Transcripts

KATE WILLIAMS: In many cities, schools are segregated because of housing patterns, so an attempt to integrate schools, students were bused. Minneapolis school board member Harry Davis said it's up to the school boards to make plans for integration. And if they don't work, it's their responsibility to come up with a new plan. He thinks the Pasadena decision will adversely affect many Cities plans to desegregate.

HARRY DAVIS: What Pasadena is saying, then is if that you intended to do it and your intentions weren't successful, then you can forget it. That's what they're saying. And that's, in my opinion, is unconstitutional. Because if you intend to do something, and it doesn't work out, then you have a responsibility of making it work.

KATE WILLIAMS: So in an essence, are you saying then that the judges are allowing something unconstitutional?

HARRY DAVIS: They're giving them a way out to proceed with maintaining segregation and saying that it's not unconstitutional.

KATE WILLIAMS: Davis said, the fact that this is an election year, and many of the Supreme Court judges were appointed by a Republican president, that might have had an influence on the judge's decision. He said politicians are under pressure by the mood of the people. And the people in the United States are using the issue of busing to maintain attitudes of racial separateness and racial purity.

In Minnesota, although Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth school systems have some kind of desegregation programs, Minneapolis is the only one under court order to implement a program. Davis, who has been on the school board for eight years, said, Minneapolis is unlike many urban Cities because the minorities have never attended totally segregated schools. The problem of desegregation here has been in integrating the all-white schools surrounding the city.

HARRY DAVIS: Desegregation in Minneapolis has been from white to Black, or a mixture of both because the White was in the majority. The whites were the ones that were segregated. It wasn't the Blacks. And so in our desegregation plans, we have desegregating the White schools. We're not desegregating the Black schools.

So in most cities, like in Boston, where there's heavy Black populations, it's a desegregation of Black schools, taking the kids from the Black schools and putting them out into the White schools, where what we've done is to send the kids from the White schools into the Black schools, and then the a segment of or a small group of Black children went into the White schools. So there can be a balance.

Now, if the patterns, if the housing patterns change and economics become better for Black people, and they can move into the areas that are not heavily desegregated as we have in some school districts, then it will lighten up the inner city and put a little heavier burden on the outer city schools. But the shift will not be so great that the population will make one school segregated over another school, again, in reverse area, in a reverse way.

KATE WILLIAMS: Because of the limited number of minorities in Minneapolis, it hasn't been difficult to desegregate the local schools. So Davis said the Pasadena decision really won't affect the Minneapolis plan. This is Kate Williams.