Jacobs, Gregory S. Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools. Columbus, Ohio; Ohio State University Press, 1998.
As another school year approaches, I thought I would look at a education-related title.
Desegregation (and its aftermath) of Ohio’s large municipalities has not been one of the state’s prouder moments. From the late sixties through the rest of the 20th Century, terms like “Busing” and “Neighborhood Schools” have developed racial undertones. This is a very controversial issue with many nuanced arguments, which I do not want to touch at this time. That said, integrating municipal schools is one of the most important stories in the history of Ohio cities over the last half century. For better or worse, it led to the creation of Ohio as suburban state. This can be seen in lopsided number of non-city residents in all of Ohio’s Metropolitan Statistical Areas.
With the case of Penick v. Columbus Board of Education, Columbus Public Schools were declared unconstitutional regarding separate and unequal schools. The court took control of producing a remedy, which involved massive relocation of the student population. Jacobs’ Getting Around Brown tells the integration story of the Columbus Public Schools. What differentiates Getting Around Brown from other “busing” stories (there have been several written from different sides about Boston’s experience) is Jacobs’ focus on how the business community, city leaders, and the development of the city, from its beginning, made the Columbus story unique.
Getting Around Brown was published in the Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series through Ohio State University Press, a series that focuses on urban history and planning issue. It is not popular non-fiction and Jacobs does not spend much time discussing the quality of education.
In his narrative, Jacobs coherently tells two stories: the fight to desegregate CPS and how school district(s) developed around Columbus. First, he tells the busing/desegregation story. For the most part, pro-integration and anti-busing were the two sides in this argument. Parties were not anti-integration (or so they said), but the will was not their to find an alternative to busing.
Jacobs completed many interviews for this book, but most were either administrative positions within the district (who did not have any choice in the matter) or community leaders who favored integration. While it does not read like he had retrospective interviews with anti-busing leaders, he does a pretty fair job arguing their side. The picture painted, is that government mandated busing was inevitable as the anti-busing crowd (who included a majority of the school board) were not going to budge. Remarkably, the city leaders came together and pushed out an almost drama-free integration of the school district. Columbus looked good for the national media, but we learn that the schools were in the midst of a deeper change.
The second story Jacobs discusses is the suburbanization of Columbus schools, which is very much different from Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Dayton schools, where the city became landlocked by surrounding suburbs. Starting in 1955, the State Board of Education, started differentiating the annexation of land for cities with the annexation of school districts. This would allow a municipality to annex surrounding land but allow students to remain in their existing schools. The new parts of the city were called Common Areas. As this policy changed in the 1950s, there was not a racial element to this ruling.
But, for Columbus, which was surrounded by many unincorporated townships and in the process of rapid annexation in the late 1950′s onward, the “common areas” led to a de facto end to the expansion of the school district. Columbus middle-class residents could move out of the district to get their children to a ‘better’ suburban school without leaving the city. As Jacobs details, there was almost no new housing development within the school district after 1970. The city kept growing, but the part of the city within the district became older and more impoverished (much like other cities in Ohio).
In terms of new development, Jacobs includes the telling story of the upscale Wexley development (now a part of New Albany, near Easton Town Center) in the late 1980s built outside of city limits. In the end, after much legal maneuvering, developers chose to join a poor rural district over becoming a part of Columbus. On paper, this looked like a bad deal for the students in terms of academic opportunities, but such are decisions made in desegregate municipal schools.
If you read the conclusion [which I would recommend in this case], Jacobs offers a solution – mainly, ending the Columbus school system and dividing up the city among the suburban districts. It is what they call, “a nuclear option”, but his argument is worth reading, though such action will probably not happen.
Getting Around Brown will appeal most to urbanists and historians, but it is also a good primer for desegregation in the North and the not-to-distant history of Columbus.
