostensibly be integrated or neutral. It quickly became very clear that it wasn’t as if the district was incapable of acknowledging how racism in the school system didn’t just end at Brown v. Board, they were very much capable of sending their superintendent into a court of law to testify as much. It was only when their power and reach was being challenged that they put in the effort to bring it into broad daylight.
I have never seen a district so desperately try to convince a court that “oh my god we’re so racist we need you to step in and make sure we’re not racist.” The Fifth Circuit court of appeals eventually ruled against FBISD, overturning the previous district court decision.
“Under these circumstances, we think it clear that FBISD has made, at least since 1973, the type of sustained good faith effort to recruit minority faculty members so as to remedy the effects of any past discriminatory practices… Try as it may, FBISD cannot deny its success.”
This conclusion is far from unfounded, the district employed several integration methods, including putting new schools in between white and black communities so that they could be zoned to the same school.
See look right here, “The Board of Trustees did not place an elementary school in the center of the Quail Valley subdivision in order to avoid creating a one-race school.”
But like, I went one of the schools they’re talking about here; it’s a middle school now. It’s also one of the most blatantly segregated places I’ve ever been in. Sure when you look at the raw data, it almost looks like a dream distribution, but the reality of the Gifted and Talented program there is that it essentially creates two schools in the same building. As a GT student, I was literally physically separated from the zoned children every day, and since we’d almost never have to interact with the other side of the school, I saw the same division and racist thought processes that Jim Crow segregation engendered in white kids. It was in the way they used “non-GT” as a proto-slur. It was in the stories of admins assuming Black GT students were in the wrong place on their way to class.
Now, this fact no longer surprises me. Gifted and talented programs and their academy counterparts owe their roots to some pretty explicit efforts to separate out white children. Here’s Norm Fruchter, a former New York City school board member, talking about why his district decided to implement a gifted program.
“The district started the [gifted] program explicitly to maintain a white population."
Even when they’re not packaged into academy-exclusive classes, we still deny students of color access to all kinds of spaces for subtle but pervasive reasons. Sometimes all it takes is a counselor trying to advise you out of taking that advanced math course. Then, because the gap between AP and regular classes is so big, trying to take an advanced course the next year is nigh impossible. The foundation just isn’t there. If they don’t think you can, then you won’t, and if you won’t, then you’ll never. To my peers in Multivariable Calculus or Organic Chemistry, ask yourself, how many black or hispanic students are in my class?
You may notice I didn’t just say “students of color” there, and for good reason. Especially in a district like Fort Bend ISD, you can’t ignore the Asian population. And thats,,, a little harder to reconcile, right? We have a very different place in this historical context. This could be a whole other video, but what we need to remember is the existence of the model minority myth. Asians were not always this welcome into polite society, and only when Asian immigrants started being selected for preexisting wealth and quality education did the narrative shift from yellow peril to “be more like them.” Regardless, Asians are a huge part of the community. At Dulles High, we’re 40.3% of the student body. Many of us, and many non-Asians as well, are the children of foreign born immigrants.
I think that’s a huge part of the reason it’s so easy for us to forget about the history right in front of our eyes. Our communities are new, they weren’t around to witness Jim Crow or Brown. My grandma was worried about the Great Leap Forward, not segregation. So, these events are abstracted away into our history textbooks, a paragraph of a chapter in a textbook you only open to study for the test tomorrow only to forget in a week. It’s far too easy to miss the human impact of every sentence and allow our state-mandated rose tinted glasses to cloud our vision.
Remember those two protests I told you about? The Freedom Day Boycott has a wikipedia article, youtube videos, and countless articles praising its bravery and steadfastness. The white parents are far less remembered today, even though they were the ones who ended up actually changing policy in the end. The direction we’ve always been going in, the way our societal inertia points, is much harder to learn about, much more difficult to encounter precisely because its assumed. We still see segregation in our schools, its just in the form of a GT program or a disciplinary suspension. Just because the word racism remains unsaid does not mean it doesn’t linger in our schools.
If you care about equity, then you have to know that the fight for equality was never easy, it didn’t happen overnight, and it certainly didn’t come in the form of one-off social movements. Justice is locked behind decades of hard, persistent demonstrations and political participation. If you care about understanding our current government and its relationship to its citizens, you have to remember that the real history is hard to find. You won’t see it on your instagram feed or in your textbooks or on some district information webpage. The revolution will not be televised.
Comments